The latest press release from Funcom reveals that over 400,000 people are now pummelling their way through virtual Hyboria, with about half of those coming from North America.

While it looks to have broken the trend, we won't know to which extent the game will encroach on WoW's shadow until figures are released showing the number of users that have retained their accounts past the free trial period.

The service, a division of Internet Payment Solutions, Inc., said that it can support subscribers worldwide and allow access to the MMOG's premium content.

The first CD of the soundtrack is already available on iTunes, with the second set to appear there later this month. Retail copies of the album will also become available in June.

The Company may report if special milestones are reached as part of further building PR and marketing momentum for the Age of Conan game. Funcom will however, not report subscriber numbers on a regular basis, and will provide additional financial guidance before the Second Quarter 2008 reporting.

This week's charts, with data taken from May 29th, 2008, see a slow sales climb for Wii Fit in North America as supply shortages continue, while Age of Conan and Mass Effect top regional PC software sales.

In the North American market, such a happening - a PC MMO other than WoW outselling a Grand Theft Auto title - would be shortly followed by plagues, floods, and the co-mingling of cats and dogs.

Within those archetypes, the different classes are tuned towards particular races, and are differentiated both by combat skills and magical abilities, as well as in terms of what weapons and armour they may use.

Though the game is broken up into instanced zones-it's not one unified persistent world-the level of detail and the size of some of these zones is uncanny. Initially, the opening island can feel small, but after hitting level 20 the world opens up drastically. The cities themselves are huge, with countless citizens awaiting your help.

For the first time, publisher Eidos and developer Funcom are showing Age of Conan's "pet" system, which lets certain magic-using professions in the high-fantasy game summon "pet" creatures to accompany them into battle． Apparently, characters that can summon pets will be able to accrue up to eight "pet points," which can be alloted to summoning pets of different levels of power; for instance, a high-level necromancer character can use all eight points to summon eight medium-sized scorpions as pets, or the character can summon two magic-wielding spirits that cost four points each．