15GB?!

lol well actually 12,901.1 MB to be more precise but after installation and patching it takes up 23.6gb hdd space.

There has been confusion as to when exactly the beta starts for European players due to conflicting statements from Fileplanet (the distributors) and Funcom (the publisher) but it now seems confirmed for a 15.00 GMT start (which is in about 1 hour 11 minutes!) http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/

As regards posting pics, I have have had to agree to a NDA (non disclosure agreement) in order to take part in the beta so cannot publicly show any as it could lead to me being banned or worse. As for the HH members section tho...

Update:

from the official funcom forum

To add an extra patch to improve the gaming experience and quality of gameplay, the official start time of the IGN Open Beta now is:

20:00 GMT (8 pm GMT)
(to check the current GMT time please refer to http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/)

We wanted to add the extra update prior to launching the servers rather than to fix it shortly after the start of the Open Beta.

Users who have registered for the Open Beta will also receive an information e-mail about this in their inboxes shortly.

Thanks for your understanding.

HARRUMPH!

OK I played the game for an hour last night. The start had been delayed so did not open until 10pm GMT, but luckily my mom now lets me stay awake late. I'm 30 after all.

I choose a Stygian Necromancer for my first character and there I was on a boat in a storm and the daft boat sinks and I am shipwrecked

Graphics of the game are very good. I realise now that I dont have any idea on what settings I ran the game on. They do have quite a lot of optimising to do as the game was really laggy and I dont think it was net lag or server lag it was more like a GFX problem.

After an hour the game crashed and I gave up and went to bed but it looks promising but there is still some way to go. I suspect that the game wont really be perfect upon release, but hey which game ever was?

So if you have high expectations and are the type of person who confuse Open Beta with released product you should probably wait anpther month before getting your teeth into this game.

TUNNELS!

Ok that's my first impression of this game. Bug reporting, beta testing and having my patience tested to the limit aside, this game is far, far too linear for my liking. Every environment you encounter, whether rocky mountains, jungle or coastal is nothing more than a series of tunnels in disguise.

See those trees in the distance? Want to go there? Well you can't. The good old staple of linear gaming, invisible walls, prevent you from doing so. Graphically, It's very much like Guild Wars meets EQII to look at (i.e nice). Every aspect is tweakable so both high and lower end rigs would be able to run the game well enough.

Comparisons to World of Warcraft are inevitable so whereas WoWs super massive gameworld is almost totally explorable without any loading screens, (the exception being the battlegounds and raid instances) Age of Conan is plagued by them with long long loading times too.

I love my free roaming, sanbox style gameworlds a la GTA, Oblivion, WoW etc and Age of Conan gives me the total opposite leaving me feeling claustraphobic and restricted in a way that completely puts me off owning the final product. I will continue to play, bug test and give feedback to the devs but Conan can go take a leap as far as I am concerned.

Mmm Ooobliiiviiioon.

Gave it a go again last night and it seems like they have done something as the loading times were reduced. Going from several minutes it now never took longer than 1 and often it just 20 seconds.

Client still has huge memory issues and is leaking quite a lot. It crashed again for me after roughly an hour. I kinda like the whole instanced night time thing though. As a low level character I really dont need another thousand low levels running around me stealing my kills