f13.net

Alpha version of new build. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkWhMKXJpM4)

Hell of an improvement. 

No SS's for those of us whose offices block such common internet hangouts?

Before:

(http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/4217/ingame12gu4.png)


After (screen capture of video, same scene and view)

(http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/8560/trailer1ge7.png)

Probably some better examples out there.  I'll take a more indepth look around.

Not bad.  Any examples of the avatars or are they going to stick with the same ones?  I can't imagine that looking good.

Looks like the change is . Distance Fog. Water. Addition of shadows. and Texture filtering by distance.

Don't know.  That's something I'd really like to find out as well.

I don't think they're updating the avatar graphics. It does look like in addition to the water updates, shadows, and texture filtering, they may have added more ground clutter. Not much else that I could notice, but shadows with proper dynamic lighting can make a huge difference.

OMG, they Sony'd it up!

From the linked video it apperas there's also specular mapping and --unless my memory is failing-- they planted nice new grass. The dynamic shadows are likely to make huge difference -- their Shadowlands area was pretty as it was, with this update it might wind up quite spectacular.

Looks like they installed the same (or similar) new sky system as Second Life.

If I remember correctly (and Google supports me) Anarchy Online was originally intended to be shut down after four years. The intention was to run a four-year plot cycle, then close it down permanently. Here we are six and a half years later, looking at upgraded graphics :) Still gonna be an insane grind though.

Its a shame that the textures look terrible however.  The new graphics bells and whistles additions make this even more noticable.

They still have the ongoing plot i think, maybe reaching the conclusion of it got just as delayed as their new MMO release.

The grind is in fact not as humongous as it seems. Sure there's a total of like 250 levels or so to get, but with every new expansion xp for previous levels have been significantly buffed up. Me and some mates subbed for ~2 months a few years back, before Alien Invasion. During that time I reached level 205. The game isn't exactly newbie friendly though.

AO has always looked better than it played and always had the potential to be a much better game (in terms of story and RP) than it is.

It _is_ grindy though - Team Missions for those that dont have SL and SL for those that do. NW and AI are only for those in the uber guilds and I can't comment on LE as I've never played it.

Maybe it isnt actually too grindy if youre just looking to level up but if you dont want to pay out of your ass for some of the stuff (which you'd need to grind to get the cash for unless you get lucky with a loot drop) then youre stuck camping certain timed spawns (18 hours in some cases) as well as stuck at certain level points if your looking for particular team mission boss loot drops (which only occur at those levels)

and dont get me started on tradeskills.....

(yes I played an Engineer!  :drill:)

40mb video trailer (http://fao.hacksess.com/~jeremy/AOrendertrailer-720p.wmv) (On some guild site)

Bleh.

So great looking environment with shoddy looking avatars.

Fail.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/29912.html

Found this on another board. 

Anyone else remember this game as frickin beautiful for its time? Crazy what a few years can do.

I still remember being able to fly for the first time as my MP.

So lets see, it introduced instanced PVE...flying mounts...2 Realm PVP... Not too shabby on the innovation side. Hell, Blizzard took AO, made it fantasy setting, and made it more casual friendly and able to run on older boxes :) And maybe a few other things .. heh

Here's to hoping AoC can innovate a little, but I'm not holding my breath.

Lets not forget the innovations of servers crashing every 5 minutes 2 days before the end of beta and a post release patch that broke the entire game.

Funcom's reach far, far exceeded their grasp.  This is what scares me for Conan.  When I see lot of innovation and ambitious goals coming from them, I can't help but think they'd have been better off just refining a formula.

And for what it's worth, I liked AO when it worked.  It was different enough while still being somewhat familiar.  And I really liked instancing (when it worked).

I only played it for a couple of month (one free month and one paid.)  It was fun for awhile from a casual solo point of view, but it sure did get repetitive on the instances, etc.  Without groups I was stuck doing the same ones over and over.  Same maps, same mobs, etc.  Everytime I left the initial city to check things out, I got ganked by wandering mobs, so I took the message, "You aren't ready yet."

I don't remember the graphics ever turning me off.  I like the difference shown in those pics but it look more like an upgrade that will influence subscribers, not attract new ones.  I mean, for a cheaper game that has a free to download and play for a month system, it was just fine before.  I certainly wouldn't have said that was preventing them from being more succesful.

I guess I would have expected some improvements to make the game more friendly to the newb, the soloist, and the casual.

Hm. Instancing and soloing were the things that were cool at first, but just led me to play it as an offline solo RPG. Which is fine considering you can play the game for free now, but I've got Hellgate: London to scratch that itch now.

Tits on a bull.

Very impressive. I liked the end of the trailer with the "STILL ALIVE" sign there. I'm not too fond of the blue skies, though.

No.  Unless you are only comparing it to other MOGs, then maybe.

For a long time, MMOs were my thing. Now I'm a part timer :) Ah well, I remember it as pretty. And I loved killing leets and eleets! Best noob zone ever!

Just the soundtrack. Still the best music in a MMO.

Game did have some nice sun sets and rises though because of the nice (by 01 standards) view distance.

I don't know how many people are like me and how many are not, but I care a lot more about the way my character looks than how pretty the landscape is.  If a character graphics update was forthcoming sometime soon, I would be a lot more interested in taking another look around AO, but with the same old character graphics, this doesn't really get my attention at all.

That's kinda what I was thinking. The landscape, past a certain point of quality, isn't as important as the character you see right in front of you, or the mobs your fighting.

I'm sure the screenshots show a certain something for the graphics hoe's here, but I think they look pretty much the same. I'd turn all that  crap off for performance reasons anyway. Especially the big three troublemakers: Lighting, shadows and particle effects.

Oh, and reflections. My god, there's a lot of horsepower saved right there if you turn that shit off.

Animations and character control trump any pretty/ugly graphics.

Completely agree.  If they were just stick people, but moved flawlessly and under my complete control, I'd be all over it.

Animations aside, I'd say this is one aspect I loved about UO when I had my latency licked.  With the standard 2d graphics, and all bells and whistles turned off, I had really nice control.  The graphics sucked.  The animations sucked.  I still loved playing my character on low lag periods because it just felt right.

WoW has this down pretty well too.  Not the best graphics for character or landscapes, but you move smoothly and you have pretty damn good control of your actions.  I turn everything down just to get even more.  Graphics are cool, but if I move like I'm in mud all the time, forget it!

I just recently played VG when they offered free play over the holidays.  I was quite impressed with the combat animations of my halfling rogue.  Best I've seen in the MMO genre.

I think you guys forget how awsome AO character models where for not only MMOs, but for video games in general at the time they were released. They were not blocky or wooden like EQ or DAoC; they had curves and shiny surfaces, 'realistic' motion animations, and fantastic amounts of animated emotes.

By today's standards, sure, they need a revamp, but you guys are talking like AO never had anything going for it, and that's way off the mark.

Sorry, that wasn't my intent.  As I said, I didn't feel like anything graphical was their issue.  I was just agreeing that if they were to go after graphics, it would have been better time and money spent on the characters, not the landscape.

Actually, I'd rather they looked at the ability to solo and make it more casual friendly.  Not that it isn't casual friendly, but if you play casual and solo, you don't progress very fast and it becomes a single player rpg very quickly.  It is not a very good single player RPG by any means.

What he said.

I felt even by the time of Shadowlands, the environment graphics were really eclipsing the characters.

As a DAOC vet, I'd have to disagree. The characters in DAOC weren't blocky at all, at that time. No moreso than Anarchy Online, anyway.

EQ? I hated EQ's graphics from day 1. It was like being stabbed in the eye. They looked like lego people with cebreal palsy.

I have to second this. DAoC character models were superior to AO. I think had a wide variety of armor and weapons which made a big difference in terms of a unique look, but the overall quality, DAoC was pushing more polygons and higher textures.

EQ's original character graphics weren't bad to me, back then.  The Luclin models were a mix of better and worse with a lot of performance clunkiness but less textures allowed.  For years I switched back to the old graphics on certain characters because I liked seeing certain textures that they never bothered to (and as far as I know, STILL haven't bothered to) redo for the Luclin models.

AO's character graphics were...uhh...I didn't like them much.  They were more rounded, better textures, etc, than some games I played at the time - though I also agree that DAoC had better than AO at the time - but I really really don't like the look of the characters themselves from a design standpoint.  They just look ugly to me.

DAOCs graphics were good. Don't confuse women with no clothes on with good detailing. For a lot of us who played DAOC, the fact we actually had real clothing was a plus.

No, that was pre-alpha EverQuest ... http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=5ae-1KuAvMY

That is full of the awesome.

Zomg, he solos a dragon! False advertising!!

(Actually, no it isn't.) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHjjtJuopE0)

As far as AO is concerned I tried to download it due to complete bordom, and I couldn't get the game to patch.  Just would download the patched, then reboot the game, cycle through the checks reboot the game cycle through the checks...

Could not get it to work.

Oh well, I'm pretty sure I'm not missing anything.

Agree, was best music for me in any MMO, of course I've completely forgotten most of it now and just saying that with a very jaded memory. Plus I never played for more than one year.

I remember when it started, my friend was into it, I avoided the horrible first 6-9 months of its startup. I remember about how it was supose to have that definite lifecycle and i remember how they quickly chucked that idea, and just letting it run forever. I was disappointed.

Wish I had played AO much more instead of quitting when I did to stay with UO.

It helped that one of the character artists was a woman who had a spear in her office, and was quite ready to use it.

AO is a nice IP to do a reboot with. I'm still longing for a nice scifi MMO. Of the few that were, it had the best art direction. Fuck things like Tabula Rasa, it's yet more fantasy with some shiny surfaces and a bunch of laser pistols in the regular MMO virtual environment.

If CCP would plan more things with their Ambulation project, we'd be getting somewhere, but they don't, so...

Someone should send her to clean out Blizzard's art department.

I never actually tried AO.  The trainwreck of a release they had scared me for life.  How does the gameplay compare?  DIKU with guns for 250 lvl?

Pretty much. You grind instance missions for lewt and tokens.

Hell, the froob program is still going on. You can check out the basic game for free.

I thought it was really neat for the few hours I played it. I loved the item variety.

Until you learn enough about the game to realize that 99% of the items are useless. :(

Is there still a  3rd party hack program that lets you find missions with rewards you want or did they break that?

Yep that describes it. But in an awesome original sci-fi setting. There's a bit of Dune here, some Blade Runner there, but lots of truly original stuff of equal quality. Very atmospheric places, music and story. Guns that sound great and feel like you're firing bullets, when it's actually just diku autoattack.

Worth soloing some levels for kicks and visiting the dark, brooding, old world cities, not just the modern easier-levelling intro areas. But soon you start to see the grind ahead, find the stats-from-equipment system overwhelmingly complicated, discover it's all sewn up by wealthy players up the food chain, and stop caring.

There is a cool moment when you first get to fly (level based). Or at least it used to be insanely cool, long before any other MMOG had flying.

That's why I say to reboot it. The setting, art and story are great, the game itself is a bit backwards.

That was why I didn't continue, it was too complicted. IIRC when you gained XP you could sink it into a bunch of different things but I had no idea what any of them did, and a couple other complicated subsystems like that turned me off because I had no idea WTF I was doing and didn't feel like investing the time to figure it out.

I do remember liking the gun sound effects. I don't know how useful the items were but they did a good job with them, even at a low level there was a lot of different stuff I could wear and weapons I could use.

She's seriously my hero. I still use DAoC as an example of female armor done right.