f13.net

Linky (http://community.ageofconan.com/wsp/conan/frontend.cgi?func=publish.show&&func_id=2396&table=CONTENT)

I think they're only open to register for notification of the beta sign-ups.  At least that's the way they worded it at Fileplanet.

http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/ageofconan/

(Thank you for the den, Trippy.  You are sweet like cotton candy   :heart:}

Edit:  Also this: 

Also:  The Metal Gear Online PS3 only beta sign up for FP members starts today sometime.

It'll take you longer to download the game than reach level 13. I don't know why they are capping it there, as the newbie area is good up to level 20.

I try to be full of hope and optimism so I fit in around here, but I just can't help but see that as CONTENT GOES STRAIGHT TO HELL AFTER L14.

I'm still under :nda:, but oh, do I wish to vent.

Definitely a wait and see.  If they are stable and beat WAR out the door it's a big coup for them.

Don't count on it.

I agree that's retarded, and I haven't even played the game. Why level 13? Aren't the first 20 levels meant to be playable either solo offline or online with friends?

Argggg.....


 :nda:

On the subject of content.

I wonder if people sometimes feel a new game "lacks content", because they are comparing it to a game thats has been out for X number of years. I think people have forgotten that most MMO's when launched are only the ground work, the foundation if you will that all other things are built on. Perhaps some mmo's have made us forget this, and forget that MMOs are constantly expanding lifeforms. I feel sometimes people i talk to want a game that has every single thing that the current one they are playing has, at launch... even if the game they have been playing has been out for years and had X number of updates.But at the same time bitch about delays. heh.

It's common knowledge that the first 20 levels are solo/confined. NDA stuff aside, there is no reason for a hard limit at 13 instead of 20.

That was leaked a while ago to have changed, IIRC. It's all online now, some of the content ('destiny' quests played at night) put you in instanced version of the area that could be considered "single player online".

Not breaking NDA here since haven't signed any. Obviously, due to it i also have no way to verify that rumour.

I think it's still fair to compare games at launch state. If it's true and content in AoC goes to shit 1/3 the way through the leveling process (or less) that doesn't compare favorably to WoW which had solid content to the level cap at launch.

Don't disagree there. Its ths that i questions: "compare games at launch state"

I'm not sure this happens. Correct me if i am wrong, but Wow added things like battlegrounds later, correct?

The only valid comparison imho, for people not of the armchair veteran set, is games as they exist against games as they exist. AoC is up against 3+ years of WoW refinement which itself was up against 6+ years of EQ1 refinement. WoW won that handily, in closed beta. I don't know about AoC. Some would pull the "it's not for the DIKU fan" card. But if that's not the case, then they're saying the game is for people attracted to the genre because of it. Even WoW had to cannabalize the genre to hit the records to make it a popular media topic.

Anyhoo, it's worth a looksee. Not sure how much you'll garner through level 13, but it's something.

But ya, a lot of what makes WoW popular for the longtime players came later and then MUCH later. Battlegrounds, most raid zones, Arenas, Honor Points, dailies, etc, all well beyond launch.

As much as I want to see this game be cool, 20 days of open beta? lawl

But, my friend, have you considered the possibility of a secret client?

 :roll: AKA: miracle patch!

But WAR has one of those as well, apparently!  :grin:

Negative ping code? Is it finally time?

Yes, We Can!

HOPE!

Digging!! (But only vertically)

What's even the point?  Will that even give you enough knowledge of the game to be worth it?

 I'm playing AoC cuz I got most of my guildies going to try it out.. although I've made it very evident to them I think the game is doomed. lol

Dejanarchy vu.

If it really is a pvp focused game, maybe comparing it to Shadowbane is better than comparing it to WoW.  It's launch can't possible be as much a clusterfuck as SB, could it?

Guys?

Anyone?

This will be a Funcom game.  You know better!  The launch could chew off your leg.

So destroying my computer aside, Woolly Mammoth or Rhino?

I don't think its possible to get a rhino stateside.  At least, I haven't figured it out.

Pre-order from Best Buy (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8829878&type=product&id=1207957072398)  (since their page doesn't actually mention it (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/36108/Age-of-Conan-Collectors-Edition-Details)).

If this is anything like all the other collector's edition rewards that have gone around, these things won't be very useful.  I'd say go with what you think will look coolest and hope for the best.  Neither mount will allow for melee combat, so you are probably getting a horse anyway in game.

YOU GET A DRINKING CAPE!  I mean, really, a drinking cape!!!

Not true, not true at all.  I recently resubbed to WoW and it's awesome how many lies and fabrications I throw at the rubes whenever they ask me how I got my zergling pet.

(http://www.creativelearning.ca/images/toys/Bob_Builder_large.jpg)

Given what I've seen so far today, I probably won't be touching this game for months.  I was one of those crazy people that thought Funcom may have learned a lesson from their AO launch and will absolutely have a solid, stable game because they know it's launch suicide not to.  After crashing five times just adjusting video settings before leaving the newbie beach, I have revised my opinion.

It's been in development for 5 years, at some point you have to launch just so you can fire everyone.

One of the funniest comments about AoC I've seen was on the FoH boards - something like "I played Vanguard so I don't mind a little bugginess and missing content at launch. This is a bit buggier and has more missing content than VG, though"

 :ye_gods:

I can't disagree with those comments, but  :nda:.

(http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n221/Savient/failol.jpg)(http://buffalopundit.wnymedia.net/blogs/files/2007/09/failboat.jpg)

Aez, is that first photo real? I soooo need that in hi-res to print at 60"x80" for work.

Google-fu :

http://www.cargolaw.com/2007nightmare_ital.florida.html (http://www.cargolaw.com/2007nightmare_ital.florida.html)
*scroll down for the story*

It's real! All abort the failboat!

I hope the fetapults are in.

Oh come on, it's not nearly as bad as Vanguard.

It is pretty sad though that they are a month from launch and still pushing out 5Gig patches on a weekly basis.

My PvP weekend review:

Downloading:  Gamespot Download Manager showed me at least four different error messages trying to download this.  Replayability: 10/10.  Took over 30 hours to download from other sources.

Installing:  Only crashed my computer twice.

Setup:  I was informed by Funcom that my Nvidia card (8600 GT or somesuch) had drivers that were "known to react extremely unstably with Age of Conan."  Prompted to change.

Character creation:  The fifteen seconds before I was informed that "This is the wrong version of the client, please redownload" seemed to be good.  I liked the fonts on the error messages, and the music I managed to hear was excellent.
EDIT: Didn't realize I had to patch manually.  Perhaps I will get in after all.

Wow, things have improved a lot. Even just within the PvP segment, they've come pretty far with completeness, usability, stability and even look.

I never even got that far.  I saw I had a 6-9 hour download, plus god knows how long for patches, and realized it wasn't worth it.  I canceled the download, and went back to WoW.

Though, from the sounds of things, I didn't miss anything.

AoC does not survive casual scrutiny. You gotta REALLY wanna check it out  :grin:

But it should also be axiom at this point that if someone is enjoying WoW, they don't need to check out any other MMOs. There is no "better WoW" out there. The only time to really give anything else a whirl is when you're looking for something mostly different in some key way (and window-dressing is rarely that "key").

Yeah, this goes back to earlier in the thread, when people were talking about comparing AoC to WoW, which has had over three years of refinements.  If you're creating a post-WoW MMO, I think you've really got to offer an experience that can't be had with WoW, because it's such an uphill battle.  I've only played a little bit of LotRO, but it seems that that may be it's fatal flaw — not distinguishing itself enough from WoW.

Well the question becomes does the user-base of WoW find it to be a treasure of refinements, entertainment, and surprises or have they seen about all there is to see, with additional content being less than entertaining.

WoW has never really done anything ground-breaking. It's just executed quite well; and with a distinctive style. Back when EQ1 was at 400,000 concurrent users people said they're never be an EQ-killer. Think we can agree that was wrong.

There exists the possibility for a WoW-killer...it's just pretty damn hard to achieve.

I could open up my middlemanagement book of leveraging core competencies to target consumers with needstates they haven't identified, but eh, you've probably read the same ones :-)

I've said before, and continue to believe, that the WoW killer will come when "success" is measured differently.

To me, WoW is the end of a cycle that began with D&D. A good run, but it could grow that way only because the type of people who loved D&D went off to become programmers who built their youth experiences into text, graphics and then 3D. They grew up while we grew up, happily traveling together apologizing for the tech along the way.

Today's kids though, they're not starting with D&D. Games have transcended the stereotypical basement dweller to become mass acceptable. And as it has done so, so have tastes changed. What they think matters is different. Consider just how many browser-based MMOs were not made by veteran devs with roots in tabletop gaming and RPGing.

By the time a new done-like-WoW game comes out, it'll be for the folks growing up through the younger games. When they hit late teens and college/university years, think they'll want more generic-fantasy for flat monthly fee when for almost a decade prior they were playing in IP worlds with much higher awareness, and for free?

I do not.

There's also the secondary and tertiary business partners to consider. Most current AAA MMOs are almost entirely vertical, save those that license engines/middleware, those that bring in some type of outside partner for specific tasks (e-comm, voip like from Vivox, etc), and the newer ones paying licensing royalties.

Meanwhile, newer browser worlds are most external service or licensing arrangements, themselves often run by companies specifically there to make work-for-hire worlds as marketing vehicles, brand extensions, etc.

Obviously this is not a cut and dry thing. There's a number of exceptions, and it's not like the old way is going away. In a genre with AC1 still active, it's hard to bet on anything.

But I would bet that the metric is going to shift. Because a lot of other newer companies with bigger IP and a lot more dough are too.

Darniaq, your posts always get me thinking.

I have to say I totally agree with what you are saying about growing up with DND and the boom of computers in general.

When I played UO for the first time, it was after me and my brother had talked about how cool it would be to have hundreds of guys all playing in a game like that. So, it coulda wiped out my whole PC and I still would have loved it. It's not such an amazing feat as it was now. The infrastructure/bandwidth now avalable to customers changes things greatly.

Ah well, was a good run.

How many and what IPs transcend cultural differences the way WoW has/does, and appeal to gamers?  

Will it be something sci-fi?  Probably not.  US sci-fi usually doesn't translate well to Asian markets.  

Another fantasy?

What other single player RPG (besides Starcraft/Warcraft) is huge in Asian, European, and North American markets?

/naive rambling:
It would seem to me that there isn't another 10 million strong target base to go after.  Instead, the best strategy would be to target specifc audiences, budget and build a game to go after that group.  North America and Europe generally find the same thing appealing.  Don't worry about targeting Asia with that game.  Build another game to target them.  

Homogenize your engine where the same coders can work across multiple MMOs.  Vary artwork and stories according to the region you're targeting with that game.  Develop the core game engine so that it can be used for Starship Troopers, but also be used for Elves Gone Wild, with really nothing more than art asset changes, making sure the artists tools are the same for all artists across all games.

From the outside looking in, the MMO gaming industry seems to be very...well..bloated.  The same companies use different engines for different MMOs.  Why not streamline it?  Why not build 'one engine to rule them all', with art tools that can be used to generate a suit of warrior armor and also generate a SWAT uniform?  The only real difference (it seems to me) between a palladin whacking a foozle on the head with a stick and a soldier shooting a 9mm at it is the animation and distance.  The stick is essentially a 9 mm with 5 meter range, the 9 mm is essentially a stick with a 50 meter range (or whatever).  Mocap the animations into a database; use when necessary.

Dunno.  Just kinda spitballing....

Disney MMO would transcend cultural differences but would not be that 'desirable' among the higher demographics.
The reason WOW is a hit in Asia is due to its RTS roots. Realize this is an anomaly. Can you name a RTS lore converted straight to MMO? No, LOTR is different, it's a book first, then a movie, then RTS then MMO

Whahaha, that ship!

It reminds me of how during the Vanguard pre-pre-pre-launch hype, Brad McQuaid took a break from his pill popping regimen to photoshop 'Vanguard' and 'Conan' onto a pair of battleships (guess which ship was out in front!??!?!!?!) and post it onto a forum as a salient point in some asinine argument or other that he was having.

Damn, I wish I could find that picture.  :awesome_for_real:

Your question is a bit off considering Warcraft was never a single player RPG.  The question is what video game IP's have enough worldwide appeal to be worked into successful MMO's.  Essentially you'd be looking at stuff like Call of Duty 4, Pokemon, Gran Turismo, GTA, a Final Fantasy MMORPG that doesn't borrow some of the worst aspects of EQ, or the Sims (I'm not into those games so I'm not sure what it was about TSO that kept it from attracting fans of the franchise).

Because The Sims appealed to extremely casual gamers as its core demographic. Players who load the game up to rearrange the furniture in their house or see how their guys are doing between rounds on Pogo or episodes of Montel Williams. Not the same demographic who will pay a monthly fee for a single timesink game. The Sims tops the charts because people who don't play computer games are into it.

To the rest of the topic, it's an interesting discussion and one that I've mused over before (http://antipwn.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/what-makes-an-mmo/). There are a lot of basic assumptions that drive a lot of modern games (not just MMOs) that can be stripped away without lessening the experience at all. You'll need a combination of a visionary design team and a publisher willing to risk a lot of money on unknown territory to see it though. It might happen but money men prefer safer bets than that.

EQ2 vs WoW engine. "we are planning for future tech" vs "let's just let people play on what they have atm" ... different tools for different goals, simple as that. That's of course extreme example but it applies to lesser degree to them all.

Though that said multiple new MMOs seem to opt for Unreal Engine 3 for the client and some other middleware to handle the server side. Guess we'll see how it develops.

At a high level I think you are dead on, but I don't think the focus on going to be on tech or experience delivery (except from a financial perspective-by the game developers and funders - browser-based games being cheaper to produce and deliver).  Rather, I think the next focus will be a shift in the what type of game will be "teh bestest".  I think video games at this point attempt to fulfill two major needs:

1) desire for entertainment:  evolution in this area will draw a close parallel to happened in the moving-picture business and how it diverged: Blockbuster/high budget flicks (WoW), made-for-T.V (browser) and, eventually, art-house pictures (currently there are many indie efforts, and some efforts to promoting indie-efforts, but these are mostly tech-demos rather then a particular group of artists saying something).
2) desire for competition:  an evolution of sporting games, and sport elements within entertainment games (e.g. WoW PvP).  This one fills the need for boys and girls (of all ages) to compete on a level playing field.

The fact that 1) is hard, and doesn't really satisfy 2) in any capacity says to me that the next winner is the game-maker that starts with a 2)-type game (i.e. a competition game), and adds in entertainment elements throughout (cutscenes, background story, etc).  To get the 2)-type game is not trivial either.  I think for it to be a WoW killer it must provide good player bracketing to keep people of like-skills competing against eachother, also it must provide good AI competition for those who would rather play cooperatively amongst friends (often friends want to play together, but have large differences in ability).  It also must be accessible in smallish chunks of time i.e. the ability to get on-line and play for an hour or two, and have persistence elements, and open up a tier for higher-level "pro" play is key.  Magic the Gathering is an obvious example of the type of gameplay that I'm talking about (persistence in this case is the deck/stockpile of cards a player owns).

I don't think the massive-content/massive-expense games will completely die out (and the 15-25 year old crew grew up with single player games, the way they play is still more heavily focused on entertainment), but I think that the 5-15 crew will expect more of the the sport-entertainment type of game (these types of games being less costly to run - lower cost of content, will also drive them to a large extent)

So, lets hear some opinions on the beta weekend. Oh, and please post Comp Specs.  :rock_hard:

Not yet :-)

While it's expensive in the short term, building your own engine can prove to be cheaper in the long run. If you expect a long run... and then actually achieve it :-)


Completely agree. This is partly what makes Club Penguin so popular with the players. Much of the activities surrounding making the cash to customize your igloo(s) come from competitive sporting-type activities. It's also the same for Webkinz (which is more of a questionable-MMO than a real one, but ciest la vie). And is probably statistically the biggest force of retention in WoW.

This also raises the recurring point of IP. Not all IP is going to work of course, and as we've seen. WoW worked well because it started with appeal to gamers. This has been discussed before. I think the last time we talked about gamer-loved IP, we came up with things like Starcraft (before SC2 was announced), Diablo, and something else which was huge but it's slipping my mind.

But that's if you want to grow MMOs by getting more gamers. Which is a good strategy, there's just more to it.

There's also growing by talking to everyone else. When that came up before, we talked about Helly Kitty online, or a Pokemon MMO. Then someone produced a link for the former :-) And since then we've learned that both Gaia and Neopets are getting persistent worlds. They won't make money the same way nor at the same level as WoW. But that's more because everything about them is different, including their audience.

Maybe in a genre of multiple playing fields, we need a meta-genre? Even back in the day I thought it silly to have Second Life and Guild Wars carry the same category tag. Today that's even sillier. Barbiegirls is as far away from WoW as COD4 :wink:

If you don't have a computer built in the last year, don't fucking bother.

My computer: AMD FX 64 2800+, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 (256MB)

It ran like shit in the PVE segments, and like total shit in the PVP section when there was more than 1 character on the screen. It also looked like monkey ass. The worst part was that it seemed like a fun enough game, had I actually been able to run it competently. I'll have more details and rage on my blog when I get the chance, but fuck, this is a PVP game. Performance has to come first and when you can't even get a decent framerate despite playing it on about as low a setting as it will go, you suck.

I'm not sure about your vid card, or if it is "equivalent" to the one posted on the min specs.


Linky (http://community.ageofconan.com/wsp/conan/frontend.cgi?func=publish.show&&func_id=2399&table=CONTENT)

I have head a lot of people say shadows (Nothing new here) and bloom are the major FPS killers... did you try turning that off? Just curious.

It's not, the radeon 9600 is way slower then the geforce 6600, despite appearing to have 3000 less of something or other. It's two generations behind. The ATI is 2002 technology, the nvidia is 2004. Interestingly enough the "sweet spot" card right now is the geforce 9600. Yeah. Confusing.

I really hate when they change numbers like that for hardware, may be why i don't pay attention anymore.

Needs a 512 mb video card and 2.4 ghz CPU just to run at 1280 x 960? Please to be optimizing your code, kthx.

Yeah, the Radeon 9600 is way old shit. I was surprised it still ran. It just irks me that they can't even make a low-spec render run worth a shit. You'd think that making old tech work better would be easy, since it's so established.

maybe we have hit one of those cutoff points, as you can see, they are not supporting 56k as well. Broadband only.

Out of Curiosity, not that it truly compares, but can you run oblivion?

Yes, and it looks just about as shitty. But I get better performance on TF2 with the Radeon 9600 than the shitty Nvidia 6200 that I have lying around, which plays Oblivion like shit but looks better.

If I were making a MMO I'd allocate significant development effort to gracefully scale down to intel graphics decelerators found in most notebooks. But hey, what do I know.

The computer I used is T6410, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 7800 GT.  It's several years old but the video card is more recent and I added an SB Audigy 4.  It seems to run fine on this, although there was a wee bit of lag in the PvP mini-games.  Everyone seemed to have some of that though.  I can also run Oblivion with that computer.  I'll probably continue to play most games on it until it falls apart.  I'm sick of trying to keep up with it all.  When they release a game that I absolutely can not live without playing, I MIGHT piece together something else.   Maybe.  Or maybe I'll just buy some shoes.

Looks like the finally got spellweaving in. (http://pc.ign.com/articles/870/870119p1.html)

OK, speaking as someone who's not in the beta...those negatives looks much worse than the benefits you get, especially for a PvP game.

:awesome_for_real:

Ya, Haemish, come on bro, that card's gettin a bit rusty and you can't judge a modern MMO by its ability to perform on a 2002 card. See my sig for grunk's words of wisdom.  :grin:

Spell weaving sounds really cool.

I would say PvP games should give small benefits for playing well. A good player is good anyways. Giving large bonuses to good players just creates disparity, no? That all depends on how easy it is for a newbie to screw up with the weaving, though.

Sounds neat anyways. Regardless of actual bonus, it's likely the first thing you'll have to master to be competetive, which may be a shame. It always is when bonuses become mandatory.

Does UE3 allow for seamless procedural/lazyload terrain? If not, any MMO using the engine will be zoned and I thought we're past that shit.

Thats not necessarily true, the use of zones or "Levels" is most times a application level (Meaning the design of the game its self) reason, not necessarily part of, or required by the rendering/game engine.

For instance, Vanguard using the UE3 engine does not use what are commonalty referred to as maps/zones/levels.

It is much more common thees days for assets and the like to be "Streamed" off the hard drive, or loaded and unloaded as needed, instead of all at once in the form of a loading screen. Depends on what you are doing.

Supposedly yes or at least it's much improved compared to UE2.5 (vanguard)  I don't see zoning as much of problem though, have yet to see (MMO) game that doesn't have it to some extent. Nor the great appeal that's game hitching every 30 secs because it loads another terrain chunk in background vs explicit short pause when closing clear boundaries.

Modern MMO = World of Warcraft

Runs goddamn fine on my POS. If you can't run that well AND you still look like shit, you need to fire your low-spec render team OR NOT EVEN BOTHER. Just tell me I can't play and move on to your shitty sub-100k subscription levels and move on to the Vanguard halls. Meanwhile, developers who give a fuck about making money will be over here, playing with money hats.

WoW being the most played doesn't make it modern. The millions of people left driving Oldsmobiles from the 80s don't make them modern either. In MMOG terms, WoW is a few years old and nearly ancient. Just like your PC. ^_^

But Haemish still has a point. Design for his machine and make 1 million PCs compatible or design for mine (3.2GHz CoreDuo, 2GB, 8600GT) and make 100,000 PCs compatible.

Or design for high fidelity graphics, just like bioshock, oblivion, crisis, or any other modern games. What ever way you go, its a dual edged sword.

Bioshock, Oblivion and Crysis did not have a subscription fee attached. Bioshock was nothing but black blobs on the screen, which told me all I needed to know about playing it on this card. The sub fee is already a barrier to entry for some, adding yet another because you can't be arsed to make a decent low-spec renderer is another one that needn't have been done.

WoW is the basement level for entry into this market. Hell, take even Guild Wars, which looked and ran decent on a machine half the specs of mine.

No.

Notice they never actually say that it's in the game. Or that it's not. They're just detailing what it'll look like if it were.  :nda:

I only upgraded my graphics card because my GeForce 4400 Ti was so old and broken, it wouldn't run anything.  Righ stuck it in an old machine that doesn't do anything even remotely fancy.  The only other updates was another BG of cheap RAM and a sound card that was really cheap on sale.  I won't upgrade anything until this stuff decomposes.  Nothing to do with cost, it's all because MMOs have pissed me off.   I'm tired of MMOs telling me what to buy.  I'll buy a new rig when I fucking feel like it, not when some POS MMO that MIGHT last me a month or so because it runs out of anything interesting to do, tells me to.  I can live with my consoles.  MMOs can go fuck themselves.  Bastards.  If I could make them feel pain, I would.

Dammit.

They already said many times its not in the beta. One of those things they are going to surprise us with at launch.

Time will tell.

Ah yes. Surprising people with untested core combat systems at launch. Time has already told us what happens. Dozens of times.

Too bad the fanboys never, ever listen.

I'm not all that surprised.

I suspect launch will be less a train wreck than a train wreck that was carrying toxic waste that ploughed straight into an orphanage which exploded.

And then things will get worse.

nice catch. Really nice. I knew something was amiss. I re-read the sentence a few times just to make my grin broader.  :grin:

The basic 'caster stance' concept isn't even that new (though they do expand on it a bit with the 'timer' and 'positive/negative side effects' bits). WOW priests have shadowform, LOTRO minstrels have warspeech, both of those are 'stances' that give up survivability for pewpew; arcane mages have a spell that costs more mana and casts faster the more you use it in a X sec period. I'm sure GW has plenty of similar skills...


-- Z.

Another major title currently in beta does essentially the same thing as well. It's not an innovative mechanic, but that certainly doesn't mean it's a bad idea. If it were in.

Far as I'm concerned, this game debuts when it comes out on the 360.  PC people will just be paying to beta.

This is how I feel about it.

I'm still getting the wooden box though.

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

Way to talk with your wallet.

This is Funcom we're talking about. Not EA or Nintendo or Acclaim.

Funcom.

They put out like 3 games a year. At most. If that. More like one or two. IF THAT.

If I only pooped 2 or 3 times per year, would you buy a turd of mine?

I mean, I only poop twice a year. Buy a turd. C'mon.

Does the turd come in a wooden box for $70?

If your poop was near as awesome as a Conan art book in a wooden box. I'd buy one. Most definitely.

I would sell your poop on eBay.

If you claim it to be in the vision of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, it will fetch a pretty penny!

That's how I lost my last ebay account!

So I am not a Fileplanet subscriber these days and somehow managed to get an open beta key, so I guess it is truly open. I thought I saw someone mention earlier that it wasn't. Or maybe I'm just lucky. I am lacking sleep, so this post is a rambling mess.

That being said, I saved my little old key code and then glanced back at the download button. 12 GB client download. I am not lacking hard drive space by any stretch, but dear me that's a huge client. A lot of art assets I guess. In any case, it will probably run for shit on my poor old PC. It's funny how I neglected my gaming box when I got my Mac... three years ago.  :ye_gods:

Not that it matters. WoW still runs very well on this PowerBook, too. Not that I've played in a while, but still, it reinforces Haemish's point. Which I've forgotten. I'm going to sit in the corner with Signe and mumble profanities at the MMO developers now.

The point is well taken. I'm sick and tired of shoving new components into this 8 year old box. If something like Conan cant run on it then screw it. I'm not shelling out money I don't have on it.

Have you considered washing the piss out of the Sunny D bottles below your computer and depositing them?  I've heard its a surefire moneymaker.

Sunny D bottles. Damn, now you tell me. I've been using plastic milk cartons. That handle makes it really easy to fling them twords the thrash with the one arm I have that has any strength left. If I'd known that I could be making money *sobs*

Geez that Sunny-D statement sounds familiar. Either it's been posted before or it was on some sorta podcast  :grin:

And if you don't have a recent computer, don't bother with AoC. Never upgrade for a game. Games that require such upgrades are only for people who probably upgrade constantly as a matter of course.

That's silly. If people took that advice they would never play any games at all. Just like anything else you need to make your own value judgement.

So now that AoC is open beta is the NDA down?

It's not open until tomorrow and those of us currently under NDA will remain there unless funcom says otherwise. This means that we can't talk about the closed beta, although the open beta is clear.

Did you get in through fileplanet? because it keeps taking me to the subscribe page when i click on it.

I must give credit where credit is due- grunk was the first to say it, ironically in reference to AoC upgrades as well. 

Thanks! It was killing me. I was pulling up last week's 1up podcasts trying to find it. Knew I shoulda done a search here first  :grin:

Yes. I just clicked the open beta link on the front page and then logged in. Perhaps because I used to subscribe? I have no clue.

This is obviously a bug and the only honorable thing to do is to relinquish your key and give it to me.

So the start time for the open beta has been pushed back 5 hours while Funcom slips in a new patch..

The wailing & gnashing of teeth on the various forums is very nostalgic!

Lamentations of the women.

I hope Funcom has the sense to title their tech support forum that.

So, it appears that the NDA is down........ For Reporters and news sites. (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/31789)

Well THIS is a news site right? start spilling it.

Do you have Comcast?  Evidently you get a free subscription to Fileplanet and Founder's Club if you do.

I stole this from a guy who stole this from the General Beta boards, however, being in general beta I could of stolen it myself, but I was to lazy.  It's a technical thing-a-majig

--------------------

Blatently stolen post from the GB forums. Frankly, its too valuable not to share. Kudos to Stonescape, who wrote it.

Are you wondering how to run this game as smooth as possible ? Would you like people to test, change and retest stuff until they eventually come up with pre-chewed checklist so you can see in the blink of an eye what to improve about your computer to run this game smooth at release time ? Well, look no further because I have done the work for you. Hope you enjoy. This guide was last edited to reflect the 30 april build.
List of impact per hardware pc component:


1. Central processing unit (CPU)

medium, depending on which video card you use you will need a stronger processor. Nvidia cards draw their power greatly on the processor and thus generate extra load. ATI cards operate at maximum speed pretty much independent of the processor. In both cases the game itself requires a considerable deal of continuous processing. I used to have some clear results here but those are always from ageofconan (the game itself) + the debugger which swallows up huge resources. The mainstream thing that we are able to see is that the load is almost never divided over 4 cores (if you have a quadcore) but over either 1 or 2 cores. Mostly 2 cores but the more I test the more I start believing that it's the debugger that makes us see that while once it's gets stripped (at should be gone at releasetime) we might very well see that only 1 core is really doing the work here. Because I don't have the option of disabling that debugger and get clear readings I'm suspending all cpu testings till further notice.

The only thing I can tell you is that most of the time 1 core is up to 70-90% (pretty much always) on a Q6600 and a second core is at 50%. The other 2 cores are at rougly 10%. That's why I see mostly. Exceptionally 4 cores are used but it might be the debugger using them under Vista instead of the game and it's engine. I expect the cpu load to be less at releasetime when the debugger is gone


2. Random access Memory (RAM)

The amount of memory installed in your computer is absolutely critical to running this game smooth. The game itself has been developped as a 32-bit executable with LA (large address awareness) enabled. What does this mean? 32-bit executables are by design restricted to 2GB per running process on a 32bit OS. (ageofconan32.exe = 1 process = the whole game) As you zone to the inn or other zones, the executable size in memory will try to cache all this information (= keep it loaded in memory in the form of ageofconan32.exe growing in memory usage size) to give you a smoother gaming experience. I have noticed that the "working set" of the executable grows to as large as 2.6GB (since latest checkup), this is how much of your physically present RAM is being used by the game. If you don't have that amount of free ram BEFORE starting up the game, your game will slow down after zoning enough times and slow down even further over time until you restart it to make the game use less memory again. For this reason you need under XP at least 2.5GB in your computer to run this game smooth and under Vista at least 3GB. Aside from the physical usage there's also the virtual size (the actual size of the process) which I have seen to grow as large as about 2.9GB after zoning alot. It used to be up to 3.5GB in betaclients before 14april but that is gone.

note: on a default 32-bit windows XP or Vista for that matter, no processes are allowed to grow over 2GB even though the maximum limit of a 32-bit process is 4GB per process. The game will simply crash when it reaches that size unless you make modifications. (you may be experiencing this right now). If and let me stress that only IF you have 3GB or more (4GB preferably) you can configure your Vista or windows XP installation to allow processes to grow over 2GB (at the cost of decreasing your OS's reserved kernel mem however...) so they no longer crash but instead run smoother. This change may be better OR worse for you. On page 4 (post 73) I explain how and why. Do this at your own risk and NEVER if you don't have 4GB of memory in your computer installed. Windows XP 64-bit and Vista 64-bit are by default enabled to allow up to 4GB for any 32-bit process do this so they do not require changes and your executable will not crash when it reaches 2GB on such an OS. Just make sure you have 3GB or more in your computer

note: 4GB is the ideal amount needed to run this smooth along with whatever other stuff you run on your OS (services, background apps, the OS memory itself) Vista will even use the extra memory to help cache other stuff. I have 8 and beyond 4GB you do not notice much more improvement in speed and smoothness so 8GB is NOT necessary for running ONLY this game while having all other apps closed. However having 8GB will help cache other stuff under Vista as well as allow you to simultaneously run a bunch of other windows programs. This is luxury however, not a must have. 3GB is must have minimum for smooth AOC gaming and 2GB means running the game at decreased performance. This is inevitable

note: the speed of the memory is completely trivial when compared to the actual amount of memory.Having e.g 1066 Mhz mem instead of 667Mhz will only yield a 1-3% memory read speed increase which you don't even feel or notice at all ingame

note: although increasing your RAM from 2GB to 3GB is in essence not a direct increase in fps but instead makes the game play and loading/zoning feel alot smoother, it should be noted however that if you lack alot of RAM your FPS will be affected through stuttering etc. Running the game with 1GB e.g will give such problematic play (enough to feel 'unplayable') Having 2GB is therefore a bare minimum for running at all while 3GB is the minimum for running smooth. 4GB is a good standard. More memory with Vista 64 gives you better HD access caching

note: Any 32-bit executable is by design limited to a max of 4GB physical memory usage and a non-modified 32-bit OS further limits it down to 2GB. If the 32-bit executable is marked for "largeaddressaware" (= allowed to grow to 4GB instead of 2GB) and the 32-bit operating system is set to allow largeaddressaware-processes to grow to 3GB instead of 2GB in mem size, then the executable can grow a bit bigger up to 3GB at a cost. (this is the reason in the first place while all 32-bit OS's further limit down all 32-bit processes to use a maximum of 2GB: because the OS itself can only address 4GB in total and wants to reserve 2GB for it's own (=kernel) operations and play it thus safe) For this reason the ideal situation is to have 6GB or more mem in your computer and have Vista 64-bit as OS. It safely has 2GB for itself and still 4GB free to let the 32-bit executable grow to it's maximum so the game feels like one big smooth train

3. Graphics processing unit (GPU)

Critical impact!! This game uses pretty advanced graphics that are at or a bit ahead of it's time. This allows for a visually stunning game under ideal circumstances with future hardware. I have been able to run at 1900*1200 at high graphic settings in a quite smooth way using the 8800GT. A retest with 2 of those in SLI showed that sli does not make any difference in the current game client. Recommended however is a latest gen of graph card for smooth play (nvidia 8800series or ati 3XXX series and up) The graphics card therefore is well worth your money for this game, more than buying the latest processor in any case. The raw clock speed is what makes or breaks fps currently. SLI does NOT work currently! Hope they will fix it soon so I can update this section. The game uses huge textures. Upon measuring videocardmemory usage I noticed that outdoors 512MB is saturated all the time on resolutions 1600*1200 and up. Get 768 or more memory on the card if you can.

note: as of today the game still has some technical issues that cause extreme drops in fps. All players are subject to this regardless their vid card (I talked to many ingame) Even with 2*8800 in sli running at low settings in the lowest resolution you still have this so it's not solvable by hardware. How bad is it ? Well it's like this: you stand still in a high graphs environment and notice 25-65 fps. As soon as you start sprinting or doing a 360° mouselook you may experience insane drops to below 1fps (= extreme stuttering) for a few sec due to the fact of missing precompiled shaders in the shaders cache database. EDIT: as of the april 19 build we now have a solution for this problem!! On page 6 (post 116) I explain why it happens and how to fix the stuttering yourself.

note: not all graphic cards appear to be "well compatible" with AOC. For example the latest badass 9800x2 series are known to give you trouble and low performance in many cases most probably due to bad driver support. all 8800series are rocksolid choices for this game as long as they have 512MB ram on them as an absolute minimum. Don't use a card with less memory !! All latest gen ATI cards such as 29XX and 3XXX series appear to be doing well

note: since 22 april and beyond, more GPU hungry stuff has been enabled in the beta-client. Therefore, as of now the sky is the limit since there is no longer any setup that can run the game at max settings. It is however possible with the latest gen hardware to achieve a framerate of 25-50 all the time without having to disable the game's beauty. I plan to implement a software tweak guide at releasetime once the video options are final (they keep changing currently in the betaclient)

4. The disc subsystem (HD or a RAID of HD's)

important and severly underestimated. This component does not increase your fps in any way (at least not to a noticeable degree) but DOES effect exclusively ALL ZONING experiences which is pretty much from launching the game to going in and out of zones nonstop (in tortage e.g) The sky is the limit here since the game dir is over 24GB as it is today and parts of that are being loaded into memory as you zone. I have tested the game while running it off a latest generation 7200RPM harddrive (samsung 400GB) and later on a RAID 0 of two WD Raptor 10000RPM disks. My god the difference is day and night. With the single 7200RPM disk the loading screens take double the time and I can listen to up to an entire song while zoning into the game. On the raid system I could only hear the part of the women with the high voice and I never hear the rest of that song because I'm already ingame. This feels so good. If I had the money I would buy a 32GB HyperOS hyperdrive to run the game on because it would be blazing fast then no doubt. I can only imagine how good that must feel but I'm already very happy with the raid0 system. Adding more than 2 drives to the raid0 made a further improvement in loading times but only marginal like 10% (not worth it imho) For smooth experience ofc you have no data or anything else running off your game disk or raid system except the game and maybe the OS (peferably even only the game itself and nothingelse)


tips and tricks to run the game smooth(er):

1. Turn off "bloom" in advanced graphics options and set shadows to "from characters only". This may almost double your fps if it was enabled before
2. (optionally) turn off AA (4-25 fps gain on average). AntiAliasing= a GPU hungry technique to improve the visual quality of a game even further
3. Run the game off a seperate fast disk or raid system (where you only install the game and put no other data or programs) This noticeably helps the loading times during zoning and launching the game
4. close all other running programs and antivirus before playing AOC and defragment at least twice a week. Use simpleconfig.exe in your gamedir to perform a compression while you sleep (takes ages!)
5. Run the game fullscreen!
7. Backup your gamedir before and after every patch
8. Remove the stuttering (page 6 post 116)


disclaimer: All findings in this thread are based solely on the personal testing experience of a game betatester. I will take no responsability for any damage that certain software or hardware changes may cause to your computer or data by executing actions suggested in this thread. Please execute any actions only after careful consideration, research and above all always at your OWN risk.

Wall of text to say the game runs like a slide show.

I'm running a geforce 7950 512mb on a duo core AMD chip with 2gigs of RAM.

On "medium" settings with bloom on I run about 20 fps normally, but this fucking thing stutters sometimes as it tries to load textures from all over.

Not a very smooth operation.

Yeaaaah.

I'm going to cancel my Collector's Ed preorder. My computer doesn't have a prayer of handling that, and I won't be able to afford an upgrade for many moons. No point in shelling out for something I won't be able to use.

Very very helpful, though, Drae. Thanks for reposting it.

My summary of Draegan's excelent post is, wow I'm hard and I want to build a new computer...  I love shiney, its so damn, shiney.  Can we get a version of that that includes the referenced posts?

I love me some blazing fast hardware, this game is going to fail so hard though, do I blame Funcom for getting into bed w/ MS & Vista or Vista for sucking cock?

tl;dr system reqs:

CPU:  Dual Core E6600 or better.  Quad Core doesn't help (much) but higher speed on the dual core will help (some).

RAM:  More is better.  8GB is overkill on Vista.  64bit OS sounds like it'll help if only because it can handle additional RAM, 4GB+ is wanted.

GPU: Geforce8800 w/ 512ram is minimum spec.  Cards with more mem are desired.  SLI does nothing.  Does anyone even use ATI now adays?

HD:  7200rpm drive will not cut it, bad load times.  10k rpm or better yet two of them in Raid0 = 4tw.




@Bloodworth \/\/\/\/\/\/
I thought 32bit XP doesn't even let a person boot up with 4GB slotted?

That article brings up an interesting question. I just built a new computer, its a quad core  that i believe is 64 bit.. I also have 4 gigs on the new machine. But i am running XP pro 32bit. I intend to upgrade in the future...but. Does this mean my CPU and Ram are not being fully utilized? If so, how can i correct this short of a 64 bit OS?

Thanks.

You can't. There are some linux version who can do it but only for programs that are especially compiled to take advantage of this feature.

A 32bit OS will use 4 gig ram minus your videocard ram minus a couple of hundred meg to address the rest of the stuff in your pc. If you have a 512 meg video card you usually end up with 3.2 gig usable ram.

You can use a 64bit vista (not the cheaper 64bit versions) to address more than 4gig of ram but 64bit vista is a bit of a driver hell.

Guys I'd wait until you read some reviews on sites that don't run Funcom/Conan advertisements before building entire systems around this game.

Just sayin'

Good ol' Failcom sure doesn't disappoint. This is going to be fun  :drill:

Thats basically my machine, except I am running XP Pro with 2gb of ram. I get around 65 fps... But every time it has to load in new textures, I get 1 fps for about 3 to 5 seconds. Its very frustrating, and the loading happens at odd times. Basically the game runs very jerky, with lots of hanging. Also, it really doesnt look that good. I mean, I guess for a MMOG it looks decent, but it doesnt look as good as the system specs should make it. Also, there is a lot of Uncanny Valley with the character models. They all look semi retarded.

You think it's bad now, wait until they patch in nipples.

Could you have mentioned that a little earlier? :-P

Oh well, since it worked it'll still be useful for other games.

They are delaying the delay for another two hours. In a trully hellish day at work, it's hard for me to stop giggling.

They already did, and forgot to patch in extra shirt textures. So most of the female NPCs had nipples sticking through their shirts.

References (I found the original post).

On page 4 (post 73)
-------------------------------------------------
Intro: What is this all about ?

a 32-bit OS such as Vista or XP has a few limits when it comes to memory use. To sum them up they are:

1.The Operating itself can only "see" 4GB minus the amount of reserved memory space by the Bios (because the bios is a layer that stands between the hardware and the operating system itself) The larger the memory on your video card for example, the less memory is left for your OS. This why one person sees only 2.8GB in windows and another sees 3.5GB while they both have 4GB of physical memory installed. Regardless of which edition of an OS you have, ALL 32-bit XP and Vista are subject to this rule.
2. 32-bit XP and Vista are designed in such a way that they need a part of the total addressable (= amount of memory that the OS can "see") for themselves. For this reason, Microsoft designed both XP and Vista in such a way that a certain process could only get up to 2GB of memory, and then the remaining memory would remain available for kernel processes (= itself), even though it does not in fact always need a full 2GB. In fact a clean XP might only need 300MB at some point if only 1 game is running and nothing else installed. Vista will require more kernel memory because it's bigger by design. As more stuff runs, the OS itself might need up to 1.5-2GB of memory for it's kernel. By default the balance in 32-bit XP and Vista is such that it's 2GB for a given user-mode process (= a program = Age of Conan) and 2GB for the kernel (= OS itself) If the virtual size of a process such as Age of conan reaches a total size of 2GB, the program is terminated by the OS BY DESIGN to prevent it from infiltrating the kernel reserved memory space. The user experiences this as a program crash straight into windows. For age of conan, my tests have shown that it's virtual size reaches 2GB at about when the physical memory usage size reaches around 1.5GB (this is what you see in windows task manager). This is why people keep crashing all the time without understanding why. Well, at least until now...
3. 32-bit Processes (=programs) themselves have a built-in little extra mini switch that's called a 'flag' that prevents them from groing bigger than 2GB. Even if you configure the OS using the above to allow up to 3GB for a process, it would not be able to do so if it's built-in switch is set to "not Large Address Aware" because that settings limits the process to a max of 2GB memory. If it's set to "Large Address Aware" however the 32-bit process is allowed to grow up to 3GB on a 32-bit OS or up to 4GB on a 64-bit OS, which is again the maximum for ANY 32-bit process.


Now there is a switch that makes it possible to shift the balance a bit from 2GB/2GB (program/kernel) to 3GB/1GB. This switch allows us to change the max mem limit for user-mode process so that Age of Conan can continue to grow in virtual size up to 3GB instead of only 2GB and that equals a physical memory usage of at least 2.2GB. The game will crash again when it reaches that new limit. My testing has shown that if you zone enough and roam about, the game wil go beyond 3GB physical usage and 3.5GB virtual size as of now. For this reason you can still crash. However, further testing has shown that the game reaches 1.5 physical usage in the first hour easily when zoning around Tortage (quite easy to simulate) while reaching the 2.2physical usage takes at the very least lots of zoning and usually a few hours to reach. For this reason the following switch (ONLY IF YOU HAVE 4GB MEM) may solve alot of problems for you


Great news! So how do I set the switch ??

Under Vista 32-bit:
1. Under Vista 32-bit (with at least 4GB memory installed regardless how much you see of it in windows) go START
2. Navigate to programs...etc until you see a black icon named "command prompt"
3. rightclick it and select: run as administrator. A big black box appears
4. In the big black box, type the following command: BCDEDIT /Set IncreaseUserVa 3072
5. Press enter to execute the command
6. reboot your computer

7(optional). If you don't like it for some reason you can revert the switch the same procedure but replace step 4 with this: entering bcdedit /deletevalue increaseuserva (this undoes the switch)

Under XP 32-bit:

the equivalent of that switch on Vista for xp is simply by modifying the boot.ini file (it's a hidden system file under c:\) and add the /3GB switch to the line that looks like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Pro"

so it becomes:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Pro" /3GB

then reboot to activate the change

to remove the switch under XP: remove the /3GB and reboot



Is there a catch ? Any danger to this switch ?

Yes, there is. You limit the available memory to the OS itself. If the OS tries to use more, windows will crash and you will have to reboot and start your programs up again. Is this most likely to happen ? Nope, generally it's not. But it can whenever the OS requires alot of memory, more than is available. Let's say someone has 4GB installed, but he uses 2*8800GTX (the type with 768MB per card) so his OS only "sees" 2.8GB. On top of that his computer is not cleanly/newly formatted. It's filled with tons of previously installed programs, antivirus and whatever else that uses memory. Then on top of that he's playing AOC with the switch so it's using over 2GB of memory...you can see where this is going and you know how to avoid it...

note: in this regard and considering the fact that SLI currently is not working in AOC anyway : on computers with ony 3-4GB of memory, AOC can in fact run better with only 1 video card for now since then you have more memory available to windows not kidding...



Final advice:

enable this switch ONLY if the following conditions are BOTH true (if you still wonder why you haven't read the above):

1. you have Windows XP32-bit or Vista 32-bit (any edition)
2. you have at least 4GB of physical memory (even if your OS only sees 3.2)

if the answer to any of the above conditions is NO, then do NOT enable this switch or it may work contrary to your goals.


Note: On a 64 bit OS such as e.g Vista x64, this switch is not needed at all. The OS allows by default for any process to take up to it's maximum of memory available by design. Vista is able to "see" technically up to 128GB. Microsoft however decided to set a limit for each edition. so let's have another look at what restrictions we have for Vista x64 since that seems to be a popular question now:

1. Restriction by edition: Vista Home basic supports max 8GB, Vista Home Premium max 16GB, Business-Enterprise-Ultimate all support 128GB
2. Restriction by process: Since 64bit OS's can run both native 64bit designed process as well as 32-bit processes, there is still the max limit for a 32-bit process which is 4GB inevitably while a 64-bit process process could take up pretty much all memory. So if Ageofconan.exe is a 32-bit process and you are running Vista 64-bit with 8GB of physical ram (installed in the computer), then the OS will see all 8GB of ram while AgeofConan will crash if it reaches 4GB in virtual size but it will be able to use all 4GB since the OS still has enough memory left for itself so we dont' have the crappy situation from XP or Vista 32-bit. If Funcom would make a 64-bit version of the executable then it could grow even beyond 4GB up to..around 7-7.5 (assuming you have 8 onboard) ?? Something like that

Note: since the introduction of 32-bit Vista, many people have complained to Microsoft about the fact that windows shows that they can actually only see 2.8-3.5GB of memory while having 4GB memory installed that starting with SP1, enough people in fact for Microsoft to decide to change the decription under "System" in windows control panel. Yes you are reading this right: after installing SP1 for Vista on your 32-bit Vista you will see 4GB instead of the lesser number, although lesser is still being used even though the system information will indicate otherwise. The phylosophy behind this is that the system information should reflect how much memory is installed in your computer, not how much is effectively available to windows or used by windows so be careful there. Important to remember is the fact that you STILL only have 2.8-3.5 available for windows when doing your math for memory hungry programs such as this game... again, with 6GB or more and Vista 64-bit SP1 all those troubles are nonexistant and that's the near future of gaming imho !


IMPORTANT NOTE: since april 14 the AOC betaclient uses significantly less memory and therefore many people have had less crashes by removing this switch again. So it is possibly better again to play without this switch.

Why is this ?
Setting the switch shifts the memory limit from the AOC client to the OS itself on (32-bit OS only). So: before april 14 your AOC client was the main source of crashing and your OS less since the client wanted to grow up to 3.1GB physical memory usage. By setting the /3GB switch you let the AOC client grow bigger at the cost of limiting the OS itself to 1GB which may make it crash as well. After april 14 the client only grows up to 2.1 so if you remove the /3GB switch you revert back to the default 2GB/2GB balanced limit (2GB for AOC, 2GB for the OS) so the OS is safe from any crashing now. Hence since AOC is no longer the main source of crashing we can conclude that the remaining crashes (coming from not enough free memory for the OS) may be removed by reverting back to the default settings. Hope this explains alot for people

Is there no spoiler tag?  Or did I fuck it up?

Another reference:
On page 6 (post 116)
-------------------------------------------
Time for another guide: how to fix the insane stuttering !!

Q:What is it ? Well if you enter the thirsty dog first time and you're screen is shaking as hell and you get 1 frame per X seconds instead of X fps (AKA the slideshow effect) that's the stuttering effect we're talking about =P

Q:Why does it happen and why does it still happen even though I have teh strongest bleeding edge new computer in the world ?

To generate the possibly insane goodlooking graphics the game uses objects called "shaders". Shaders are small programs that alter pixels or vertices. Consequently, there are two major types of shader - pixel shaders and vertex shaders. These tiny programs add effects to basic geometry - so a water-styled shader can be added to a flat blue texture to make it look reflective, or a glass-styled shader can be added to a polygon to make it appear transparent. These shaders are the key to what makes the graphics in games today look so much better than the graphics in games from let's say 5-8 years ago. These shaders are programmable, so games developers can make their own, allowing them to create a unique look and feel for their game and that is what Funcom has done. Now the problem is that some of these shaders in many area's in the game are not known yet known to your betaclient so when that happens the game uses the graphic card's onboard processing unit (the GPU) to compile (sort of calculate) the shader results and then displays them. The time of compilation is what gives the feeling of insane stuttering which is super annoying.

Q:Ok now we know the problem, how does Funcom handle it ?

Funcom thought of this when developing AOC. Their solution was and still is to simply have your computer hold the results of every compilation in memory -so that this stuttering would be a one-time thing as long- as you are standing in that 1 small space or area (let's say the area of thirsty dog inn). When you log off and exit AOC, the AOC client is supposed to write down those results from memory into a file on your harddisk so that all compilation results don't have to be done all over again next time. Upon a clean client exit (which never happens because AOC crashes all the time currently and therefore loses it's compiled shaders) it saves all these changes into a file in the general beta folder and that file is called "shader.cache.local"
As the result is calculated it's kept into memory as long as it's needed which means that if you leave the area to go and find new "previously unknown shaders" your current ones will be lost from memory and replaced by new ones which means you'll have the stuttering again. Also, after every crash you lost your compilations before your computer had the chance to write them down so you'll have the same stuttering upon next logon...

Q:So what's the magic trick then to get rid of the stuttering ?

Basically whenever your computer has compiled new shaders you want to immediately save those results to disk so your computer gets them from there next time instead of having to do it all over. That way you'll have no or almost no stuttering since it's much faster reading out the results than recompiling them. There's a button in the game that you can press to instantly save the current results of a shader compilation into the shader.cache.local file (you will actually see it grow in size when you do) and you want to do this RIGHT AFTER YOU FORCED/EXPERIENCED SOME STUTTERING because of new shaders being compiled.

Q:so where's that magic button ?

When you are in game, first open the debugging menu:

ctrl + ù for french keyboards
ctrl + \ for UK keyboards.
strg + ö for german keyboards.

Then press "dump shaders" because that is the magic button to save the results.

Q:What's the best way to test or use it ? You do it like this:

1. Upon feeling horrible graphics stuttering, stop running and start looking around 360°, move a bit back and forth and explore the very smalll area around your feet a bit until all stuttering stops and everything is fluent (this is when the computer has finished compiling the shaders of that area and has the results freshly in memory)
2. open the debug menu and press "dump shaders" to save the results to the file on your harddrive. You're safe now for next time you come across this small area
3. keep on repeating this everytime you experience stuttering in new area's
4. Check the size of your cache file before and after pressing the dump shaders button. If there's compilation data generated, it will grow. It can't hurt pressing it often.


Q:hey I tried it and it's indeed 5-10 times faster but when I restart AOC, it's not immediately ultrafluent. There still is some kind of mini-stuttering for like 1 sec or less everytime I first visit a previously saved area after starting the game. Is this normal ?

Yes this is normal, in fact this is as good as it gets. The client no longer needs to do all calculations but gets them from the precompiled results in your shader.cache.local file instead which is waaaay faster. Still it has to get them so it's normal to generate a small load, but nothing like what you experienced before so be happy and enjoy


Q:why doesn't Funcom provide us with a shader.cache.local file that contains ALL the shaders in-game so everything's smooth from the start ?

That is in fact their plan but it's not that easy: different cards and chipsets compile to different results so it's hard to make 1 file that has everything compiled for ALL videocards in the world. However, Funcom does plan to include shader.cache.local files with precompiled shaders for most known cards at around releasetime probably. In the meantime help yourself and make your own so you can play without stuttering !

Note: remember to backup that cache file regularly. If you reinstall the game or if a patch destroys it, you will want to copy your backed up version back to your gamedir to avoid going through all stuttering again

Note: this guide is the direct result of the information gotten from game dev "Vinterstum" in another thread on this forum. We were searching on the right track but it was he who took the pain of coming down to explain us the cause and eventually inform us of the "dump shaders" button. Special thanks to him because without his replies we we're still stuttering as hell every time we enter the thirsty dogg inn and many other indoor area's !

the original thread that lead to this solution can be found here:

http://forums-beta.ageofconan.com/sh...t=22254&page=7

Note: I noticed that before the april 19 build, there was only a file named "shader.cache" that never grew in size no matter what I did. Starting with the april 19 build another file named "shader.cache.local" has been added and that one seems to work correctly by growing in size upon being written to. So before april 19 I guess this fix simply wasn't possible...

Note: if you change your video settings you may change which shaders are needed. You will then not be able to use the compilation results from before and thus experience stuttering again. Therefore, decided and set your settings for once and for all, then start using "dump shaders" to make it smoother and don't touch your graphical settings anymore. If you want a good reference baseline for smooth play, try this: go stand straight in front of Royo in tortage (nose to nose), wait for your fps to stabilise and make sure it's at least 30 or more. If it's not, lower your graph settings until it is 30-50 fps according to what you find acceptable in terms of quality versus performance. Once you have decided, stop touching your graphical settings and start using "dump shaders" to remove future stuttering in any area where you have just experienced stuttering

UPDATE 30 april: I just noticed upon retesting that the current gameclient AUTOSAVES any newly compiled shaders to the cache file REGULARLY DURING GAMEPLAY. Yay, no more pressing the "dump shaders" button is needed from now on !! This is a good time to delete your cache.shaders.local file and let the game build up a clean one (to get rid of any junk in there that has been changed in the last patches)

Yes and no.


2^32 = 4,294,967,296 = 4 GB, yes, each and every bit of ram is addressable independently (not really).  Which means you cannot address more than 4 GB of ram without a 64 bit OS.  Windows XP only actually has access to 3.5 GB of ram as the last 512 MB is used for I/O devices, also you can only really access 3GB of ram for your programs because another 512 mb is used by the OS to do OS things.

You are 'fully utilizing' your memory, it's just that you do not get to decide how it's used.

I didn't know until recently.  I've had a sub to FP for ages and was PAYING for it.  People can still get keys, though.  They seem to be never ending.  I might give it a few days. 

Also, nipples sticking through your clothing is simply awesome.

What what what?  How do I do that? lol   :ye_gods:

If you ever joined the technical beta for stress tests, PvP weekends or whatever you'll be getting into the unrestricted closed beta today or tomorrow. Basically this is everybody who applied.

Also the NDA has been relaxed for closed beta testers, but only up to level 13. Not sure how effective that limitation is going to be.

My short review: AoC is unpolished as hell but the basic gameplay is in solid diku territory and quite fun. The client crashes all the time, your character falls through bridges, there are backend server lag issues, and it requires a hefty sunny-D type computer to play. Given past discussion in this thread and elsewhere I doubt anyone is surprised by this.

I predict massive traffic as people sell real/fake compleated shader files on ebay

Because after getting suckers to subscribe to FP for the open beta, it turns out lv. 13 is the max level they're allowed to get to.

Yes I understand the rationale but I just don't anticipate it being all that successful. Either you have a NDA or you don't; relying upon joe public to self-censor is unlikely to be productive.

I actually never fell through a bridge, and I've only crashed 3-4 times in a few weeks of play.  I've never had any lag issues, my latency has always been great.  But the texture loading etc is brutal.

I only crashed a few times, but I got Lost Connection a lot. As to the falling through bridges, the game is very very unpolished. There are hundreds of little glitches everywhere you look and I only got to level 12 or so, in the newbie area, which according to other testers is by far the most polished area of the game.

It's that Game Invasion thingy.  http://gameinvasion.comcast.net/gameinvasion/setup/

Thanks Signe.. now if it will only work.

Some of that article Draegan makes me scared. Given funcoms history, makes me really scared. But, i see the edits made to each section and it makes it seem like they are on top of it, even if it wont be 100%.

I have really tried to keep my expectations somewhat in check about this game, mostly because i wanted it to be something that took me and friends away from Wow... It may in the end turn out, this wont be the case. But i do hear the combat is really FUN, so perhaps.. Fun it seems is sometimes harder to achieve then performance, lol. Some of that does read thats it just over the top demanding, not because of the techniques they are using, but simply because of the programs and potential sloppiness. Then again, this also reminds me the time before eq2.

Time will tell, and that time is getting closer all the time.



"surprising the fans" was not my words, that was from the Devs...perhaps i should have made it green.  :-P

So far this beta event is completely useless.  My computer is frozen in time.

Well, my computer woke up but and the game runs okay EXCEPT loading is incredibly slow.  I don't think I'll bother.

Are you getting to the point where you click on a download server, then get a pop up window that just has a part of the beta page in it?

Cause that's as far as im getting in both IE and Firefox.  Can't imagine why people dont like this fileplanet thing...  :oh_i_see:

I got blank screens on the cinematic. I escaped to character creation, then got more blank screens.

8800GTS/320, Dual Core 6750, P35 chipset motherboard, 4gb ram - with boot flag to allocate extra memory, latest drivers, fresh install less than a month ago. I don't want to be too arrogant about my system, but there's just no excuse for it not to work.

Just FYI (with experience only on the first city and areas) I get a good constant 40fps on my laptop with a 2.1Ghz Core 2 Duo (T8100), 512mb 8600M GT, 3gb DDR2 and a 5400 RPM hard drive. 

Loading is a bit slow (but I wouldn't be surprised if that was mostly cause of my hd speed) but other then that it works pretty well.  This is on Medium and it still looks pretty good imo.  I'm happy so far.

Take from that what you will. 

*edit* if you get a blank screen (known bug) you have to exit, run simpleconfig.exe and lower the resolution.  Then raise it up again once in game.

*edit2* and btw, turning bloom off == very big increase in fps.

To get Fileplanet to work I find I need to use IE, and turn off any kind of protection I have on ZoneAlarm. Even stuff like web bugs and private headers, which most websites function fine without, seem essential to making Fileplanet work. They do seem to have a lock on MMOG betas, so I just turn it all off for while. Once the download starts, I turn it all back on.

I had the blank screen at first, too.  I didn't do anything except exit and log back in once and it never happened again.

Someone said the NDA dropped right?

CPU:  Dual Core E6600
RAM:  2gb
GPU: Geforce8800 640mb
HD:  7200rpm

Runs awesome on my machine. It helps that I'm a nut for defragging. There's a LOT to load. Load times are a bit long due to the 7200rpm thing, but no worse than EQ1 ever was.

I do get the audio stuttering in the opening cinematic. Don't really care.

In fact, I'm wildly ambivalent (heh) about the whole thing. Graphically awesome game. Combat is either me melting faces or dying and not really knowing why. It's all stats but the required info is not conveyed in the WoW-way.

It's not AO by any stretch, though some people will think so because their computers aren't the perfect configuration for the game.

Well I got my code and stuff, but I'll be downloading for like 48 hours it seems.  After that, i guess the real fun begins.   :ye_gods:

Runs okay on my crappier than Darniaq's machine.  WAY crappier.  Although I do have 2 GB RAM.  Really cheap RAM.  It's loading better now, too.  I still haven't found my way out of the tutorial.  NDA is dropped only for level 13 and under, I think, which is stupid.  Yay for Evildrider.  Everyone with Comcast should subscribe to Fileplanet and yell HA! for getting all their downloads and subscriber betas and demos and not paying for them.  HA!  My fingers  hurt.

I feel disjointed tonight.

Also, debuggery.  Dammit.

Hey, good to know that AoC is progressive and not simply catering to heterosexual fantasies.

I just said fuck it and installed FP's download manager ages ago.  This was after I tried straight downloads on two demos, and both came up as "corrupted, please download again." after very long DL times. I haven't had that problem with the DL manager.  Also, it's letting me get the AoC client in 11H not the 48 hours poor ED is going through.

Something for the PvP fans - you lose at least three times more pvp xp on a pvp death than you gain from a pvp kill. So you need to have a greater than 3:1 K:D ratio (!!!) to progress.


 :awesome_for_real:

I just installed the D/L manager as well. But the corrupted archives are just so weird ass version of zip. I found some message on a board that pointed me at a client that worked, but lost it during some or another reinstall and never did find it again.

I'd just like to say I've been in the Technical beta for at least 2 months and haven't yet played a moment of it because the stress tests were held only one day a week for 3 hours when I need to be asleep (due to time differences).

Also, it's been a long, long time since I've seen a downloading system as ugly as the one I saw for AoC. Download a setup file, then 10 .dat files for a total of over 14 GB? THEN patch another couple of gigs? I know I'm a bit backwards here in Australia (my monthly plan is 20GB download limit) but damn that was harsh.

In all reality, AoC has warning sirens going off everywhere to me.

Remember AO's ranking system? Was fucking TOUGH to get a good title. Worse than 3 to 1...IIRC. They must be sitting around saying "Damn, these guys got it easy!!!"

That was just for a title, though. There was something sweet about it though...when you saw a high rank dude you were like....cool There is a real deal ganker.

There seems to be a lot of horror stories about mid range systems getting crappy FPS again along with people with 5 year old computers saying the game runs fine. Seems the GF 8 cards aren't running the game too well from most of the comments I've seen, and they say its due to some recent patch that has some driver issues.

How are you guys doing on the performance side?

Performance:
I'm right between the minimum and recommended specs. Running it in Full Screen mode on Low Video settings

FPS: 25-40 in most outdoor areas, with frequent slow downs to single digits as I get into new areas or have multiple players around me. In Tortage ill grind to a halt frequently and lock up frequently, requiring a hard restart.

Loading/Zoning: This is where the pure hell starts. Loading screens can take anywhere from 5 seconds (very rare) to 5+ minutes (the usual). The first time I zone into a new area my machine usually freezes up, requiring a hard restart. As there is frequent zoning to get anywhere in the game, I spent more time looking at the loading screen than actually playing last night and this morning (once I got to Tortage). So for now I am playing a bunch of classes to level 5 and stopping outside Tortage till I can upgrade my system.

Today I am going to buy and install and additional 2 gigs of RAM and and additional 80GB HD, as well as do a fresh install of WinXP. Hopefully this will help, and I can kinda justify it as it will help with all my gaming and not just AoC heh.

This is not a crappy system, and is basically only 18 months old. Designing a game for a small percentage of high end systems is a dumb business plan IMHO. My guess is that someone with the Minimum Specs listed will not be able to play the game at all.

My machine:
AMD 4200+ Dual Core
2 GB RAM
WinXP Pro
Geforce 7900 GT 256MB
80GB 7200 HD
ASUS M2N SLI Deluxe

Once all the textures and shaders are cached it runs fine on my computer, but the long pauses when the shaders are cacheing are unbearable.  At first I thought my computer had frozen.  This is an absolute game breaker for me and I am really perplexed why this is even happening with the game so close to release.  I am seriously considering cancelling my pre order.

So far I have only played the starting area (which I assume is just you and the AI, as I haven't seen another player).  I can just imagine what it will be like in the real world when you are constantly loading unique character data as the general population comes  into view.

My specs:

AMD 3800 Dual Core
Nvidia 7600 GT
2 gigs of ram.


If these problems aren't  fixed asap, this game is going to end up alongside Vanguard on the Sony All Access pass.  :ye_gods:
which is a shame considering that Conan is my all-time favourite fantasy franchise.

Linky (http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=79173)

I'm running

Core2 Duo E6700 (2.66ghz)
4 Gigs Ram (800mhz)
GF 8800 GT (512mb)

So far people running those specs seem to be doing ok, but I worry about the guys complaining about the GF8 cards having issues.

From reading their boards it looks like there are some driver issues with certain of the nvidia drivers for the 8k series. Looks like there are work arounds for most of it but here is hoping they can nail it down a bit better before release. A lot of the fixes seem pretty simple such as toggling full screen off then loading into the game and turning full screen back on and goofy stuff like that.

 :grin: Oh ho ho ho.  Realllly?

Maybe 6 years ago you could get away with something like that.  Now?

I'm seeing around various places that this client, yet again, is olcer then even the Stress test client. I haven't seen a developer say it, but a few MODS over at the AOC boards have said it.

I believe this open beta version is known to be "501". Anyone in the closed beta able to confirm?

Frankly, i'm not sure i believe it.

Fuck off, Gaute. You are less than a month from release, and letting many thousands of people hammer on the game. Do you think it's going to get BETTER when people are paying and there are tons of people around to cause stalls?

The calls of "THIS IS BETA, PEOPLE!" at this stage of the game is the sign of impending fail, possibly of epic proportions.

It's still beta.

At launch though, yea.  :awesome_for_real:

Hey, you can fix a LOT in 18 days.  :grin:

Just remember, when you're logging in for your 'early start' becuause you preordered x copies of the limited collector's edition that it's technicaly NOT released yet.  It's post-beta, but not released.  :oh_i_see:

Nope, sorry. You can call it beta, and say it's for testing, but with less than a month to release, that just doesn't cut it. These problems will not go away in that time period, and will likely be many months in the fixing. Memory leaks? Graphic stalls? Come on, that's BUSH LEAGUE. If it's because the graphics engine is so uber that they are inventing new things that break, then they need to delay release. You'd have thought Anarchy Online would have told them that.

You still can. Thanks for playing!

Also, I did not experience stalling when I uhmm "played." This was back on my fucked up E6600. There's no way it stalls on my Q9450. Not a chance.

That is every thread of the entire beta forum for the last 3 to 4 months. It's pathetic on a grand scale.

They simply ran out of money to do the graphic.

And they aren't Turbine (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/turbine-secures-40-million-in-funding) whose only skill is to convince idiots to dump money on them failure after failure.

That's fine and all, but how well did targetting the high end user work for Brad McQuaid?

This is way too late in the game for Funcom to be dealing with problems like this  and  their use of the same tired old spin we've heard over the years makes me chuckle.

You know, we're fond of saying when pontificating about games that we're in a post-WOW world. But we are. Last night, I got the black screen. I closed the client and played WOW. This morning I got Conan running based on replies here and played for a little while. It was stuttery and laggy (much like AO) and didn't look very polished or well explained. I'm planning to raid tonight in EQ2 and work on my epic tomorrow. My WOW sub is run out as of next week and I'm thinking of switching my alt game to COX.

Conan? I just can't be bothered. It's not done. My 20 minute estimate is it should be ready for release in July or August at the earliest. There's no way I would have reacted like this five years ago. I'd have wanted to see the new shiny. I played Horizons for weeks. I even paid for Shadowbane. I'd certainly have played this beta for free. Now? I just can't muster much enthusiasm.

On the game, the giant blood spatters are juvenile. They're 95% Monty Python and 5% RE Howard. I found the women's outfits juvenile as well, though it didn't make me break out launching at its silliness like the gore did.

Extremely well. Everquest was top dog for years.

To add to the problems, no one has even touched the DX10 version of the client. They say they're holding it back for a big surprise. Oh it'll be that I wager, but not in the good sense. Hellgate pulled this exact same scene with their dX10 client and it still runs like ass.

I haven't picked up the AoC beta in quite some time so I wouldn't be qualified to personally speak on the problems. I do , however, work with 3 guys playing the open beta and to a man they say the game has a memory leak the size of Niagara. All 3 of em said this, along with an extreme excess of loading screens, are the top two major issues for them atm.

Turbine published AC2, which I will agree was an abomination of their own original IP, and the only value to come out of it was that the graphic engine they developed for it is now part of DDO and LotRO.

Turbine has successfully published three games that are still running. They're still cranking out free content updates for AC1 and LotRO (I haven't been following DDO at all), so it would seem that they're making enough money to keep paying programmers and artists. "Failure after failure" doesn't describe either AC1 or LotRO.

I haven't played in a couple months myself, but a friend of mine says that the closed beta does have the DX10 client and it simply doesn't work.

There's a fun game behind all those rust and scratches, but it can be tough to find. It's simply a matter of polish.

I'm pretty sure hes talking about Vanguard.  EQ most defiantly wasn't designed for high end systems (I bought the game at release and was able to play it perfect on my moms crappy Compaq Presario.

Well obviously, I was being snide. But you probably started playing EQ a year or two after release; when it first came out it was one of the first games requiring a 3D graphics accelerator.

Beyond the need for the 3d accelerator and the connection issues a launch,  I think the next big firestorm was when Luclin launched  in 2001 with much higher system requirements, a host of technical problems and much wailing and gnashing of teeth within the player population, who due to limited mmo options bent over, grabbed their ankles  and  begrudginly accepted the SOE shaft.

Today there are just too many options out there to even give Funcom the benefit of the doubt this late in the game.

Aha! The perks of Comcast subscriptions. It's funny, but I never know about these things. It must be because I delete Comcast's e-mail without ever reading them.

That was, however, 10 years ago. In the meantime their playerbase grew older, jaded, cranky and discovered more interesting ways to spend their money on. Like hookers.

Oh and WoW happened meantime too but that's another story.

Will this be able to run the game ok?

Intel Core 2 Quad  CPU Q6600
2gigs ram
ATI Radeon HD 2400 pro

Yeah, it worked so well for Hellgate.

If I remember the Luclin thing was a very late decision, only a few weeks or month before release, that it would only support whatever version of DX that windows 98 had, cutting off everyone that was still running Windows 95, which wasn't a particularly low number of people at the time.

One of the big reasons I played AC rather than EQ was that I could play it in on my laptop in software mode without a 3d card. At the time though, EQ had a monopoly on PVE with halflings, elves, dwarves, orcs and all that. UO was gank city and AC was the weird (and imho wonderful) world of Dereth. A lot of people bought their first "voodoo" card in order to play EQ.

To be fair, the only reason the original EQ engine had high-end requirements in any way, shape or form was that it needed a 3d card.
Hell, I ran up through to the Velious launch on a P1 90 with a Voodoo2 and 32 megs of RAM.

e;f,b

Edit2: Luclin was the last hurrah of Verant, and was in retrospect a pretty bleeding obvious signpost for Vanguard Saga of Fail.

Like I was serious?

I won't be preordering, nor buying, nor checking back in later. Part of it is my enjoyment having run out long ago. In a larger sense though, I don't really bother with games I have to apologize for anymore. I'm way the hell beyond "I'm playing because it'll be fun someday". There's too many games out now to waste time on the sucky ones. And that was before I got the Wii even.

Unlike when AO and DAoC and CoX launched, we're in a world where the fallback game isn't just the one we're most heavily invested in because that's where our friends are at. We don't need to put up with crappy code, breaking graphics and stupid CSR just because it's the only game in town. There's actual actual honest-to-goodness quality playing experiences out there, like WoW, like GW. These days the game has to have a WoW level of polish and be unique enough to be worth drawing attention away for the vast majority of players who have no reason to leave. Not to mention the just-as-quality competition in other genres.

And the game can't be alienating most of the genre right away by requiring a computer only people in completely different genres bother having. That's not a market. You're not going to grab the Bioshock player with AoC, because the latter is still the same-ol type of MMO that didn't attract them when WoW did it right.

I love all the people trying to rationalize their doom predictions with "OMG look how many choices people have today!"  AOC will be a moderate success and quite profitable even with bugs and high requirements. 

If you don't like the game or you don't like the need for an upgraded machine go back to whatever game you were playing and stop making yourself look like an idiot in regards to the doom predictions.  It doesn't matter how many choices there are, people are still playing horizons, EQ1, Fury, SWG, UO, EQ2 (even though there were a lot of performance and "oh no I need to upgrade" complaints then about it), LOTRO (everyone making their doom predictions of how bland the game is) etc...  and all of those are profitable (some more than others) and have no end in sight.

You can leave the game and really no one will care or notice. 

For the most part, except for balance and some bugs I have heard great things from people this past few days and the last pvp weekend event.  From my experience so far the pve has been much more interesting and fun then it has been for most MMOs.

The 'It doesn't suck it is just not as good" gambit.  Haven't seen that in a while.

It's not so much a doom prediction when you start to think about the budget this game required. Not only for the high-end graphics, but for the Conan license on top of that. The game needs users, probably as many of those as it can get. Sure, it'll probably limp along at 100k or less, but it will take a while to make back its development budget because of the bad technical reputation it will get on release.

It may not be AO level of fail, but it will be some level of fail.

In fact it doesn't even describe DDO, imo. DDO is a good game. It just isn't at all the kind of game people expected it to be, and when people go into it expecting it to be like WoW, they get disappointed. I popped back into DDO recently after about 18 months gone, and they're still adding content. Monks are going in soon, and they're looking at updating the game for 4th edtion D&D too. You still can't really solo very well (though they've taken some small steps in that direction) but then, who the heck solos in D&D?

I can claim wow failed on some level cause it hasn't hit 12 million. 

You would, of course, be wrong, but you could certainly claim that.

Do you really think that the budget for AOC is low enough that Vanguard level subs won't be a failure? Or do you really believe that these kind of technical fuckups won't impact subs?

Except for, ya know, the businesses that make them.

Nobody's doomcasting AoC. We den'd the VG thread last year. In fact, nobody's really saying anything that hasn't been said about AoC for the last three years. It was never a bad idea. And it's a pretty interesting game (even if it's not for me). It's just that some of the major selling points that mattered three years ago no longer do. The big expensive bet that Funcom made was largely based on that. And you can be damned sure that bet was made on expectations, not some vague hope 1,000 people stick around 5 years after launch. This isn't Fury.

All people are doing nowadays is adding that to the actual state of the game that will launch.

People will play it. Some will quit. Others will watch. But if we stuck with just that Zen assumption about this shit, there'd be no reason for forums :-)

Of course they will, and we all know that first impressions are critical. Hell, I'm sure funcom knows that too, they just don't have any choice.

I'm anticipating a solid 150-200k launch, dropping to 100-150k after 30 days. If all goes well subscriptions will then grow to 300k+ as the title is polished up through the fall, and finally "relaunched" at xmas 08 with a major content patch and refreshed PC and new X360 SKUs. But that's realistically a best case scenario.

They are still heavily invested in DDO as well.  It has had something like 18 updates since launch 2 years ago, with a very big one coming at the end of May. 

Saying Turbine is a failure of a company is a huge laugh.  Considering they are the biggest development house in the US now.  (That is according to their own words).

I have the same processor
4 gigs for Ram
and an 8800gts 512mb

And I seemed to be rolling along ok.  I only did enough of the tutorial to get to Tortega.
Although, so far not too impressed.

There's a huuuuuuuuuge difference between a ATI 2400 and a NV 8800GTS. Huuuuuuuuuuuge.

Haha ya.   :awesome_for_real:

I guess thats bad news for me lol.

You really only have to update your vid card, which at least is cheaper now that the new 9800's have come out.  There are some good deals right now if you look around. 

My friend got a 8800GT 256MB for $125 from newegg last week. This shit is cheap as chips.

4realz?!

Quick question for y'all:

Would two 8800GTs with 256mb in SLI run significantly faster than one 8800GTS with 640mb?

I'd go for the one card personally.  SLI is really for those FPS fanatics out there, you don't need that for MMO's or hell for most gameplay.

Sure. But you don't need SLI unless you've got a 30" monitor at 2560x1600 (or you're playing Crysis). A single 8800GTS 512MB or 8800GT 512MB will handle 1900x1200 (most 22" and 24" monitors) just fine. The 8800GT or GTS 256MB should work OK at 1900x1200 too but will require some compromises on graphics features. I probably wouldn't go for the 9600GT unless you're running 1600x1200 (most 20" monitors).

To put it bluntly, unless you're at 2560x1600 don't buy SLI. It's a waste of money, requires a huge power supply, generates a ton of heat, and just unnecessary.

Ah sweet, good to know. I'm at 21" with no intentions of going bigger anytime soon anyway.

I have a 22" CRT playing at 1600x1200 and with that 8800GTS I really have no problems.  Its good stuff.

No, dumping money into the company that released AO is clearly a better bet than into a company that has been running three successful (two somewhat niche, one less so) games for years and years. In Turbine's track record, AC2 was an anomaly. Atleast their shit works.

Edit;
Had already been mentioned by Hutch I noticed, but I'm leaving it. :-)

It seems the AoC registration system will allow me to log in with my ancient AO trial subscription, and allows me to add AoC to that account, but after I actually enter the beta code, it insists I can't use my user name, because it's already taken.

 :ye_gods:  If only a porn company did the billing, the circle of life would be complete. 

Man, I just noticed this gem... I can't remember ever getting over 2:1 K:D in any sort of FPS... and those were my finest moments. I know I'm a scrub and need to l2p, but geez, are they TRYING to dissuade people (especially in groups smaller than 10, otherwise you'll just get rolled by roving_honor_farm_team and lose all your pvp xp) from pvping altogether? :P

Not to mention the  :awesome_for_real: factor of playing a healing or tank class in a pug battleground. So you support your team, get focus fired and die? Tough stuff, enjoy your xp loss while random_hunter_or_rogue_891 rakes in the kills! And that's above the normal  :ye_gods: you get from playing in a pug battleground, hoping that the enemy team has more idjits than yours...


-- Z.

No that's not true. At all. At 1920 x 1200 SLI can make a *huge* difference (like close to 2x FPS) depending on the game and settings. It can even make a substantial difference at 1600 x 1200 and lower resolutions, and depending on the game and settings.

What's the qualifications for the game? Is it mostly genre-wide (like, it matters more in FPS than MMORPG?) Or is it all about the developer and the engine?

Depends on the title, but generally speaking you don't need SLI to play most games at 1900x1200.

Same here.  So much for my hopes that The Secret World would be worth a damn.

I always make new account names.. I'm freakish like that.

The tutorial was much fun. I've got some WoW play to do right now, but the game isn't punishing my ancient 7300LE too badly.. yet.  Load times are a nightmare, though... I didn't miss these and recall how fucking lame they were in EQ1 now.

I made a new account name and everything went spledifiously. 

None of Turbine's games have been abject failures, but pump 40 million in venture into the company?

Not in AoC at least, apparently SLI does dick all in terms of extra performance with it.

Second hand knowledge though, ymmv etc.

(http://static.greatgamesexperiment.com/userimages/0/07adb425c3fe9f5bc4442c6bf554b17c_sq.gif)

It really depends how they calculate the kills. E.g. LotRO PvM uses system where each kill made by anyone from your group counts for you as well. This allows the healers to keep up with the damage dealers in terms of PvP xp gains, and results in typically high kill : death ratio for anyone but most suicidal cannon fodder people.

If AoC is similar in this regard, the 3:1 ratio would be fairly trivial ... depending on average group size, of course.

Just wondering... Is that better or worse than a 7300gt? How much vram do you have btw? And what res do you play in?

Worse, if I understand the geForce series and this chart (http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_7300.html)right. It's supposed to have 512mb of vram but I can't confirm that in the control panel.  I've often thought it had less, as it doesn't perform near as well as I think it should.

As for Conan, knowing my card was a piece of shit I turned it down to low settings and really low res.  My screen's native res is 1680 x 1050 but I bumped it down to 1280X or 1040X in Conan.

Sheesh. I thought it was a decent enough card.

Fucking high ass reqs. What a stupid thing to do for an mmo. Especially this one.

That's what folks have been saying for the last 2 pages.  :drill:

I agree. The 7300LE came with my machine 18 months ago, when I bought it.  I understand that's "ancient" for the hardware warriors but I wasn't dumping $400ish on an 8-series back then when they were 'new.'  Particularly when the most taxing game I was playing at the time was WoW.

And now for something completely different: excerpt from new interview about PvP details:

( http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/age-of-conan-hyborian-adventures/870785p1.html )

:awesome_for_real:

Fuck all the naysayers. It was a fun damn game. As a matter of fact, most of the systems in LotRO are direct rips from AC2. Even the experience gain for just killing mobs is the same. And I would call LotRO a success thus far. It's all about the IP and the marketing. AC1 players didn't want a different game. They wanted a graphics update. Hell, it's arguable whether they even wanted that. Everyone else couldn't get into the world of Dereth. Because, you know, anything that strays too far from "normal" fantasy fare is HARD to sell. I think I had some other points, but I am tired and rambling. So yeah, AC2 was awesome. There's at least one other person here who agrees with me.  :grin:

But to get back on-topic, gonna test a Lenovo Thinkpad with an ATi card to see what happens. Just finished downloading the 12 gig monster and am installing. Watching as it chews up an expanded 12 GB+.  :ye_gods: We shall see if I can lop some heads off by tomorrow afternoon. Virtually, that is.

You may have found AC2 fun but "abject failure" is a pretty good description. Not popular, not well-reviewed, plagued by technical problems. The fucking chat didn't even work. Chat!

I think that was the lone huge technical problem really. And once Microsoft gave it all over to Turbine, the problem was fixed right quick. Not that there weren't other problems, but none that were necessarily unique to MMOGs. Hell, even AO still managed to stay running after the technical problems it had early on. Just sayin'.

Rubber band lag from hell.
Giant fucking dragons getting stuck on a few pixels.
Quests that could be completed by lowbies not even on the quest and grant them 10-20+ levels in one shot. 
Toons entirely leveled by perching retarded AI. 

Some of the great Turbine staple bugs that AC2 manged to refine.  And yes, that doesn't touch upon the standard MMO gaffes that they managed to compound everything else with.  Broken chat was just icing on the turd sannich.  I won't even touch upon the aggravation that was their account management.

Quit playing white knight for a game that wasn't worth the media it was printed on.

Dude, they fixed perching in AC2, don't you remember the "We'll just give EVERYTHING a ranged attack, the SAME ranged attack!   :awesome_for_real:" fix?

An MMO without working chat is not excusable, period.

Also the game *design* sucked ass. No NPCs, no towns and no buildings to enter. Yeah. That screams "the first second-generation MMORPG" to me.

Add to all of that the actual lack of tradeable currency and the less than one dimensional combat.

The lack of towns didn't bother me at first, but mostly due to the theory. Servers were supposed to "discover" a decimated world. The only thing wrong with it was, ya know, the actual execution of the entire game.

The music system was fun though. LoTRO is AC2_2.0.

I remember reading about how players would eventually repopulate and build towns and such but I had two big problems with that:

1. The entire world felt like a graveyard with no hubs of activity.

2. I suspected the "rebuilding the world" aspect was just some tacked-on backstory to cover for the fact that they wanted to push the game out quickly with minimal features. "We created a shitty incomplete game" doesn't sound as good as "we left out towns and NPCs on purpose as part of our master plan!"

On the subject of Conan...other than bitching about specs and performance does anyone have anything to say? (Is there an NDA, sorry it's a bit unclear) Can you play as a topless she-devil?

Yes you can. Topless and nippleless as of now.
Other than that, I'd say it's a HUUUUUUUGE mixed bag. I would like to do a writeup but, maybe not.

I read this as "We have PvP death penalties, but they suck so much we won't put them in until release.

You've got nipples, they're just flesh-coloroed. It's really disturbing.

Ah. So they are patching in just the colour at release, not the shape. Cool.

Okay but that's only for the PvP servers right?  There had better not be any tangible penalty for PvP deaths on the PvE servers...

There should not be any penalities for PvP deaths at all. It's just stupid to add penalty for failure in MMORPG events where players have the least amount of control.

My characters have no nipples.  None.  Not even flesh coloured ones.  I think people are trying too hard to see them.  Nipple freaks.

If people really want to see nipples, they know about this internet thing, right?

I don't want to see nipples.  I just don't want to see people running around who have boobies and no nipples.  It's like I'm stuck in a big nasty Barbie's Nightmare House.

Discounting performance issues like lag and crashes it seems like a very fun game.  I love the combat mechanics, at least the melee combat is much better than the standard auto attack + special moves thats dominated the market so far.

I have been waiting for the game to load for about 5 minutes on this laptop. Starting the beach intro now. We shall see how it goes... Looks interesting. Music is pretty decent.

Nah, they're talking about a few NPCs that "spawned incorrectly" -


(http://img393.imageshack.us/img393/130/boobiesyl8.th.jpg) (http://img393.imageshack.us/my.php?image=boobiesyl8.jpg)

That's sorta an interesting gaming concept. Malibu Barbie's Psychotic Break Weekend. Just port the AoC combat engine over, reskin the whole game to look like Santa Monica or Newport Beach and have at it. Sorta a GTA for girls.

Loading times are just ridiculous.

They had nipples on the screenshot over at fohguild. Maybe it's from the sikrit game build:

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/33391-aoc-general-information-109.html#post1056661

(nsfw, obviously. not safe if bird-like faces scare you, either)

I read it similiar. But i mainly marvel at the concept of dropping completely untested bomb of death penalty mechanics on your live playerbase (because you're afraid people might deem them too harsh if actually tested)

This game is too hardcore for me.  Death penalty alone scares me.  Baaaaah!

The NDA has been lifted for the Open Beta.

I'll give you a few impressions based on my first toon, a Conqueror (dps-warrior class), typed while I wait at a few loading screens :uhrr::

1. Many of the quests involve cut scenes with multiple choice answers/responses that lead the npc to different quests and stories. I kinda like it. The European accents are a good touch.

2. The game is pretty risque. Lots of whores, flirting with barmaids, saving the wenches at The Bearded Clam cathouse. Definitely PG-13

3. The combat is cool when it flows smoothly. It may get tedious/repetitive later on but right now I'm enjoying trying to coordinate which Combo to start based on the targets current defenses, and the need to change up my attacking direction mid fight.

4. There are plenty of quests available in Tortage for 1-13. Although I ended up grinding from 7-9. I had finished all the green/yellow quests I could find and the orange/red ones were too tough. I think I should have upgraded my armor earlier. You can upgrade at 5 & 10 and I ended up using mostly all the level 1 stuff all the way to 10 (my WoW inspired miserliness..who buys from vendors anyway?) This was with a Conqueror...perhaps the other classes don't have as hard a time with higher level mobs. Next time ill spend my money sooner...nothing to save it for.

5. There are quests called Destiny(?) quests which take place at Night. You enter Night by talking to an npc. At Night the island is turned into an instance for you only, and you complete your Destiny questline. The city is asleep and the vendors are gone.

6. One annoying aspect is you have to press a key to come out of combat. Otherwise you run around with your weapons brandished and cannot use certain out of combat skills. Its slightly annoying.

7. Every now and then you'll go crazy and chop someones head off or run them through with your  sword then kick them off with you foot. Pretty cool when it happens and apparently its not totally random.

8. Playing in the Night instance is smooth and fluid, makes me see the potential of the game if running well.

9. It definitely captures the Conan feel...desperate, bloody, cutthroat, wenches, etc etc. Theres no elves here, the majority of the facial models are downright ugly.

No..I'm talking about my personal avatar on my death/shadow/dark-whatever character.   I was wondering if the shadow on my boob was part of the shirt I had on or the model since I have a constant "headlights" thing going.  Take off the shirt, there's a nipple all flesh-colored and odd looking, unlike the FOH screen where there's a rosy pink areola on the breast, but no nips.  I'll get a pic in a bit and post it.

Some of my observations:

The melee combat is pretty fun, not CoX fun, but definitely beats all other MMOs out there currently. Too bad the same can't be said about caster classes. They're the exact same as in every other game. No point in playing them really. Luckily there's a melee healer (Bear Shaman) and a melee mage (Herald of Xotli) so you can get into melee combat with every archetype.

The graphics and animations are really nice if you like the realistic approach they're trying to achieve. Fatalities are cool, the blood splatter on the screen not so much (reminds me of Mortal Kombat). One thing about the graphics worries me a bit though. Given the amount of detail they need to put in, it must take huge amount of work to add new content to the game. I wonder how often new content updates will be added and how many zones there will be at launch.

The game has other problems as well: the client performance is crap because of the resource streaming from disk (they say its mainly the compilation of shaders). I don't understand why they're having this problem now. This kind of stuff should've been spotted and fixed months and months ago. Once they fix that, the game runs pretty well on a 8800 GTS 512 (40+ FPS @ 1680x1050 with everything maxed). There's some missing textures, clipping issues, getting stuck, falling through the world etc. stuff as well. It's also heavily instanced. Loading screens all the time. Even cities (and thus probably all zones) are instanced ("Where's my friend? He should be standing next to me? Oh, different instance...").

In my opinion they should spend another 6-12 months in development but I guess they've ran out of money.

This game is only half baked.  They're releasing it too early.  It's packed full of problems stemming from graphic issues to broken quests to stability.  It'll be months before they iron everything out.  They blame nearly everything on "old client" and "debugger" but they're just spinning.  They should have paid more attention to the size of this thing.  That's going to be a big issues, that and the soul draining requirements.  Even having said all that, I like it.  Lots and lots.  And lots.  It's clever and fun even in open beta and I haven't even seen crafting.  Architect.  Yum.    I'm hoping for a huge patch on release and several gigantic updates in short order so I can actually play with decent settings. 

If you land the deathblow on someone with a combo/special attack (right as their health is about empty), you'll get that cool animation.  Also, if you have the blood splatter option turned on, you'll have it splattered on your screen.

Good stuff.

Well, interesting. My Age of Conan doesn't have nipples. It's not about NPC, my character doesn't have it.
Maybe nipples are Collector Edition stuff.

Wheres the Blood Splatter command? I haven't been able to find it in the f10 menus.

The gore toggle, nudity toggle, and nipples aren't in the open beta.  They were in the closed beta, I think.  I hope they make it to release or people will yell... about the nipples, anyway.  I don't know if they plan to put in a profanity filter toggle... people are bickering about that in the official forum.  It's a bajillion pages long but I can't be arsed to read past the first page.

PS  I'm not sure I enjoy beheading people.  It doesn't fill me with the joy I thought it would.  Maybe I just haven't found the right person.

No CE here, just the open beta client from File Planet.  Odd.

Why does it not surprise me that Merusk sees nipples everywhere? 

It's not named that directly.  Sorry about that... :oops:

I think it's called Blood density?  I'm reinstalling now, and will find out.

Give me a bit and I'll find the setting you need to turn up to get it.

Something unexpected has happened over the last few hours.

The game has gotten much smoother. The load times are down dramatically and crashes have become much less common.

This morning I reinstalled the game on a 250gb hard drive with nothing else on it.

Immediately afterwards, the game was nasty performance wise but after a while it improved dramatically. It seems to be that the first time you enter a new area, or zone into somewhere, your hit the long load times and the lag / disconnects / stuttering.

But since I have been covering the same ground all day, it runs very smooth in all the areas I'm running around in (Tortage, Jungle, White Sand Isle, Aquilonian Ruins).

I'm starting to really enjoy it and I find myself looking forward to launch and the world outside the starter area, except for the fact that those new areas will probably be laggy & buggy the first few times I enter them too heh.

I noticed that too, at first it was unplayable now its down to tolerable.

Some games, like BF2, take forever to load the first time as it creates the shader files and stores them on disk, imaybe they are doing the same thing.

I attribute this to compiling a local cache file for the zone the first time you're there.  All the old games that used to do zoning did this, iirc.

Secret miracle client build revealed!  :awesome_for_real:

Well you gotta run the patcher manually to update the game and i havent done that since i installed so its not that.

Whatever they did seems to have converted the client from whatever folks were playing during the PvP weekend to the client I've been playing on for a month or so (admittedly very on-and-off). There's also that caching thing described earlier to consider, but I'm inclined to actually believe in the "magic client to fix all problems" here because it was such a huge difference between what I was playing and what folks were reporting from that weekend.

Actually, it really was part of their brilliant master plan, as well as being a cover for the fact they didn't want to invest the resources to provide NPCs.  One of the leading game design theories back then was that NPCs were actually bad for immersion and whatnot.  Players supposedly would provide a much more realistic and immersive society than NPCs.  Especially given the crude vending-machines or fixed-location menu-based response tree of NPC "AI" at the time (think EQ1).  The number of ways this particular game theory is utter horseshit is almost infinite, but just for giggles allow me to point out a few of the electric pink elephants crowding that particular room.

Exhibit A:   SWG was also designed with this theory in mind, and started with only a few NPCs in the world which were then actually supposed to be removed from the world once the player population grew sufficiently to provide the adequate backdrop of a bustling living city.  Heh, they actually ended up adding a few more NPCs here and there during beta just to make the cities seem a little less like the ghost towns they were, again with the intent to remove them later.  Remember the crowds and bustling activity going on in the backgrounds of (most) city scenes in the movies?  Remember the tumbleweeds and shutters-banging-in-the-wind feeling of 99% of the city spaces 99% of the time in the game?  Which made a more realistic and immersive backdrop for playing out stories of a few exceptional people rising up from the masses to do extraordinary things?

Exhibit B:  CoH took the opposite approach and filled its city spaces with normal people (NPCs) doing normal things (walking, standing, talking, arguing, mugging, running, driving, honking in traffic, painting graffiti, etc).  The world seemed like a place that existed whether the players were there or not, yet the players were able to enter that world as heroes and do heroic things, and (briefly) make the world a better place.   And the common people reacted accordingly, running away from fights, thanking/praising the players for rescues, etc.  Never mind game mechanics, technical issues or whatever, which city environment seemed more realistic/immersive and at the same time was more fun to interact with (or ignore at will)?  The mostly empty SWG cities or the NEVER empty CoH cities?

Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap."  This is probably too charitable an estimate of the value of "player-generated content".  It applies when judging the value of a player-made dungeon or quest.  And it also applies when evaluating the ability of players "doing their thing" in a game world to provide a fun and sustainable world backdrop by themselves for all the other players in the game.  If the only "people" in the world are players, with no NPCs, then at least 90% of a player's interactions with other "people" will be in that crap category, be it asshats, sociopaths, weirdos, farmers, deaf-mute soloers, or whatever.  Is that what you want 90% of your game's impression to be based on?  That last question is hyperbole, I know.  There are lots of other factors that will go into someone's impression of a game, but you get my point, I hope.

The Count's NPC Postulate: If you wish to create a realistic MMO game-world, NPC's are not only useful but almost mandatory for filling all the roles a world needs but which players aren't interested in filling. (Apparently, moisture farmer and cafeteria cook are roles players are willing to fill, but there must still many others - like maybe mucking stables or lubing mechs or changing hospital bedpans or something?)

The Count's NPC Corollary: The key to making a game world more realistic, meaningful, and immersive, is NOT to eliminate the obviously artificial NPCs in favor of an all-player world, but to add more, and more meaningful, NPCs to the world, giving the players an ever larger and richer background of ordinary people against which their extraordinary deeds are shown even more extaorindarily. (Or something.  I'm still working on refining that one down to something more pithy.  :oh_i_see:)

Cynic's Perspective: The whole idea of eliminating NPCs in favor of purely player occupied MMO game worlds seems to boil down to one of two cases: starry-eyed ivory-tower theoreticians-which-refuse-to-be-bothered-by-facts (yes, I'm looking at you, Raph  :grin: ); or lazy, short-sighted, or under-funded devs seeking an excuse to cut an expensive component out of their schedule.  Note I'm being specific about MMO game worlds here, because there are other situations where having no NPC's may be workable, such as non-game worlds (eg Second Life), and non-worldy games (fps, sports, etc).

I read the pink bit about the elephants.

I really, really want to like the game.  Unfortunately, the fact that it seems to eat through my 2gb of ram in about 30-45 mins is really putting a damper on my ability to give two shits about this one.  Which is a shame, because I like the feel of the world, and the combat mechanics.  However, given the shitfest of lag, and lurching about that I get when I leave an instanced area, I shudder to think what the world pvp will be like.  :ye_gods: 

Same here, ive been waiting forever to get into the beta and now that im finally in i can barely stand to play.  I REALLY like the game but i just cant play something that lags and stutters and crashes.

Why is this taking 10 fucking minutes to log into the game for the first time.  :tantrum:  Reading content...

edit: and now a blank screen with a mouse pointer and music.  Viva Funcom  :awesome_for_real:

The first five times i tried to log in i ended up shutting it down cause i thought it had stopped responding, eventually i just let it run and got in after about ten minutes.

Because it was in pink, right?  Me too.

Yikes.  I just logged in again and suddenly I'm stalling all over the place, even in an instance, and sometimes I get a black screen with huge bananas on it.  WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME???

While it has improved for me, there are still numerous crashes and occasional long loading times.

Maybe after spending Thursday night and Friday banging my head against the monitor, I'm imagining an improved game.

EDIT:
I have also been setting my Shaders to 2.0, setting AgeofConan.exe priority to HIGH via the task manager, resetting my Processor Affinity to a single Core, and some of the other voodoo currently being pitched on the various forums.

While going witch-doc, try running Windows Media Player in the background. It tunes the timeslicing of certain media APIs which makes some games load and play faster. Ol' tricksiness. :-)

No, ShenMolo, people in chat and on the forums are reporting improvement, too.  I think I just suddenly got buggy.  Probably God punishing for coming out of the reality TV closet.  I deserve it.  I'm a wee bit worried about the bananas.   :ye_gods: 

I hear this bug can be fixed by switching to window mode and then back to full screen, or the other way around. Some of this stuff is  :awesome_for_real: indeed.

This game launches in sixteen days.   (http://www.democraticwarrior.com/forum/images/smilies/SHF.gif)

Gold.

WTF is with all of the freezes and 5-10 minutes to load a zone.  It seems like it's all system performance too.  I haven't really noticed any latency (or people for that matter).

I lost connection like 5 times in a 20 minute span.. got tired of it, and just logged out.  Not sure what is up with that.

Or, you know, a mirror.

Looking at one's own isn't as fun.

(http://pics.livejournal.com/flamingatheist/pic/00026r8r/s640x480)

(http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/9302/5bananasfw6.png)

Remember to detach your bananas.  They last way longer that way.  Also, peel from the bottom to avoid strings.

Would have been funnier with a period, Schild.  It needs to be deadpanned.

I agree.

Or rather, i would, if the original had one.

However:

Bananas. Perfect for Orange Juice.

Merusk sees nipples everywhere. You see bananas. It takes all kinds.

I only see bananas when they're there.  Merusk sees nipples when they aren't there! 

So there.

Played around a little today, being in the general beta.  Logging into one of the night instances, underhill? the game took 15 minutes to load and then 10 minutes to load the textures.   :ye_gods: :ye_gods:

However the rest of the game runs fine.  There are monumental memory leaks everywhere. 

However if you can get rid of the leaks and the "stuttering" then this game will be very very fun.

Yep that's the general consensus, the game itself is pretty good, but it's lacking massive amounts of polish. Another 6 months and it could have been amazing. But then it would be competing with WAR and the WOW expansion pack, so who knows.

All aboard?

(http://www.forumammo.com/cpg/albums/userpics/10072/fail-train.jpg)

Even though I think the game itself is good fun, I agree with Aez.  This launch is going to be bad bad bad.  I can't wait.  I'll be there, rubbernecking.

Ditto, a good game having an irrepairably shitty launch pisses me off a whole lot more than some pos like vanguard failing.

What happened to Grunk? He should be here telling everyone that they are crazy and there is no way this game could do anything wrong.

I miss Grunk. 

A light that burns twice as bright burns half as long-- and you have burned so very, very, brightly, Grunk.

(http://www.militaryspousesupport.net/boards/images/smilies/smileclouds.gif)

We miss your face around here, Grunk!

Perhaps his super computer has sucked a miracle patch out of the raw bit stream of the internets.

So the consesus is that's it's going to be horrible at release?

Are we talking AO bad or Horizons bad?

He's probably out to sell some bottles, like all you lazy whining fucks should be doing if you want to enjoy this game proper.  :oh_i_see:

edit: oh wait, not fucks. Fuckens.

The game's killer issue is that it crashes a lot. This has actually got much worse with recent patches, so hopefully they can fix it - it's something they introduced themselves. The game engine does work (or it did).

It's not like Horizons or Vanguard. The zones are generally well designed, and they have lots of content.

The classes are fun to play. For example, if you are want a change from the standard healer, you can play a bear shaman who is designed for melee combat and for healing his party at the same time (the first heal spell you get doesn't actually proc until you smash something with your club, so the rest of the group isn't going to be moaning at you to stand back).

It is a lot more demanding on your PC than WoW, but it does run fine on the 7000 series of Nvidia cards (and I would assume whatever the equivalent ATI card is), as that is what I was using for some time.

Yeah unless there's some patch on release day to fix stuff, this is going to be an unstable release. For the most part people running GF8 cards (due to some shader runtime error in the 169 drivers) and running Vista 32 (mostly hard drive indexing) are going to be the people with the most technical issues.  They can be tweaked if you know what you are doing, but this sorta reminds me of when Shadowbane launched that game optimizer utility.  If you didn't know wtf you were doing, you could seriously blow up the game.

All in all if someone doesn't at least have.....

P IV 2.8 Ghz
GF 6800+
2-3 Gigs of Ram (400 mhz+)

then they probably shouldn't bother to buy the game in the first place.  Otherwise most of the other issues can be resolved by updating Nvidia drivers and doing some manual tweaks, but its FunCom's responsibility to ensure people know how to do that.

I think 2.8 GHZ CPU's are about 4 years old, so that's probably the baseline barrier to entry for this game. Its not like WoW where you can play it on a 6-7 year old computer.

gosh, I think I agree with everyone else. Looks fun, could be fun if graphics lag didn't get me killed all the time. Currently runs worse than The Witcher 1.0 but still better than beta Horizons.

Picked up BFG 8600 GTS for cheap on the weekend, and everything runs pretty smooth now (AMD 3800 dual core and 2 gigs of ram) at 1280 x 960 on MED settings <with bloom and 4x AA>.  Still takes forever to load intially and takes forever to let go  of system resources when you exit .  As mentioned before,  level changes are hampered by the cacheing for the first couple of minutes, but then it's smooth sailing.  The game definately looks a lot better  running on med settings.  Haven't tried high settings yet, as changing the graphics settings during play causes  cacheing and general pc coniptions  as all the shader stuff is re written.

No crashes or disconnects when I played last night (there were a few patches to download since I last played on Friday).  Will probably keep my preoder at this point.

Anyone know when the open beta ends?

[urlhttp://vnboards.ign.com/Message.aspx?topic=107205723&brd=22995&replies=1]There was a tweak for slow zoning in this tech round up[/url]

Had something to do with indexing or searching, but people who turned it off went from several minutes of zoning to a few seconds.

Cool thanks.

I was roaming around the innertubes this morning to find my pink garbage disposal deodouriser and noticed that the AoC CE is selling for like $200 and up, even on Amazon, from private people of course.  Are they out of them already?  If so, I wonder how many they bothered to make?

Maybe having seen the game some sellers decides to better try and beat the crowd.

Edited because I spelled something really strangely, even for me.

Umm... oops.  I no longer know what the hell I'm doing.   :ye_gods:

AO on release had big server problems. The server would not let you zone and rubberbanded you worse than any game before or after. The server would lose inventory and bank items. AOC does not have these server problems. Server performance appears quite good to me.

Horizon has vast areas of the world unpopulated. You could run for several minutes without seeing a single MOB or anything to do. The client had terrible performance in a city. AOC does not appear to have this problem either. My performance (with closed beta) in cities with lots of walls and chars is on par with my performance in the wilderness with MOBs and lots of vegetation. Long as I have restarted in last half hour that performance is quite playable.

Vanguard was just bad underlying technology. The client did not support more than one core. They are having to redo all the artwork to get acceptable performance in cities. The server zoning of the world did not work with major glitches both for players and MOBs at the zone lines. AOC does support multiple cores. They don’t try to do “seamless” zones. They do have issues with zoning times but my educated guess would be it is much easier to fix than the Vanguard technical mess.

Honestly, i think the consensus is that the game IS fun, and different. But buggy performance wise, and that this fact may hinder the games launch.

Personal opinions:
All in all, i'm not sure you can compare it to AO's launch. But then again, i didn't experience it. I also don't think it can be compared to Vanguard, as it still birthed because of more things than performance issues (Lack of content, bad/old school design choices, not fun ETC...).

Just my take on things said in this thread.

Sorry, but a fix that involves shutting down Indexing and Windows Search services on Vista is pretty lame. Its a minor feature of Vista, only really useful to folks with the requirement to do searches for files. You know, like, nearly everyone.

I am assuming they were asking people to see if it really was the case, not that it would be the permanent fix for it. i am sure they were just testing or asking for people to test, to see if it was even an issue, to then go on to develop a real fix for it.

I don't know, but thats what i read like to me.

I don't recall using windows search in the past few years to be honest.

Wasn't really that necessary for XP, since file access in XP isn't a big woop. Vista, on the other hand, has an indexing service because doing raw file access is a heavy undertaking.

Don't get me wrong, I think this 'feature' of Vista is wrong headed to start with, since file access shouldn't require a whole separate indexing service to do what most computers do as routine. On the other hand, it does feel like yet another 'woops' on Funcom's part.

Not trying to be sarcastic, but i thought thats what open betas were about, to get as many configurations trying to play as you can, and then making fixes for the "unknowns"..among other things. I even suspect thats why the shader cash wasn't included, maybe they are gathering them from all the clients, :tinfoil: lol. Not very likely i'm sure.

That brings up a question. Bug submission system, hows it work? Is it one of those "when you crash" it comes up asking for info types?

I disagree but I cannot say why for a few more weeks.

If Vista's Indexing Service is considered an 'unknown' by Funcom, we up the creek. More likely its simply the rush to get the product out the door. It must be hell to try to develop an MMO for two operating systems simultaneously, especially under deadline. I feel bad for the Funcom developers.

Thought they lifted the  :nda: ?

Yeah, i hear that.


Only for the closed beta, and even then only for reporting/news sites. Not testers. Open beta is NDA clear.

That is still not an excuse for launching a shit show. Running out of money is, though.

It's like a MS or WoW crash.  It pops up a "submit bug report" window. You can enter additional information on what you were doing to make it crash, and then hit submit (or not.)

Nah, not either of those "bad". I'd say it's got a chance of being like EQ2: a game that attracts through IP awareness of the "cutting edge" graphics but one that doesn't retain because there's holes in the core experience and people learn through the game just how not uber their computer is. And I say EQ2 because I believe it maybe would have done 10% better in a world without WoW (EQ2 alienated based on system requirements, bland graphics and way-contrived game mechanics).

I will say that AOC on lower-end systems looks better than EQ2 did on lower end systems.

Incorrect. All closed beta testers can freely talk about their experience up to level 13.

Of course you can't compare AoC to AO's launch, AoC hasn't launched yet! 

I thought the CB's NDA was lifted to level 15 or some such nonsense.  How that translates into talking about performance issues, I don't know.  I suppose you could start every sentence with "From levels 1 through 15, I noticed graphic stalling, lock ups and freezes, nippleless women and chemical smells coming from my Nvidia card."  Funcom is daft.  Fucking Scandies.  Makes me want to go to Bergen and kill my aunties.  Anyway, regardless of the fun factor, this launch will be rift with crappy bugs and performance issues and hysterically funny to watch.  Unless you're one of those people who end up in SAFE mode forever.  Then it's only funny to the rest of us.

Oh, ok, level 13.  That's 2 more daft than 15.

Well it allows you to talk freely about performance, give general impressions, etc, but not to put up websites spoiling the level 80 barbarian epic quest for the golden loincloth.

Performance has been gone over to death.  Your either going to put up with it and soldier on, ignore the game until the 2-3rd major post release patch then give it a shot or give it a shot so you can teeth gnash about how it doesn't work well.  If you fall into the third catagory I'd like to say fuck you in advance.

So with that said once the NDA goes away enough for long term deeply imbeded testers to answer these questions I'll know if I need to build my new machine for AoC or at the time of my choosing...

1.  Do they actually have the full game made yet?  Mostly do they have all the alternative to pve grinding content.  Bar Brawls, econ, play2crush, monster towns, battlegrounds etc.  I know they dont have it all yet, but how much and how polished/working is it?

2.  How bad is the content drop off in the mid-late pve portion?  How bad is the grind with weak content in the mid-late pve?

3.  How bad are the classes really.  I've always read the info they released about class spells/skills with dread, they have sounded very uninspiring and boring.  But I hear great stuff about the core combat mechanics from everyone and that + tits + blood might make up for bleh hotkey skills?

4.  How terrible is class balance?  How fleshed out are the classes?  On the scale of DAOC < SB < AO < WoW in terms of initial class viability where is AoC?

Until I know that I can't decide if I'm even going to buy AoC since I'm having fun in Eve & I dont play that as much as I might already.

EVE sucks.  (http://www.sheknows.com/graphics/emoticons/duck.gif)

Alright then.

palmer_eldritch, give me two more examples of cool things AOC does with it's classes aside from the melee-based bear shaman. There are a dozen classes, surely there is something else that is cool. If you can present a good case for +coolness, then I'll concede.

Up to level 13, eh?

Ok.  Here goes:

Performance:
Up to level 13, the game suffers from memory leaks, severe hitching, and other assorted fun times.  Note this is run on the following system specs:  Q6600, 4GB RAM, 8800GTS 512 in SLI.  Changing resolutions and/or graphics settings (low, med, high) made no difference in visual quality and/or performance for my rig.  Cannot report that if after level 13 this is magically fixed.

Combat:
Up to level 13, it's a blast.  Programmable keyboards and mice put the game into easy mode for combos that require multiple key presses to fully activate.  Requires some advanced thought and setting your opponent up in terms of shield placement since a combo/special that has an 'overhead right' final keypress to activate won't do much damage if your opponent has full right shields.  As far as your shields are concerned, up to level 13, the activation of said shields is a bit suspect - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  Again, programmable keyboard such as an old school G15 make this easier, and makes it a bit less redundant and lowers the amount of keyboard contorsionism greatly.  In my opinion, the best combat system of any MMO out there.

General:
Nice use of voice overs, beautiful worlds, outstanding character models, stunning animations.  Leveling curve (to 13) seems not overly ball breaking, but could use some speeding up.  Also, power advancement concurrent to level feels solid.  Does a good job of making the player feel powerful early.  UI is decent.  Not great, but decent - needs some clean up art-wise.

Final thought:
Fix the hitching, fix the memory leaks, and other graphical oddities, it's a blast.  If it ships with these problems, then....

The herald of xotli is a caster who turns into a demon to kick ass in melee.  Cloth armor + two hander + fire spells.  Here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5edL4skKeW0) you can see one transforming and wading into a pack of baddies.

Oh yeah, and that.  :grin:

I should be able to zap through voice overs.  I read faster than they talk.  Hopefully, this will be addressed in the release version.  I'm trying to be serious here.

Um, is it a contest? Go ahead and declare yourself the winner, I don't mind.

NIJA BEAT ME EVERYONE!

Anyway, yeah, I like the herald - a mage who hits things with his flaming sword. I like the way the tanks can actually do damage. I like the melee combat in general because combos add a bit of fun and because most of the classes are about getting up close and smacking things. It's all just my opinion (and based strictly on the classes up to level 13 - what happens after that is a closely guarded secret).

Everywhere I zone there are a gaggle of topless, nippless women standing around.   :uhrr:

I keep hearing people say this and while aggravating it was bound to happen.  They apparently made a somewhat more interesting combat system that requires you to do stuff and what do all us veteran MMO players do?  Macro that system so that we don't have to use it and it will always succeed.

 :sad_panda:

It's really creeping me out, too.   :ye_gods:

But does it really work? The keyboard macro...?

Yes.

Every year, ProgressQuest gets funnier and funnier. 

Then we complain that the combat is  :awesome_for_real:

That lasts 20 seconds with a 120 second recast. It's a party trick.

at level 1-13.....

Bullshit. If it required interaction and a modicum of player skill macroing wouldn't be possible. If you can make a macro it's just thinly disguised button mashing.

Yeah, you get the demon transformation garbage at level 3 I believe. 2 or 3.

Exactly. AoC requires you to do exactly the same thing every other game does except you do it a slightly different way. Or said another way: change the paint color doesn't change the shape.

PQ just need RMT option so you can catch up with the people who have unfair advantage having started earlier, then it's perfect.

Is there any non-revealing armor for female characters?

I hope we get some good nipple armour!  In any case, the big men running around in panties and frocks are cracking me up.  Someday, there will be a game where us women get to wear the beefy armour and the lads have to run around half naked and they will be our bitches.

Anyway, are people going to play at launch?  It will be months before WAR is ready.  Did anyone besides me and Schildy (who just wants the box) even pre-order?  (I'm a sucker for a wooden box, too) 

I pre-orderd.

I pre ordered, although I've had my finger over the 'cancel order' button a few times in the last week.

I havent found any non revealing armor for my male character.  I pre ordered, the game is fun enough that i wont cancel it yet, i also ordered a new video card.

I pre-ordered.  I'm hoping this surefire train wreck of a launch will break me off of MMOs for quite a while.  My first MMO was the disastrous AO launch so I'm going for a full circle type of thing :awesome_for_real:.

You can macro the combat moves of the beat'em up games but i'd argue neither many people do it, nor does the button mashing aspect remove presence of player skill needed to get anywhere with the combat system (beyond scrub level, anyway)

I think you should save your money and simulate the release day by rubbing a plastic knife against your wrist.  I think this game has a lot of potential, but there's just too many problems to iron out for it to be a smooth launch.  I may just wait a couple of months and pick this thing up for half price.  

Turning of indexing, defragging the funcom folder and playing fullscreen made the game run smoother for me(not smooth but with a lot less stuttering/loadingtime).

If anybody in open beta wonders, if you play a bearshaman and you die to every other mob you encounter between level 8 and 13, its not you, its the way its currently implemented. :uhrr: Things get better over level15.

The combo combat novelty is nice for a while but I'm having a hard time figuring out how I'm supposed to pvp with it unless I don't move. Everybody will obviously macro these things for pvp effectiveness.

You can whip through the voice over / cut scenes by spamming the 1st selection. That progresses you to the end in a few clicks. Handy for those quests you've already done.

Well, since they've sold out of the CE, if you ordered one of those... sell the damn thing.  They're going for $200.   :oh_i_see:

I do spam the first thingy, ShenMolo, but it seems to take forever to ditch the cut scene when you talk to quest NPCs.  I think there might be a toggle for cut scenes... I'll give that a go.

Holy christ no kidding.  I Did the volcano instance yesterday solo and it took me an hour and a half cause of the constant dying.  I almost through my laptop accross the room. 

Reading the forums it looks like ti's cause Bear shamans don't have their main buff combos yet but jesus that was painful.

Bear Shaman is hard.  Everything is close up and I suck at running away in time.

I pre-ordered the CE, but I'm sort of biased, seeing as I....uhm...work on the game. :P

You work on the game and have to pay for a copy?  That seems wrong on so many levels. 

seriously.

If you're playing the Warlock/Necromancer/Whatever the fuck it's called, here's a tip I didn't catch.  You can have more than one pet up at a time.  I didn't realize this until I saw another running around with 2 skinless wonders.

The Shadow/Death Knight class was pretty fun, too. Both classes were pretty standard for MMO 'dark caster' types from what I saw. They're also the only two I've putzed with for now. The horrific graphics lag on my poor little 7300 seems to have gotten worse as the weekend went on.

I pre-ordered the CE before I applied for a job :P

When I first started the OB, it ran well with my 7800 GT.  The day before yesterday the updated with a small patch and it was just awful and got worse and worse until I just gave up yesterday.  They must have patched again last night or today, because suddenly it is running better than ever.  Now, mind you, the servers are down right now, I think, so all this exciting new performance could disappear for me and you'll be playing like a champ.

Also, Xuri, should you have a red name now?  Or do you wield a mop and bucket?  A red name would look great with your avatar.

It will be interesting to see how the Open Beta affects the class selections, especially now with more people being let in.

I played a Bear Shaman up to 10 before moving on to something else. I bet they become more rare in release based on people's impressions in the OB. I didn't take well to the Herald of Xotli or Conqueror (weaksauce at level 13 pvp) either, although it seems others did.

I'm leaning towards Ranger after the playing in the OB, or perhaps Tempest of Set.

I basically have an entry-level designer position of sorts, and I'm pretty far down in the hierarchy of things, so I guess "wielding a mop and bucket" is a fair description. =P Red name sounds awfully... important.

Wow, this marks the first time anyone at funcom has ever gotten directly involved with the community. EA, mythic, sony, turbine, even blizzard occasionally join in, but never funcom. Neat.

You might want to talk to your nordic frostgiant overlords before continuing.

Yeah, I preordered. I always do. I am broken.

BUT

this time there's a chance it'll be actually fun to play (instead of just enjoying one more colourful box on the shelf).

Who from Blizzard at the gamer level?

And let's remember Xuri was here first and then Funcom. Who says communities don't have real world value :grin:

Blizzard hired directly from the community, primarily EQ uberguild leaders, and they occasionally post on various messageboards other than their own. Unlike funcom who to my knowledge has never had an employee post anything anywhere, ever.

FC have hired a bunch of former players for AO, in fact one of the lead Devs on AoC (Jayde) was one of the foremost AO players back in the day, and the Game Director (Silirrion) is a former player. I know an orgmate of mine back when I played AO got hired to AoC as an artist. Or did you mean the f13 community? Sorry if I misunderstood.

I wasn't aware of that. But those guys haven't continued to post online non-anonymously have they? I wasn't referring to the post-LtM community in particular no.

Silirrion posts as game director, and is actually fairly interactive with the community, Metaing is another player turned-dev, although he posts a lot less since becoming a Dev. The community interaction with the dev team deteriorated quite a lot during Znore's period at the helm, as he wasn't the chattiest person (he got moved to the AoC team to work on porting the game over to the 360 last I heard). Overall I'd say FC actually has quite good ties to the AO community, it probably helps that the AO community is fairly small and well established, so people know (or knew) each other a lot better. I know they used to periodically advertise positions on the AO forums

I don't know what you mean by post-LtM though.

It ran pretty good for me on my configuration:

Athlon 64 3200+
2 GB memory
nVidia 7600 GS video.

Dropped to a few fps entering new places. So I got jumped by almost unseen mobs. Death penalty in PvE is pretty trivial, so it didn’t matter much. Graphics is OK. I’m not a fan of realistic graphics in my fantasy worlds, but its appropriate to the IP. Liked the voiceovers. And that they have some range of body size, not the boring unibody.

Felt very much like a video game in single person quests. Particularly with the narrow paths available in the newbie area. Way too many invisible walls. I prefer more explorer friendly worlds.

Won’t be buying it. While I like some PvP, the brutal style they are aiming at isn’t for me. I would like to see them succeed though, and provide a good home for that playstyle.  I’m tired of the compromises of the “we cater to everyone” games.

The Secret World forum gets occasional posts from Tornquist.

They're probably cryptic, completely irrelevant to the story once decrypted, and I assume he never finishes sentences. They just trail off into a smaller and smaller font until they're 1 pixel tall and eventually disappear.

That's an uncanny description that isn't accurate but is true.

Ah memories.  After finally downloading this beast, it has managed to crash my system to an old style blue sreen of death each time i've tried to run it.   Click play, think think think BSOD.  Good ole funcom.  Can't even give me a graceful failure but a horrific crash; guess i should be glad it didnt wreck my hard drive like certain other products they have worked on.

According to this can i run it (http://www.nzone.com/content/nzone/srl/nzone_srl.asp?gameid=4529) i should be able to run this game fine.  The best i can tell the problem is video driver related, but i have the latest nvidia drivers for my 256 Geforce 7900.

Anyone here running with this level card that can tell me which driver set they are using?

If I could be bothered to DL it, maybe I'd tell you :p


Unfortunately, all I hear is suck, so I'm staying away until release.  :oh_i_see:

I've got a ASUS Geforce 7900 GT and its running fine on my machine (well, it works, but still experience long loading times, lag in new areas, etc).

Ill check my driver version when I get home.


EDIT:

Driver 6.14.11.6928
Date 12/18/2007

I think thats the most current version.

Actually the game itself isn't suck.. if you can tolerate the usual ding-gratz MMO playstyle.  It's enjoyable and leveling has been quick - I in fact thought it was 'too quick' until I remembered "Oh right, Pvp is the focus..." Of course the caviat is that leveling is ALWAYS quick as a noob. They always hide the suck after the levels folks can't hope to achieve in an open beta.

It's worth at least the DL to check it out now while it's "free."  I certainly won't be buying it just because it kills my machine, but I'd be tempted if I had the rig to run it well.

Nah, he said Funcom  :rimshot:

Actually, the game doesn't suck itself, it's more the technical flaws and the fact that it has huge loading times and many loading screens for some, but as some said, it actually loads faster after you've played it for a while. Also it feels a bit random with the load times, normally on my PC it takes 30sec-1min to load, but when I went into the temple by the blacksmith who removes your shackles it took two Tool songs. Same on the way out. And it crashes due to memory leaks. Other than that the game is pretty fun and feels more like an "Online RPG" than a grindfest. Dunno how it is after 13 though.

The Herald of Xotli is awesome in PvP. Molten Steel Slash and the Hellish Strikes (?) are win along with the shieldings. Bear Shaman I also found horrible, same goes for Dark Templar. The HoT's at lvl 13 heal me for 2. Sometimes 3. Mostly 2.

Player vs. Everything: Age of Conan closed beta impressions (http://www.massively.com/2008/05/05/player-vs-everything-age-of-conan-closed-beta-impressions/) <---- at massively.com

I am kinda under the impression that this is a rumor, that the openbeta client is older code than the closed beta. First, the closed beta testers, like in most MMOs, probably have highend computers and that was one of the reasons they were selected, but now when the game is in the open, people with several year old machines says it is unplayable. Also on top of the open beta client it says "Age of Conan 2008_05_03-23_25 GeneralBetaCurrent@46227" To me it looks like game name, date of build and then revision. I might be wrong though.

regardless of the use of sekrit beta client #23 or top sekrit beta+ client #23c, the problem remains the same.  Funcom released the game to the masses before it was ready.

Well, technically, i think anyone in the closed beta can confirm this, as its part of the 1-13 experience.

Im iffy too.

But then again, i played last night with two other friends, we all have slightly different builds. We all did get the initial studdering when going into somewhere new, but going back ETC..was fine. The rest of the game ran fine as well. each of getting around 40-60 FPS. Like i said, only the initial loading was an issue shuddering wise, and only really the first time.

All in all, unless you have a very old computer or a part bottlenecking...i have confirmed for myself that many of the issues being talked about around the web are simply..well.. exaggerated. *ducks* Not shrugging off performance issues, it should definitely run better across the board. "Massive PvP" at this point i do not think will work.

I know all 4 machines have quad cores, and only one was running an 8800, the other two were running cards 1 and 2 models back, and only one machine had 2 gigs, the other two were 4. The machine with the "2 models back" card, and 2 gig had the longest load times, and shuddering instances.

I can get the specs and post them later of the three machines. Other than that, i think the biggest problem people are going to have other than performance is the learning curve, not that combat is hard, just the fact that you need to unlearn things from other MMO's. Situational awareness matters in this game. This is not Eq/wow combat by any stretch, if you approach it like it is, you will die....horribly, like i did.

I will be trying my home machine soon (Specs posted in the April computer build thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=12985.msg441126#msg441126))

Who doesn't nowadays ?  :nda:

Mrbloodworth: I experience the same. I run a quad core cpu, 4gb ram and an 8800gtx card and game runs smooth as a babys butt, but once I enter an instance, there is some some weird hickups in the beginning. First time I ran into Mithrelles temple, I ran upstairs and my HD started working like crazy. Then two mobs suddenly spawned and I was dead cause it was just a HD lagfest. This is a 10000RPM drive, so this is definitely not my pc. It took long time before the HD working stopped, but it seemed it was the NPC that caused it. Entering the instance and running around ran at 65 FPS. Now why would the game need 1 minute to load some NPCs over and over is beyond me.

I have also experienced slowdowns when NPC's spawn, HD starts up, and screen shudders. I think this is still the shader issue at fault here.

I'm pretty sure a limit open beta doesn't mean "the masses", even though it might seem like it. The goal of a open beta is to put load on critical system and gather information about everything you can. I still don't understand how people can complain about something that's free.

Sure, if you pay for it and it still sucks, ok you can bitch. (Not that we can't have a conversation about it, as it may decide people one way or the other - but saying it's not ready is like saying driving the next Ford hotrod prototype with all it's sensors and minus creature comforts is not ready. Well, duh).

I couldn't confirm it without actually downloading the 13+GB open beta client, getting a login, etc, which I'm not gonna do. But I would take claims of sekret golden beta builds with great skepticism. I would anticipate serverside lag to be much worse in the open beta, though.

Epic ending to the Age of Conan Open Beta (http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=82979)

I have been iffy about the game for a bit...but this sounds pretty cool. I do like that they are giving the PVP+ crowd some love in this game.

http://www.thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=303

just because the timing seems uncanny.

 :dead_horse: I'm sure people remember Failgate:London and all it's technical problems. But after a month or so they DID have most of them ironed out. (IIRC?)

Assuming that the game is mostly feature and content complete. :grin: --Read: They can launch with what they have and you won't run out of shit to do at lvl 37-- AND they devote what time they have to fixing their GLARING technical issues they could, in theory, have a smooth launch.

However. This is FunCom  :drill:

EDIT: As this seems to have become to AoC thread for the time being. Are we planning a F13 guild for AoC?

Unless there are enough people from f13 to get into the whole PvP and sieging stuff, it won't be worth it, will it?  I have a feeling that WAR might be more appealing to the SB crowd, but even there might not be enough people to really compete.  If we do start one in either game, I suggest we don't limit it to f13 members.

If you're counting on f13 folks, I suggest picking the game that's the easiest to level in.  While the WoW guild lasted a lot longer than I ever would have expected, we still only had a handful make it to the endgame before the wheels fell off.

Open Beta is a marketing tool.  There are far easier and cheaper ways to stress test.

If people are interested I'm going to have a guild that is a mix of friends from old MMOs, and coworkers...PM me

As much as I'm not a fan of Slay's, this is probably your best option.  F13 guilds don't work.  Having an in from F13 into a functional guild probably works a hell of a lot better. 

Not sure how well the PoTBS think worked with Tao's guild, however.  That game died a rather silent death.

Let it out Raz! ;)

I'm quite interested really to see how many people come over from WoW. My guess is glaring bugs will scare half away, and we'll be left with a solid core. (If I'm not scared back to EvE)

My impressions:

Good:

- The music and sound in general is *outstanding*. If this game doesn't win the various industry awards for sound design and music then something is deeply wrong. The only weakness here is in some of the voice acting. (Seperately, as an American who's primary association with the Conan character's voice is Ahnold, having the Cimmerian actor use a Scots accent was sort of jarring, even if it is more "correct".)

- The "feel" of the game is right for the source material.

Indifferent:

- Gameplay. Combat is 'fine'. I didn't notice anything genre-defining going on here; the hype has been that this is some kind of MMO revolution in the combat system. That doesn't seem to be even close to true. So there's no auto attack, and you get to play a little 'match your swing to the less shielded spot' game. This is not exactly earth shattering, but it is better than autoattacking I guess.

Bad:

- The engine sucks. On an X1900XT with 512MB, and 2 GB of RAM, I am getting poor performance - especially in that first tavern, where it is completely awful, and at times unplayable - with a game that is less pretty than LotRO (which runs perfectly smoothly for me.) There's no reason that should be happening.

- Another problem I have with the engine is how the characters 'fit' into the background graphics. I have trouble at times putting aside the notion that the character isn't being animated and superimposed on the background seperately - it doesn't feel like he's really walking ON the ground, etc. It feels very much like a console engine in that way (I guess it is, really.) The animations in general are a bit clunky. There were a couple moments where it really felt like it was getting close to that half-assed PotBS off-ship territory.

- Load times: what. the. fuck. They're COMPLETELY excessive. I think they need to work a bit on their file compression or something. It may be related to the suck from the engine; texture file sizes are just out of control possibly.

- Memory leak. After about 40 minutes of play, the client was using 1.6 GB of memory.

- Documentation/Tooltips/whatever. A lot of things the game told me should work didn't. The ~ key failed to toggle me in and out of combat. When I got "You can climb here!" messages, on a character with 75/100 climbing - I couldn't. There is a lot of this shit that is all fucked up now, and it leaves me wondering what else is incorrect on things like ability tooltips. We rely on this stuff to make decisions about our characters, and when companies document abilites incorrectly or fail to do so at all, it is a bad sign (I'm looking at you, Mythic. You better give us real documentation this time.)

************

All in all, I don't think I will be touching this game until at least 4-6 months in. It looks like Funcom has not put their technical problems anywhere behind them at all, and I am pretty concerned that this close to release their beta only has levels 1-13 - and is apparently missing some important features. Maybe in 6 months it will be playable.

hahahahahaha

After reading the disk defrag thread, I downloaded the Perfect Disk demo that Stray recommended and when I played the beta last night the intial loading time was reduced significantly.  The progress bar instead of pausing near the end for what seemed like an eternity, took a fraction of that time.  Cacheing when entering new areas seemed greatly reduced too. 

I have always used the XP  defragging tool which never seems to be able to defrag any drive fully, and had used it to defrag the drive that Conan was on with predictable results : "some files on the drive could not be defragmented",   which  showed up as huge red sections when you analyzed the drive.

EQ1 only worked in software 3d mode unless you had a 3dfx card iirc. I don't think they shipped a DX client for about a year after release.

EQ1 supported direct3d at release. I can't recall with any certainty if it had a software 3D mode, but I don't believe it did.

I pre-ordered this game, I'm also in the closed beta playing around, havn't gotten passed level 13.

On a side note, nvidia put out new beta drivers version 175.something.  They vastly improved the performance of the game.  Vastly... Vastly is a funny word when you say it.  I don't use it often.  Vastly.. heh.. Vastly.

It didn't.

Unless Vista does it completely differently than XP you can turn off indexing and still search for files. All indexing does is build a database to make searches go faster. I've had it shut off since I installed XP on general principal. The number of times I search for files doesn't warrent the cpu resources to build an index.

He keeps pointing to that survey and saying that most people are happy...  The vast majority of people who have already quit, can't play for instability or didn't like the game aren't going to spend their time filling out a god damn survey.

They're the only high profile MMO nearing launch so getting more attention than games still months away seems to be a 'duh' thing. If that's really all they can offer as benefits of the high requirements graphics and if they really believe it's the high requirement graphics that cause it... heh.

What wasn't spin in that interview was veiled indications that we should expect a disastrous launch.  And they have outright lied about the majority of people running it with no problems.  The boards, ANY boards, indicate quite the opposite.  The complaints about performance in the game are also constant.  I guess if they say it enough, it will simply make it true regardless of how terrible it runs on most systems.  What a bunch of clueless plonkers.   

Except Xuri who is lovely.   :heart: 

Oh, and I did preorder and I'll be playing (if it's possible) because it's still good fun.  Especially the cries of outrage and dispair.  Of course, yesterday, for the first time, I had a shut down.  A very quiet, crash.  The game just disappeared.  It was weird.

If you feel that way I also have a small guild in case any of the many conservative libertarians here are looking. PvP good. Raids bad. Send PM if interested.

I like in particular how the reccommended specs list dual core cpu, but suggested fix for game problems is to confine the executable to single cpu only  :awesome_for_real:

I've got a guild going with a friend of mine, if you're interested let me know.  You just have to ignore the "hardcore" slobbering my buddy does.  Send me a PM if interested.

^^ See what just happened? 4 guilds at least.

We should really make sure that AT LEAST we all try to play on the same server, and do some guild co-ops.

I don't think there's any doubt that the launch is going to be quite the spectacle, but really at this point who cares about that shit. I got my fill of scadenfreude for quite awhile with Vanguard. Unlike that game, I'd actually like AoC to succeed, and yeah, after a few weeks of oh my god it crashes all the time and quests are broken and it runs so slow and asians are duping gold and rollbacks and whatnot I have hope that they'll smooth out the technical issues, bear down heavy on polish, and let us keep licking until we reach the creamy center. There's a real game in there!

Server name stuff:
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=83613

You're right, it does do it the same way as XP, but with the big caveat that in Vista it makes sense to enable it because Vista file management, from copying to searching, to generally anything that requires strenuous hard drive activity is far more sluggish than XP is.

I'm inclined to believe this, but let's be fair; it's entirely possible that the people who complain of bad performance could well be a vocal minority.

It's possible until you poll those of us here who don't care one way or another but still have performance issues.  :grin:

Yeah I am having problems. I'm a bit of a fanboi at the moment and not minded to moan about the game, but the current client does have problems.

The game hangs and everything freezes, except the mouse pointer which I can still move around (it's the in-game pointer - not the white windows mouse appearing on the screen). Doesn't seem to be my rig, as the forums are full of similar complaints. As I said before, performance has got worse rather than better with recent patches, so the client can be made to work. They seem to have introduced bugs at the same time as opening the open beta, which is unfortunate.

I always use XP defrag, but generally my drives are never more than half full. Thing that always pisses me off though is that it leaves a lot of empty fragments of drive space such that the next big file added is always going to default to being fragmented again. What does Perfect Disk do? And does it prevent that?

I am no expert on disc defragging, but I did notice that Perfect Disc managed to defrag all the files on all my discs and arranged the free space logically, something I never  have seen Windows defrag do.  The demo is full-functioning for  30 days.  I will most likely buy the full version.

Defraggler does the same thing (but free).  After it defrags all of the files it then defrags the freespace.

Well at least most of you can play. I am one of the ones upgraded from tech to closed beta and have not been able to play more than 3-5 minutes without the game freezing since the May 01 patch. I am currently re downloading to see if a fresh install will help matters. I am not sure whether I am going through all this shit because I like what I have seen up to lvl 5 or just pure innate stubbornness and refusal to admit that I let a game whip my ass. Most likely the latter.

I upgrade to the 175 nvidia drivers.  I didn't have much of a problem after that. 

Nice, thaks Ixxit and Kall.

Feat Planer for you guys.  Check out the class' feat trees.

http://hybes.de/featPlaner.php?class=TempestOfSet&lang=en

EQ1 at release supported Glide the 3dfx api, and maybe Open GL, but I can't remember I don't think Direct X even existed back then.

As far as AoC goes I am in the closed beta and it runs fine on my machine.
Opteron 170
2 gb of ram
WD rapter drives in raid 0 config
7800 GT 256 mb
DFI SLI DR mobo

The game takes ages to load, but once it does I notice no frame rate problems, and very little hitching. Of course I play on low graphics settings, but I still think it looks pretty amazing.

Win XP here, 175 are Vista drivers. Just for the record though I have tried a half dozen different XP drivers including the Omega's and Guru 3D ones.

I remember Walmart would not carry EQ1 because it required a 3D card and most of the people who bought their games there had off the shelf units with no 3D card.

I get good FPS 50 -65 @1880 x 1050 when the game runs for me. It is just the constant freezes that make it unplayable for me. Problem seems to be the same as what Palmer Eldritch described.

E8400
Gigabyte - P35 -DS3L/S3L
2 gig gaming/performance ram
Win XP
EVGA 8800 GTS 640
Auzentech 7.1 surround sound

I run the 175beta drivers without problems on windows XP with a 7900 gtx.

The freezing improved when I disabled indexing and defragmented the funcom folder. When you enter a new zone there will always be a bit of stuttering because of the shader caching.

interesting

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_175.12.html

I have 174.93 installed right now which are the 13 April XP drivers

Been there done that on defrag (Defraggler). Problem is I freeze anytime I try and move anything from inventory to main character or access the options screen.  Those are two things that are sure to set it off, there are probably more but the game will not run long enough for me to find them. Even if I do not try and get into options or change out my newbie gear it will freeze after about 10 minutes of play.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_175.16_beta.html (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_175.16_beta.html)

This is the one I run.

ok the beta drivers, I think I tried those. If the patch does not work I may try them again.

If this is bad to post, please remove my posting. I'm not in the closed beta, its just from what i have read off the internets, so it must be true.

But apparently, the miracle patch is real, and it hit closed beta today. Most places are reporting that about 89% of all performance issues (the one constantly talked about that is, shader, loading, zoning.) are gone.

Yeah I noticed an improvement in load times. Before they were like 10 minutes + now they're less than 30 seconds. Only hitching I get is upon zone in then I just do a 360 spin and it clears it up.

My performance on the open beta today was pretty good. Everyone enjoyed it.  First I took off my shirt and put it on my head, then I made swish swish noises with my sword and, finally, I climbed a ladder and jumped off just an inch or so from the ground and completely depleted my hit points.

They need to do something about falling damage... it's completely over the top.  Also, I'm not getting the lag and graphic stalling and stuff as bad as I was yesterday.  But that varies from day to day. 

Last night, post-patch (open beta) my performance problems were still terrible, even after I cranked the settings down to 'low'. Interestingly I haven't noticed a problem with falling damage. I wonder if having a high climb skill helps?

Maybe that's it!  I didn't see any point in putting anything past 1 in climbing.  Maybe you found the point!   :drill:

Just to be clear, i was talking about the closed beta. And i also just realized that people can talk about it, as performance is part of the 1-13 experience.

I get lagged just thinking about buying a Funcom game.

Contrary to popular belief and common sense, you still don't need to spend any points in climbing. It does effectively nothing. It never has.

The CB patch was put off a while yesterday.  Can't wait to get home and check it out.

Please post your results.

Results: very good, here.

Yep.  I went in and put a whole bunch in climbing and falling damage is still OTT, in my opinion.  Maybe it makes a difference later on, but not at level 13 and under.

The thingy on the 10th will probably be like a super fucked up slide show.  We'll see.  I wish they would have allowed more chat about crafting.  If the crafting is awful or tedious, I'll probably not play for long.  I like PvP, and especially sieging, but I need all the shiny stuff, too.  I've become mushy and girlie since SB.

Well up to now, I've never had a problem with my fps and becoming a slide show at all.  It's always been the "stuttering" due to texturing loading.  I guess that's the same thing, but It's either 40-50fps or 0.

I mean because of the event.  They only have a few servers and I'm sure tons of people will play. 

 :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin:

All I can say, "Wow".  Well I guess someone had to produce a miracle patch one of these days.  This is only performance based.  There are things that need to be fixed, like itemization etc.

Maybe we can get our own sticky in the graveyard when the 3 day pre-launch launch launches.

Yep, stalling is definitely gone, loading times seem a bit better and I get about 10-15 more fps in tortage today in closed beta.

Holy crap, I can actually move around and play again.  Hooray for the miracle patch.  :drill:

The new closed patch disabled shader model 3.0 on cards that support it but aren't fast enough to actually run well. It also improved loading speeds quite a bit for most people, but some are reporting major FPS drops. It wasn't a panacea but the majority are seeing much improved performance.

I'm genuinely impressed with these reports of 11th hour miracle patch that actually worked. I mean, seriously, that'd be like first. So if they pulled it off good work and all that.

A miracle patch that worked?  No wai. 

It wasn't a miracle fix. From reports, it seems more like a last minute lowering of graphical overhead. Same result (can play the game), different means (they didn't bring everyone up, they brought the game down).

Well it also substantially improved loading times, but that may be a side effect of disabling SM3.0.

From what I read they had problem with memory fragmentation/memory leaks, and those aren't hard to fix nowadays. The stalling/loading instead seemed due to the shaders compiling.

WoW in beta used to have huge slowdowns when you were flying from Ironforge to Stormwind in beta due to memory fragmentation, and that was also easily fixed.

They mentioned something about one of "sikrit dev builds" having the shader compilation made async (which is what it probably should've been to begin with but that's another story) so thought that's the change that went live. If they just lowered the gfx bar... oh well, that's not actually bad thing in itself. They can always patch in the "graphics for the future" in that very future when/if it ever comes. Having playable launch *and* possibly gfx upgrade down the road seems like better PR potential than people screaming blue murder because they can''t play on the first day.

Im personally very shocked and optimistic about the miracle patch reports.

If they can deliver some fun, I'm down...

Hey Signe, I haven't got a PM from ya about joining my guild :))))

Memory leaks aren't hard to fix?  How much complex pieces of software have you worked on?

They may have become easier to fix, but in a lot of cases it is still hard to track them down and it is far from easy.

How much does it pay?

hehhehehe

I played AO during beta and a bit into release. I recall those agonizingly painful wonderful times. Spend 20 minutes fighting through the lag to get across the city just to rubberband back to where you started. Running at the zone line... and right on through it into the sunset. *wipes a tear away* Good times good times. Pardon me while I go poke my finger through my eye into my brain and swirl it around a bit.

One of the prerequisites of "Arm-Chair" design is a high  degree of delusional omnipotence.

Christ on a stick, but now I'm almost thinking of playing this.

Memory leaks aren't easier to fix - they just happen less nowadays when 90% of the memory allocation even in high-performance applications is done through a manager that garbage collects. The same 90% of the code isn't really performance sensitive to the point where manual memory management serves a purpose.

The actual leaks are just as damn bad to track down if not worse.

I know you dig PvP, and i'm here to say, last night i finally got my main to 13, and me and 3 of my friends decided to give the PvP mini-games a try. They are really fun, mostly due to the combat system. In fact, i got a feeling of a FPS style match, but more like savage 2 in the way that people STILL MOVE in combat, something your not likely to see in most MMO combats, because its unnessary and does nothing. Here, it is situational awareness, and position is important, death comes swiftly but so does victory.

I did however play a caster, and currently, casters can be very sick in PvP, but really (Really) vulnerable to melee..so its almost harder to use one (Thankfully that dagger in your hand isn't just for decoration, not the best, but at least its not 100% worthless gesture). Melee on the other had seems to be some intense stick and move combat. Its all very refreshing.

As a side note, i think there were about 12 people in the match, and i didn't hitch, etc.., not a once after the initial loading of the play area. If they can reduce loading times between deaths... It will just be that much more speedy.

On the PvE side, sure, a lot of the quests seem to be common fair, but the cinematic way they deliver them, combined with the multiple responses to the dialog (and it can even change the outcome it seems) makes it a fresh take all around.

In my opinion, they already had Fun.

I played an assassin last night to 14.  Now I'm in the  :nda: territory.  But as of the 1-13 stuff, it's very fun.  When you're in stealth you don't crawl around, and move at a decent pace.

Well, you do get debuggers spew at you exact data on what shit you forgot to clean up nowadays so it certainly did get easier in a way.

Finally got the goddamn download and patching done last night. My new computer (P4 3.2 Ghz, 3 GB RAM, 7900 GS) can actually play it on default medium settings at 1280x1024. It looks decent, but the Tortage area's performance was really underwhelming. Not a lot of stuttering or load time issues, but just a low FPS and a feeling of slogging through mud. I'm still just not sure if this combat system is enough to make me want to play it at release.

Holy shit.

The moon is blue, and the devil is wearing a parka.

Quick everyone repent, I am convinced the apocalypse is now upon us.

Why 3 GB RAM and not 4?  Just curious....

Probably avoiding Vista 64?

My guess he's probably avoiding Vista altogether.

Same reason he got a 7900 instead of an 8800 or 8600, perhaps?  Cash!

I cant confirm till i get home.

I know Slay and Draegan and some others have offered guilds but what sort of server are people choosing?  I don't know that I'd be up for a FFA PvP server. 

I paid not a red cent for this computer. Funny story that. My boss and friend, who I've known for 17 years now, is a compulsive upgrader. And he's not cheap, and makes more money than me, so he can afford and does get the better stuff, if not the best. This computer was apparently an upgrade or two back for him, and the hard drive stopped working. Just up and quit. Rather than try to fix it, it ended up in a closet because it was time to upgrade anyway. The only thing wrong was the hard drive. Since I have to buy a new/used car in the next few months and am trying to get up a downpayment, he offered the carcass up to me and you better believe I snapped it up.

So no, the apocalypse is not upon us, as I didn't spend a dime. I pulled out my two hard drives from my old machine (they were SATA's) and voila, NEW PUTER!!! HUZZAH! Motherfucker runs everything I've got like glass, even Oblivion. And yet, AOC only ran on medium settings at a barely acceptable level.

Can you put me on the waiting list for his next handmedown kthx?

Very nicely priced, Haemish!  Evidently, the ominous Scandie "they" are going to put the "miracle" patch, as Darniaq infers, on the OP sometime today or maybe they have already.  I suspect that it might help.  Since yesterday, it's run fine on my computer with barely a stutter, but I just run it on low anyway.  It looks fine to me on low.  I have no idea what sieging is going to be like, though.  I'm so slow at leveling, it'll probably be time to switch over to WAR before I become any good at that, anyway.

It really is a miracle patch, performancewise. Other stuff is still messy. No more dips to 5 fps if you just spin the camera around. They didn't do any type of quality degrading either, that's just some bs rumor I think.

It runs really damn good now. It feels like a totally different client, to be honest. That's how much of a performance gain it was.

I have a vague idea which server type Slayerik will choose....

I'm going on a PvE server.  Since to do some of the endgame stuff you need a lot of people me and some people from my small guild joined a bigger one called the old timers guild whose charter would be a good match for most of the people here.  You have to be at least twenty five(though they are flexible) and it's all about adults having fun together without all the drama, leetspeak and stupidity that goes on in most guilds.  Work, family etc comes first so more casual players are welcome there.  They have loads of people spread over several MMOs and there are hundreds who will be playing AoC on the PvE server so the chances of getting a guild city and being a force in the PvP endgame are good.  This is the first game I'll be playing with them and I'm fairly optimistic about it.

I'm thinking the same thing, Miasma.  Plus I'm so sloooow and caaaaasual that I'll probably be dead weight for any hardcore PvP guild for ages.  I'll have to find one which will wub for my mind.  Or nipples.  I don't care.

Just kidding of course, I know everyone here is dying to join me on a PVP server ! Oh wait, no messages yet! :)

I am interested.  But I am SO hardcore that even being part of an FFA guild is not good enough, because it might take valuable time away from solo ganking which is the purest way to gratify my selfish desires. 

But seriously...FFA PvP?  As I said before: it'll be dead in 6 months, but it'll be a hell of a six months. 

Hey!  I'm the one that DOESN'T hate you!  (http://www.realitybbqforums.com/images/smilies/tease.gif)

Due to one of your 18,000 smilies, I am unable to tell if you are insulting me even more by saying that you are the only one that doesnt hate me on this board or if you really do not hate me and are comforting me in your own way...

I'm going with the former.
 :cry2:

Enough about me, I heard there may be boobies here!!! And not evil Signe boobies either!

I do not joke about liking people. 

Also, I'm more interested in all the dafty drafty men running about in their man-knickers than the women with their nippleless boobies.

The roomie and I will be attempting an RP-PvP server.  If Vanaheim makes it as a name, I'll be pushing for that one.

If we like the game but find the server type unpalatable, then a PvE server down the line.

*sigh*
I would join Commander Slayerik in a second - he knows how to deliver fun to the PvP-hungry - but I have other obligations. Stupid pacts made with digital blood ages ago, when the Halberdier class was still in the game.

For people with miraculous patches:  have they improved the memory leaks any?  I really like the look and sound of this game and I'm considering a day one purchase but with only 2 gigabytes of RAM and a low toleration for really bad technical problems it'll just sour me on the whole experience if you're all relogging evey hour just for acceptable performance.  Thanks.

I played for a little bit yesterday and had to log off a couple of times.  I don't think this patch addressed the memory leak at all.  If so, they suck.

Seems a few of the Destiny quests got broken some how in the early levels. Miracle patch makes it play better, except for the details of actually, like, playing :-)

Just kidding. No idea if the events are connected.

ok disregard what I said earlier.  I'm regretting preordering as the game is barely running today for me at low settings. 

*edit* Nevermind, apparently my computer just really needed to be rebooted.

Thanks Falc :)

The guild I'm semi leading is not going to be hardcore by any means, hell my wife just agreed to pre-order with me! That means I'll have to level slow hehe

Well the FFA pvp beta is going *splendidly*.  Who'd have thought a game with set-respawn places and FFAPVP would turn into a "stand around and gank the rezzers" debacle.  Not Funcom, that's for sure!

 :awesome_for_real:

lol man

This game fails so hard for FFA. 

Just fails  sooo hard.

Hah I'm picturing half their servers like Darktide, inbred and empty but for a few early adopters boasting how many nubs they chased away that week.

Think I'll take a wait and see approach even though that +8 bag space and rhino mount preorder bonus was very tempting.

Its sad but I heard they were going to have full ffa even where there are missions where you need to level up, and deep inside my mind I heard a quiet voice saying "camping."

I have seen too much of the deep dark gaming soul...

Jebus... you'd think with 3 "pets" following me around my Necro would be all kinds of ownage.  HA.. no.  I got instajibbed by some rogue guy.  Back to the Dark Templar it is!  Wish I'd rolled up an Assassin so I could have one of them.  No surprise that "pure" stealth classes are owning face right now.

It would be unthinkable to roll anything but an assassin on an FFA server, imho.  Stealth rules all. 

Every class has stealth.

That sums up how they approached every single one of the games systems. They're making game design errors everyone here saw 4+ years ago. All over the place.

Funny in a car wreck kind of way.

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=86867&page=4

That thread pretty much sums it up.  But it'll be ok, because according to the thread, the only reason ganking is happening in FFA PvP is because its beta, and once its live people will care about their reputation and not gank and anyway player policing will work.

I guess in an industry catering to mostly 14-15 year olds, nobody can ever truly learn because your customer base never really ages  :-P

That thread is fucking CLASSIC.  Goddamn it's like half those people never, EVER experienced a PVP realm, much less an FFA pvp realm in their lives.  Must've rolled into the genre with WoW and thought Battlegrounds/ Arenas were what World PvP would be like.  :drill:

I really like this concept how killing people on FFA server would somehow earn these who do it bad reputation, and so they'll obviously refrain from doing that in live game.  :awesome_for_real:

It's probably very likely that those 17, 18 whatever year olds who can play AoC started their MMO playing with WoW.  Those people in that thread are one of the reasons I wouldn't get anywhere on a FFA PvP server.  I'm slow enough without all that and I want to have a guild town and stuff before the game puts me to sleep.

Also...  (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/images/smilies/crybaby2.gif) is what went through my mind reading that thread.

I don't see what these noob players should learn.

FFA servers without any structure are a bad idea, and they will remain so. It's the game designers that at this point should have learned something, not the players.

Then, of course, you've got a choice. Let's see how popular will be those servers post release. FFA servers are fun till there are noobs to gank, when the noobs are done those servers will become ghost towns.

rofl, I love all the people who go "it won't be like this at release."

I remember being bored so I rolled a toon on Mordred over 3 years after DAOC was released.  I spawned in the starter city outside the main town (forgot the name) with a level 1 toon.  Even though no one could attack me (you couldn't attack someone until they were level 10) many people tried even though they saw that I was WAY lower level than them.

Nothing will change at release, and thinking that it will is retarded.

Rumor has it that if you have an SLI system, you can force SLI mode by selecting "Force Alternate Frame Rendering 2" via nTune giving drastically increased performance - as in 20+ fps over the usual...

YMMV.

Once AO stabilized, it did have one of the most fun PVP systems available at the time, with no spawn camping, and a way to get back into the fight from a safe distance. They have done this before, for years.

FunCom did make a big woops by letting this stress test be a full on PVP event, but it smells to me like it was an idea from some moronic marketing exec who had to have their way.

Agreed. If your visible your gonna be a target. I'll be playing a Ranger, stealth and range FTW.


I could never get my non-stealth classes to actually Hide..i put full points into it and always got the "Your too low to hide in this area" or "find more shadows". I much prefer the stealth class insta-hide in broad daylight option. Also I think non-stealthers cannot move when hiding, but never was able to actually hide so I couldn't test this.

They can move and I got it to work with my Herald of Xotli. You move very slow though.

Triforcer wasn't talking about the players.

If your target age target never changes, then you think you're always designing for a certain type of player... which usually translates into how you were at that age. So, besides the fact that you're probably off because this generations teens are different from your generation's teens, you're also probably blinded by what you think they know about where they come from game-wise.

That's the problem. Aside from the tech, AO benefited by being the fourth big MMO at a time when anything coming along was going to attract attention. Whatever gameplay emerged thereafter has more to do with the community than anything Funcom specifically did. And yet in this case, they're trying to program it in.

No doubt to big success, according to that thread  :awesome_for_real:

Okay, my experience in beta so far:

Authentication Failure.

One bizarre thing they have done is to announce that there will be an official roleplaying server, but it will have the PvP ruleset. You can make a good argument that real roleplaying in the Conan universe requires full-on PvP, but one that only works in theory rather than in practice in my opinion. Encouraging roleplayers to roll on a server where a level 80 can slaughter your level 20 as they are talking to an NPC, and then head off to the nearest spawn point to see if you respawn there, is asking for wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This is why I think my attempt to play on one of these servers is doomed to failure.

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=1981693&postcount=11 (http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=1981693&postcount=11)


 :hello_thar:

Man, normally I can restrain my inner grammar nazi, but DAMN, I just couldn't this time.  The improper-'your'-to-total-words ratio is off the CHARTS here.

Damn! Your right, I was being pretty lazy there.

 I'm trying to make "your" the new "cuz".

(http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m20/r3dknight/YOURcat.jpg)

I barely notice anymore.  I type faster than I think a lot and make tons of errors.  I expect the people who point it out all the time were not breast fed as children.  Which is also probably why they're playing a game with nipples.  See?  It all makes sense now.   Albelian75 just had a momentary nipple lapse.  Some people on the innerhoops need SERIOUS nipple therapy.  (http://www.mommiescamelot.com/forum/images/smilies/boob2.gif)

Say, that is quite a nice avatar you got there  :pedobear:

I think its Hello Conan Kitty. Jade nipples on the outside of the vest and everything.

I think it's over now.

The patch notes said open beta was over.

I've never really had the courage to ask whether or not I was breast-fed, so unfortunately I can't prove you wrong on that.

Tangentially, I've noticed in AoC that occasionally when an NPC model is being loaded you'll sometimes see it briefly flash on your screen without clothes on, resulting in an occasional glimpse of bare nipple on female characters, which I find absolutely hilarious for some reason (something about technical glitching resulting in scandal amuses me).  Perhaps I will hereafter refer to this phenomenon as "nipple lapse."

I've been playing quite a lot of age of conan and I haven't seen a single nipple.

Since I'm rather accustomed to seeing nipples, I figured I'd do an extra check and run around all the NPC's in tortage and check their nipple status.
Unfortunately I saw none.

Being one those guys who enjoys a good boob once in a while, even if it's as pixelated as it has to be, I have to wonder. Where are all those nipples?

I think Merusk took everyone's nipples.   :ye_gods:

Anyone signing up for the Early Access?  I got it today and I couldn't find a client download link.  However they are supposedly emailing it to you.  Anyone know if there is another source?  A correct source?

Isn't there an early quest to collect 50 nipples? I think that's the issue: slow respawn rate of nipples on mobs. They need to increase the nipple spawn rate.

Allegedly, they email you when your payment is approved and the link will appear on your account page under payment history or something.  Not entirely sure.  Of course, the last time they said they'd email about the open beta, no one got one.  I think they suck at email.  People are complaining about the "pending" status on their account page.  Some people have received the download link but not an email.  Other's have the email and the link.  Who knows what Funcom are doing?  In any case, you could always use the link people posted on the official site, much to Funcom's supposed chagrin.     http://funcom.cachefly.net/AoC-EU-EarlyAccess.exe  or http://funcom.cachefly.net/AoC-US-EarlyAccess.exe depending on where you are.  Funcom doesn't seem to be very chagrined over it as they left the posts with the link up.  It doesn't appear to be a keylogger, imo.   :grin:

Of course, you could just wait.  You can't play until the 17th in any case.

I did.. and I'm hoarding them.

Here's one  (http://www.putfile.com/pic/8132692)
Here's another. (http://www.putfile.com/pic/8132693)

NSFW if you fear topless CGI from AoC.

I was definitely breast-fed.  Mom used to tell women with newborns all about how I used to bite the hell out of her nipples.  Right in front of me.  It wasn't embarrassing at all.

My experience continues:

No more authentication failure!

Now I just lose connection every time I try to create a character.

I am SOOOOOOOOOOO spending my money on this!!!

Erm.. you missed it. It ended 23 hours ago.  I'm surprised you even made it to character creation.

Joy.

Their login screen was so informative.

I didn't make it to actual character creation...more like, clicked on the create button and then got disconnected.

So nice of them to fix my authentication failure problem before ending it.

Well, at least I get my gigs back.

Yeah, actually the only nipples I've seen are from those accidental nipple-reveals while loading in the NPC models.  Which makes it even more amusing... it's like this whole technology implemented just so you can catch a quick glimpse of digital nipple if your machine is struggling to load models.

A thread I started on the AoC forums:  http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=89027

My favorite quote so far: 



... sometimes I wonder why F13 people stay here, when 95% of us could find some random MMO board and become its undisputed intellectual powerhouse.   :awesome_for_real:

Eh, beating up retards, like beating up the homeless, gets old after a while.