Can this game run on dial-up?

moonshake

I have high speed, but my brother only has dial-up.   I would like for him to try this game, though.   Is it functional on dial -up?   Or would the lag give him a bad impression of the game?

therain93

Well, the minimum specs on the boxes say 56k modem and I have managed to play it over a Verizon Wireless card on my laptop but that's really a tough call.  If he's nearby, invite him over to check out the game or else hand off to him a buddy key with the caveat that lag could mess with the experience a bit.

Amarsir

Playing doesn't take that much communication. You're constantly sending information, but never in huge packets. If you're really curious, try taking a demo snapshot of your playsession sometime and opening it up in any text browser. That text is all that gets sent back and forth, and it's really just a list of locations and events.

Lag comes from latency, not bandwidth. Think of the difference between mailing a letter and FedEx'ing a box of documents. One clearly gets more information there, but isn't necessarily any faster. (It could be in some Fiber-Optics cases, but isn't necessarily.)

Now where he would have a hold up is downloading patches. Not so much the incremental ones day to day, but probably the big issue ones with new maps and tilesets. And definitely the initial installation. So what you may want to do is take your copy, burn it onto a DVD-R and copy it onto his machine. Once he has the full install, play should be fast and clean.

**?sephiroth

I have played with people on dial up before, they seem to manage ok.  The main headache is that they take agggeessss to load into and out of each mission.  When they are in or out though they seem to do ok.

Yeebo

Yeah what he said.  I used to play on a dial-up connection back in the dark ages.  The phone lines in my house also sucked, so I generally only got 28K connections.  And it played fine.

One ting that really will blow, however, its patching the game to get started at the beginning.  You'll need to be able to leave your PC downloading overnight for at least several nights.