Age of conan, Open beta: May 1st 2008.

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

[HaemishM]

If you experience stalls remember that you are testing beta-code.

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.

[Venkman]

It's still beta.

At launch though, yea. 

[Merusk]

Hey, you can fix a LOT in 18 days. 

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. 

[HaemishM]

It's still beta.

At launch though, yea. 

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.

[schild]

If you experience stalls remember that you are testing beta-code. Getting data from you is our way to make the launch experience so much better for everyone.

  Oh ho ho ho.  Realllly?

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

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.

[Nija]

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

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

[HRose]

They simply ran out of money to do the graphic.

And they aren't Turbine whose only skill is to convince idiots to dump money on them failure after failure.

[Ixxit]

There's no way it stalls on my Q9450. Not a chance.

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.

[Numtini]

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.

[sam, an eggplant]

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

Extremely well. Everquest was top dog for years.

[Falwell]

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.

[Hutch]

They simply ran out of money to do the graphic.

And they aren't Turbine whose only skill is to convince idiots to dump money on them failure after failure.

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.

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Teleku]

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

Extremely well. Everquest was top dog for years.

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.

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Ixxit]

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.

[Soukyan]

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.

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

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.

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

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.

[tmp]

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.

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.

[Threash]

Will this be able to run the game ok?

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

[Morfiend]

If you experience stalls remember that you are testing beta-code. Getting data from you is our way to make the launch experience so much better for everyone.

  Oh ho ho ho.  Realllly?

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

You still can. Thanks for playing!

Yeah, it worked so well for Hellgate.

[Numtini]

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.

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.

[Simond]

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

Extremely well. Everquest was top dog for years.

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.

[Venkman]

It's still beta.

At launch though, yea. 

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.

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.

[KallDrexx]

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.

[Murgos]

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

[HaemishM]

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. 

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.

[Ingmar]

They simply ran out of money to do the graphic.

And they aren't Turbine whose only skill is to convince idiots to dump money on them failure after failure.

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.

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?

[KallDrexx]

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

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

[HaemishM]

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?

[Venkman]

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

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

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Evildrider]

They simply ran out of money to do the graphic.

And they aren't Turbine whose only skill is to convince idiots to dump money on them failure after failure.

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.

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).

[Evildrider]

Will this be able to run the game ok?

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

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.

[sam, an eggplant]

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