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

[Slayerik]

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

[Rasix]

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.

[Slayerik]

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)

[Ingmar]

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.

[Nija]

they DID have most of them ironed out. (IIRC?)

Assuming that the game is mostly feature and content complete.

hahahahahaha

[Ixxit]

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.

[Phred]

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.

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

Age of Conan - Beta Concerns Q&A

MMORPG.com: We have heard many complaints about the presence of loading screens in Age of Conan. Can you tell us why they are there? could the game have been made without them?

Funcom: When we started to develop Age of Conan we really wanted to bring a new level of immersion to MMOs (and judging from the feedback we have done exactly that!), and we wanted the most lush and detailed areas we could possibly deliver (while hand-picking the best from the Conan lore, across Hyboria). It was therefore a trade-off that we divided Conan into zones, and by doing so we also, naturally, had to have load times between the zones. I think this price is worth paying, for sure, but for Open Beta we reintroduced an old bug which expanded the loading times way beyond the acceptable (the bug makes the game write and store tons of code while loading, which increase the loading times too much).

It is noteworthy to mention that if you want a seamless world, you need to stream a lot of the content to make it load right. We tried this, but it meant degrading the quality of the graphics, and even getting a lot fewer interest points in the game, so the end result was an easy choice. Quality won!


MMORPG.com: We have heard that the Fileplanet Beta client is actually an old client and won't be the one used on release. Can you speak to that?


Funcom: It for sure won’t be the one we have on release! I mean, 150 experienced MMO developers working crunch are able to polish, a lot;) We are making some great updates and fixes based on the lessons learned, lessons we would not have received without the stress we put our servers and systems under. I must stress that it was, and is, beta, and the verdict should come for our launch version, not the version three weeks before.

And yes, I have seen the same rumors that it’s old, but it’s not entirely true. We tried to include the best we had on a stable approach, but in our eagerness to please we wanted to get a few additional fixes out (hence we pushed the launch back a couple of hours). In order to reach the May 1st date some of those fixes led to unwanted side-effects which weren’t discovered in time. For some, it got a bit rockier than we wanted. We are running an extensive survey now, and from the first few hundred replies (which should be statistically correct), it seems that most people are actually having tons of fun AND good performance. We are humble about it though, and admit that things could have gone smoother, but the experience some people have had now has helped us to improve for launch, which is what really matters.

It’s also clear that those who are in our Closed Beta have had a more stable and better experience because of the reasons mentioned in this interview, but rest assured we are aware what caused this and have some really nice updates for you come launch ;)


MMORPG.com: A number of players are complaining that they are experiencing poor performance despite meeting the recommended system specs. How do you respond to this?

Funcom: This is true for a minority of the players, but I feel pretty confident it’s not because of their systems alone but because of stalls and memory leaks, or even simpler things like trying high settings on a low-end machine. I mean, with the graphics we have, no lowest spec machine can even be kicked to perform well on high. I have to point out that a number of players are reporting stellar performance on the very same approach (meeting recommended specs). We cannot knee jerk to forums posts though, we need to ensure that the data we get, and where we subsequently put our best coder brains, is based on logic and correct data. We have now gathered loads of data, and we have learned a lot. It will surely improve for launch.


MMORPG.com: Do you expect performance issues to be resolved before launch?


Funcom: I don’t expect any high-end PC game to resolve absolutely all performance issues before launch, and it won’t be any different with Conan. It never ends as new graphics cards, drivers and machines are introduced. HOWEVER, when we are playing the launch code here we see great performance across numerous systems, OSes and cards. I was just down to the coder HQ (aptly renamed and organized for launch), and a laptop on low specs performed great with the fixes implemented! We have now FIXED the main causes of the issues on the Beta which were synch compiling of shaders and fragmentation of memory. The symptoms of these problems included most of the issues that some experienced, including missing NPCs, players falling through the ground, the map missing and crashes. In the latest builds we have improved memory handling and we do shader-compilation asynch, and OMG does it help! That we have solved this issue means a lot to us. It was unfortunate that some people on the Open Beta were affected by these issues (our bad), but now that we have the solution I am in a strange way happy about it too. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack, now that we have found it I can with relief say that it would have been _much_ worse to find out about this at launch.


MMORPG.com: Can you tell us what led Funcom to decide to create a game that would require higher-end computers to run?


Funcom: People love great graphics, and everyone is, regardless of what they say, being pumped by graphics. It’s a trade-off, surely, and both a gift and a curse, but at the end of the day it has also propelled us into the position as the, by far, most read about, viewed and awarded MMO in development. In all of this (famous last words etc.), I think people will actually be pleasantly surprised about how well Conan runs on lower than the highest spec machines.


MMORPG.com: There are members who are complaining that (from their experiences in the Fileplanet Beta), they expect AoC to have a "rocky" launch and point to AO's launch as an example. Can you speak to this?


Funcom: If you say that you surely weren’t there for the AO launch. I was, and it can’t even by a fraction compare.

We got a couple of surprises when we launched the Open Beta (which it was honestly great we found them at this point and not at launch). We also proved beyond any doubt that our server technology is rock stable once we deployed the first fix (we expected more issues, and did not get them, a very good sign). That most all (80-90%?) seem to think our core gameplay is really fun and engaging is a very nice outake, and that we have taken immersion, storytelling and audio in MMOs to a whole new level is another one, and so much more. We are on track to something special, and it’s FUN. The day we dig down because of bad news we have lost as a company. We are about learning from the things which don'tt go as well as we would have liked them to, and improving on that.

Do I think we will get a rocky launch? Any MMO launch is a major challenge, and there is always something, but I think we are looking good at the moment. We have been through the storm before, so we know what we are up against, and I think we have what it takes to make it right.


MMORPG.com: On the flip side, what are the best results that you have gotten out of the beta so far?


Funcom: That most people love our game! That it’s fun, that it’s mature, that the combat system delivers, that the previews coming up are so good, that our server tech is even better than anticipated, and that we learned so much, and not the least, that we are able to fix the majority of the reported issues for launch.


MMORPG.com: You hinted at a beta surprise in our latest interview, care to reveal this today?


Funcom:Yeah! The short version; we have an epic ending to our open beta! We had always planned something special, and it was a chore to not speak about it during the fuzz leading up to this, but we didn’t want to destroy the emotional impact the news would have. Hopefully the players will love what we have coming for them, and I think they will. We don’t plan to do major patches to the Open Beta before it ends though, but some tweaks there might be;)

And what is the surprise? On the 10th of May, we are transforming the entire Open Beta into PvP MAYHEM, while at the same time giving players to all which Hyboria as to offer! That is right, as we take down our servers for a short period we are at the same time changing the entire server rule-set to Free For All PvP carnage! Your servers will ALL become PvP! Participate if you dare, or make a new character and stay in the safety of Tortage!

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Draegan]

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.

[Trippy]

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.

It didn't.

[Phred]

There was a tweak for slow zoning in this tech round up

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

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.

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.

[Miasma]

We are running an extensive survey now, and from the first few hundred replies (which should be statistically correct), it seems that most people are actually having tons of fun AND good performance.

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.

[tmp]

MMORPG.com: Can you tell us what led Funcom to decide to create a game that would require higher-end computers to run?

Funcom: People love great graphics, and everyone is, regardless of what they say, being pumped by graphics. It’s a trade-off, surely, and both a gift and a curse, but at the end of the day it has also propelled us into the position as the, by far, most read about, viewed and awarded MMO in development.

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.

[Signe]

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.    

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.

[Arrrgh]

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.

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.

[tmp]

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 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 

[Draegan]

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

^^ 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.

[sam, an eggplant]

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!

[Draegan]

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

[Engels]

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.

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.

[Chenghiz]

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.

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.

[Merusk]

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

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

[Venkman]

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

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?

[Ixxit]

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.

[KallDrexx]

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.

[Hound]

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.

[Draegan]

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

[Venkman]

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.

Nice, thaks Ixxit and Kall.

[Draegan]

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

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

[krazyk]

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.

It didn't.

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.

[Hound]

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

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

[lac]

Win XP here, 175 are Vista drivers.

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.