Game Director Gaute Godager, Senior System Designer Andrew Griffin, and System Designer Evan Michaels, all take part in dishing out the details on the melee combat in the game.

At level 20 you get the ability to start harvesting resources, which has so far proven to be mind-numbingly boring. Thankfully the game's auction and bank systems were brought back online last week so there's more of a point to the whole system, as you finally have a convenient way to sell items, but the way the resources are laid out makes harvesting extremely tedious. The game features three resource zones, all of which are set up for you to just run around and chop wood, mine ore, pick cotton, and launch arrows at prey.

In addition, when fighting an enemy you'll notice thin silver scale-looking icons pop up on your selected monster. These will appear on a particular side of the monster, indicating they have extra shielding in that area. The more scales on a side, the more shielding there is. Your job, at least as a tank, is to try and maneuver yourself around a monster so your powerful attacks can hit the unshielded side, since the shielding shifts depending on your position relative to the monster. Or, instead of moving around behind or to a different side of the monster, you could try using attacks that swing from another direction.

As announced earlier this month, Age of Conan has been pushed back until March of 2008 on the PC, with the Xbox 360 to follow shortly after. That means you're going to have a wait a little bit longer to do some city sacking of your own, but from what we saw today, it looks like the wait will be worth it.

You can check out the trailer of Age of Conan right here by downloading it through the link below. Get a sweeping view of Hyboria, and some tough sword action that's sure to get you asking for more.

Aside from their sheer number, the developer mentioned that these players are able to provide them with constant reports that allow them to thoroughly test numerous aspects of the game. Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures will go live on May 20.

Banking perhaps on this achievement, Funcom and Dark Horse will be producing the comicbook with the Dark Horse Comics team and Conan luminaries working together on the project. Dark Horse and Funcom Inc. will be working closely to make the comicbook consistent in art and direction with the game.

Though it wasn't on display, Funcom informed us that an updated graphics tech has been implemented into Age of Conan, called Cheetah 2, which they claim drastically improves framerates. This would certainly be good news considering the jittery, inconsistent frame rates we've seen at events past, and at the demo they showed at CES 2008.

There's still plenty to be polished up in Age of Conan but we were encouraged by the progress shown since the last time we saw the game up and running. Hopefully we'll see more by the time the beta program opens up early next year.

We could go into a really long and detailed explanation of how this combat system works, but we figured you'd have more fun actually watching this video, which features Funcom product manager Erling Ellingsen as he introduces you to the Age of Conan combat system. Meanwhile, the game plays directly behind him thanks to the magic of technology!