Just wanted to give you a mini update on this. I didn't get a chance to download the game until yesterday afternoon, and using the Turbine Download Manager the roughly 4.5Gb package took in the region of 4 to 5 hours at about 240 kbps. Fortunately they have the option to be able to pause the download for a time set by yourself so if it impinges on something you want to do you can take a"download break" and go play BFBC2 or something. This didn't much bother me as I was suckered into building kitchen cupboards for a few hours, so it was an ideal time to download it.

I rolled a female Elf Ranger on the Khyber server and chose to be an Arcane Archer. It just seemed fitting to me. With the free to play side of the game you get two player slots only, but more are available to buy or when/if you subscribe I guess. The character creation is relatively basic and you are given the aid of the game in going for the standard attribute settings or fiddling with them yourself. Obviously I went for the easy route. As for the character itself, again a relatively basic amount of choices compared to what we see these days, but then the game isn't a new product. I will say that there is an amusing selection of colours for hair/eyebrows though. Having said that, you spend most of your time looking at their rear so in the long run it matters little.

You begin the game shipwrecked on the shore after your ship is attacked by a dragon (who'd have guesses it) and immediately I saw a rip off by Funcom in the way AOC commences. Okay perhaps there are only a select way of starting an MMO on the paths you want the player to go, but it did seem a little too close to the mark. You're then accosted by some dick of a Halfling from whom you get your sword off and shortly after that you're in your first instance, and after that into the first (starter?) town.

I only managed to play for a couple of hours last night, but a number of things became evident to me as follows:

1) You can probably play this game without having any clue as to what WIS, CON and INT mean nor having any background of the board/card game - whatever it was! Sure it helps, probably significantly, to know this stuff, but just reading the description on items as well as knowing your current stats so far seems to be sufficient to know whether an item is useful or not.

2) The NPC's talk in a kind of Oliver Twist kind of way. Things like "Oi mate wotcha got there?". There's great accents which made me laugh to listen to them but they do tend to bring a depth of character to the game which makes it a pleasing thing to actually spend the time to read the quests and listen to them.

3) Instances can be done in Solo mode or a choice of one lower and 2 higher difficulties. The higher ones become available once you have completed the instance on the previous difficulty, either solo or in a group. The good thing was that despite the game being 5 years old there were still plenty of people in the town I was in. Compare that to Guild Wars!

4) Most importantly of all, some of the quests seem to need intelligence to solve them. So far I have done one which involved going into an instance and having killed a load of bad dudes, I'm faced with a large orb surrounded by a force field in the middle of a grid of squares. On each of the squares is a kind of Pipemania layout and you have to rotate the squares to make a path for the fluid to travel to the centre to dispel the force field. Sure there were still the "kill ten rats/spiders/crates" type quests, but it made a novel and dare I say addictive change to get a quest which was an intellectual challenge and not just a run and kill thing.

5) The game utilises DX10 graphics and again, despite its age is surprisingly decent to look at.

That's all I have to say for now. Considering its free, unless you choose to subscribe or buy items, I am well impressed.