By Crom, The Age of Conan Preorder

Posted by Stropp on April 25, 2008

I have decided not to download the Age of Conan beta.

For one thing the public beta starts next Thursday the 1st of May and closes on the 17th of May, prior to the full release on the 20th in the US. Since I’ll be away from the 4th to the 18th, I’ll only have three days to play (and a big part of those three days will be spent preparing for the trip.)

The download is also big — the installed files are 9GB — and my account has a bandwidth cap of 25GB. Granted, that’s a lot, and I’m unlikely to go over the limit, but it will be a long download in any case. The other thing is that I’ll have to buy a sub to File Planet to access the download. For three days… nah.

If I wasn’t going away. I’d pony up the cash and grit my teeth for the big download.

So I did the next best thing. I ducked into the local EB Games store on the way home from work last night and placed my preorder for the collectors edition of Age of Conan. All up the CE AoC preorder is going to cost A$109 — highway robbery when you consider the current price of the Australian Dollar — comparable to the price I paid for The Burning Crusade collectors edition.

It also looks like the War Mammoth is the bonus that is provided to Aussie EB Games preorder customers. The sales clerk didn’t really know much about it, but he had a printout showing the War Mammoth. I know that the Mammoth was the mount most people were after, but I was secretly hanging out for the Killer Rhino. A much more dangerous looking mount in my opinion.

Age of Conan will be available for sale in Australia on Thursday the 22nd of May. In talking with the sales guy at EB Games, most games are released on Thursdays in Oz — just like movies — though this isn’t a hard and fast rule. GTA IV will be released on a Tuesday. When you take into account the timezone differences though, I’ll be playing AoC only a day after the US release.

So the release schedule for Age of Conan as I understand it is:

• 20th of May in the US.
• 22nd of May in Australia.
• 23rd of May in Europe.

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