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Your First Impression of AoC is directly proportionmal to your Computer's power
Czzarre
Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 3,742
Hey all, Well the gates are open and we have flooded into the world of Hyboria (800K of us..wow). As we can see on this site and other forums, everyone is giving their first impression of the game. There is a mixture of Pro and Anti AoC posts here, and thats to be expected (generally more people rant about things they hate than post about things they feel are good...rule of thumb 3:1)
Still in all of the 'My impression' posts one thing seems clear. Its not the 'Gameplay' thats the issue ..its the 'play game' ...or lack of your system to be able to. I wrote about this in my Review ( Age of Conan: "A great Game with a fatal Flaw" ). Still we must keep things in perspective and give the game a chance to grow on you, and your system.
The last week of Beta there were HUGE advances in the ability of lower end machines to play AoC...there is no reason to believe that wont continue. Bugs fixed, memory leaks patched, etc.
Also, playing on Low settings is NOT the end of the world. High or Low its still the same Game. Even on Low settings the graphics are way better than most MMO (WOW for example). What upsets a lot of people is that someone says how wonderful the game is at HIGH settings then you feel denied this experience.
In time, you can buy more RAM, a new graphics card and enjoy things on higher settings. Take it slow as your budget allows.
Good Luck all
Comments
Very good point.
However, for me running the game on low isn't sufficient, I still lag and have a poor framerate. Really regret not looking at graphics cards when purchasing my laptop, pity I had bearly even heard of this game at the time...
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I agree completely. I bought new gaming computers this year for both me and my son, and we've had nary a performance issue yet. Runs smooth, occasional lag here and there (very brief) and overall we're quite happy.
Contrast that with this report from a friend of mine (who unfortunately paid no attention to posts about upgrading my computers to play AOC/WAR this year.)
I had to give him the bad news that unfortunately his rig's underpowered for this game. But you'll note, he got it to run smoother at the lower graphic settings.
But I played VG and LoTRO on low settings due to a poor rig, and honestly, it contributed to my general dis-satisfaction with both games. (not the only reason) I can understand why people wouldn't want to play at thoses settings, and as I told my friend, time to upgrade.
I think many gamers get confused by the fact that they have no problem running WOW, they don't realize it is 4-5 year old technology that was intentionally optimised to run well on as many systems as possible.
For better or worse, Funcom chose a different path and there are pluses and minuses to that decision.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Good post. And yes, while at the highest settings, AoC is one of the best looking games that I've ever seen, even at the lowest possible settings, it looks great.
If you really want to discuss computer's not being able to handle the game, tell me why people should upgrade a Nvidia graphics card from the 8000 series just to play this game? I have a card that plays every other game I've ever played on the highest graphics settings, yet this game it can handle on low and medium when out of the cities. The amount of money you'd spend on a 9800 (or two or four), you'd may as well wait 6 months and buy a whole new computer for slightly more (I'm assuming they won't be buffing their requirements as we go?). I hate to tell you buddy but playing on low is nowhere near as good as playing WoW on high - and this is coming from someone who hasn't played WoW in 6 months because he got sick of the game (ie. I'm not a WoW fan).
Kinda seems like a Funcom problem and a great way to scare people away by making a game with such high requirements.
INdeed, but in the end, its just Graphics. So long as you can play this game smoothly the gameplay should be more important that the OOO and Ahh of seeing the distant mountains. I think we are placnig too much emphasis on the Low, Med and HIGH. So long as its smooth, and you can play the game, I think youll find the gameplay is a blast.
If grafics >> all, and you dont have a computer for it ...then there is nothing I can say or do that will make you happy. However, I ran a graph on what people looked for when they used the MMORPG Finder. Over 8,000 searches and Graphics came in 4th. Gameplay is still what most people look for first in a game. Look HERE for the graph (3rd graph down).
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
I know mine was, thankfully my computer could handle the load
MMORPG Characters immortalized!
LLyncu: Star Wars Galaxies (Chimaera)
Xiode: Age of Conan (Mannanan)
People also need to realize clicking "low" doesn't tank everything and mean that that's as low as it gets.
The view distances for many things, especially rendering in high detail, are defaulted to almost 2000 meters. You can't see a thing at 2000m for crap, let alone need it rendered in high detail. Stuff like that isn't changed when choosing low settings, so there's a lot of customization necessary still to see if you can run it.
I'm using a 3.4mhz single-core processor, 8600GTS I picked up very cheap, and 2 gigs of cheap ram, and the game still looks wonderful while getting 30+ fps. Would it look better and handle huge huge fights with spell effects well with a good computer? Well, yeah, but mine's over 4 years old aside from the graphics card I updated, and it still runs fine.
If you really want to discuss computer's not being able to handle the game, tell me why people should upgrade a Nvidia graphics card from the 8000 series just to play this game? I have a card that plays every other game I've ever played on the highest graphics settings, yet this game it can handle on low and medium when out of the cities. The amount of money you'd spend on a 9800 (or two or four), you'd may as well wait 6 months and buy a whole new computer for slightly more (I'm assuming they won't be buffing their requirements as we go?). I hate to tell you buddy but playing on low is nowhere near as good as playing WoW on high - and this is coming from someone who hasn't played WoW in 6 months because he got sick of the game (ie. I'm not a WoW fan).
Kinda seems like a Funcom problem and a great way to scare people away by making a game with such high requirements.
They shouldn't and thus they should realize their computers are not powerful enough to run the game and move on. Also you can't clump this game in with "ever other game". This game is new and it uses the top of the line graphics. Crysis is an example of a game that relies heavily on graphics, however, it is not an MMO and doesn't have as many things going on as an online game would.
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You wouldn't understand
I think it was the right choice to aim this high in requirements. Many mmos suffer from being outdated technically in only 1-2 years.
And given that AoC looks better than most existing mmos even with all settings to low, it should work well also on mediocre computers.
Just let me say I certainly don't agree with that statement, its simply a cop-out.Simply because folks look for gameplay, Believe me I don't think that the graphics r all that great myself. Been in it for closed betas and open
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Not always, I run the game with everything on at full wack (eventhough anyone that can will tell you that half the stuff doesn't really do anything, if its not in they should just grey it out) but after tonights attempt at playing it can kiss my ass. Been loving it by and large but some of the bugs and poor application of grouping are game breaking for me so I'm going to give it a rest for a bit and come back when they hopefully decide to fix things up a bit.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
I don't completely dissagree with you but personally my first impression of AOC sucked. I just don't like it that much, yes the graphics are nice but the implementation of the systems seems to be poor. I don't know it could just be me but I would rather play AC rather then AoC, the graphics are crapier but the game seems more in depth to me. However I am the kind of guy that will buy a game and force myself to play it for a month and get at least 1 full week game play in to see what it is like before I cancel my account. I hope it can redeem itself.
Some ATI graphic card owner have powerful computers but the game is running poorly. Hopefully a fix is on the way.
I would get nvidia 8800 gt but the pcei 2.0 is not compatible with my pcie 1.0 motherboard. I have heard ATI cards don't have this problem, so I wait for a fix.
I can believe this. The game is really pretty much unplayable for me.
If I am out in the middle of nowhere and not in a city, I can get 30-ish fps.
But when other players come along or when I'm in a city, it can tank very very quickly.
So saying I get "30 fps" is really very deceptive, because what is really relevant is the MINIMUM FPS I get over say any given half hour period. This minimum fps is something like 1/10 fps (that is, one frame every 10 seconds is about as bad as it gets) which is of course completely unplayable.
To further compound issues, I find that tweaking the graphics settings does little at all. If I set everything to zero with the lowest possible resolution (as in, even low settings don't set things at zero, but if I further go and turn everything off and view distance to 0, etc) it *STILL* has framerate issues, even though it is redering pretty much nothing at all. On the other hand, if I set them to medium on a more reasonable resolution, I get only slightly worse framerate (with the caveat that of course it is still completely tanking with lots of people around.)
I have looked at performance guides stickied in the main forums as well, with no luck.
By contrast, I can run Neverwinter Nights 2 on max settings with 1920x1200 resolution, and the Witcher also on high graphical settings. Age of Conan is much harder on my system than either of those other two games.
I regretfully cancelled my subscription today, although it is still good until 6/26. It's really too bad, as this is kind of $100 or so down the drain. I had hoped the game would last me at least a month or two...
I have to say that, my computer is almost 2 years old 3.4 ghtz 2 gig ram 1900 crossfire radeon and i get 25-50 fps depending on the area and if im in combat or not, that also includes cities. Now if my old arse computer can run this game on Medium settings like silk, I think the problem is the video card. Alot of people are using Nvidia, last time i used Nvidia my system had problems and the card couldnt handle it. But I am with Tu here, im glad mine runs it fine.
What're your specs and did you read the min requirements before buying the game?
Edit: If you're comp isn't even a single core 3.0ghz, you need a new comp anyways, not just for AoC, lol.
I have somewhere around the recommended specs for the game, so yes :P I did read the requirements. 7800 GTX and 2 gig ram.
Again, I can in isolation get very good fps (30+) but this really tanks in cities or when a lot of people are around.
Edit: Before you ask, yes drivers are up to date and blah-blah-blah. I in fact recently reformatted my hard drive and installed everything again, so I don't think that's the issue.
CPU?
As with the above poster I have a 2 year old Dell XPS 600 and I have a nVidia 7800GTX card which gives me a frame rate of 25-40 FPS on medium settings, and it plays great for me.
A lot of complaints I see are from people with series 8 nVidea cards. I remember my last PC had a horrible nVidea card with a huge heatsink on it that constantly overheated and gave rubbish performance.
I wonder if they made a similar mistake with the 8 series and the 9 series was made to correct that.
CPU?
Deviate...calm down...I read the system requirements on the back of the box and I have close to the recommended ones. This includes the CPU requirements. I am sorry if you find this so hard to believe, but there you go.
CPU?
Deviate...calm down...I read the system requirements on the back of the box and I have close to the recommended ones. This includes the CPU requirements. I am sorry if you find this so hard to believe, but there you go.
I think he's asking what your cpu is, not pointing a finger at it. You've told us your graphics card and ram, but not your CPU
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I admire you that you're willing to keep an open mind about the game on the off-chance that your opinion may possibly change.
Personally, I was a little sceptical at first. But, slowly the game has shown me that there are the little funcom touches in there that often get missed by other games. Its hard to put a finger on it, to me its the lore in the quests, the tongue in cheek humour (e.g. a brothel called "The Bearded Clam" made me laugh). Little bits of humour in the patch notes, the way they basically motion captured EVERYTHING possible (even chickens!). Don't get me wrong, there are quite a number of little glitches and bugs that need attention. But nothing game breaking.
As for performance: I've got 4600+ with 2gb ram and 8800 GTX. The game plays well for me on the whole, however I see a noticable fps drop in Connells Valley (this is were I've found that it's the grass draw distance and grass density that is killing my fps). Personally I think there's some textures that need redoing which could possibly be hindering performance.
I also get 1 lockup in 14 hours, which given that AoC is bearly out of the door, ain't bad.
Tomorrow an extra 2gb should turn up, so I'll see if theres any difference specifically in that area with the ram added.
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ill add that playing on a machine that just meets the minimum specs, i am enjoying the game greatly.
all low settings, it looks at least as good as lotro does on med+ settings. my fps are low, in the 10-15 range, but its playable for sure, and ive not died or fallen of a cliff because of lag or framerates. load screens are between 5-30 secs, depending on where im loading into.
ideal? of course not. but it'll suit me fine until i upgrade my comp later this year.
i dont think a negative (or positive) shouldnt be added to a review because of system requirements, but they are worth noting, imho.
just my 2 tin on the matter.
CPU?
Deviate...calm down...I read the system requirements on the back of the box and I have close to the recommended ones. This includes the CPU requirements. I am sorry if you find this so hard to believe, but there you go.
Hehe, I was just asking what your processor was bro. If you're using a single core thats under 3.0ghz, thats where your problem is.