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Age of Conan fails PC Gamers - Here is the PROOF!
neya
Member Posts: 44
Here are the facts:
Age of Conan is intended to be released on the Xbox; if you were not aware of this; check out the article on this very site. http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/191/feature/1958
Want to know why your Age of Conan runs terrible on your computer?
It's because the game is cross platform designed. In other words; tailoring the game to Xbox hardware is much easier than tailoring to PC hardware as the specifications for each idividual PC varies wildly.
Valve ran into problems with cross-platfrom when developing Team Fortress 2.
See page 20 of this article: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/GDC2008_CrossPlatformDevelopment.pdf
The above article was a presentation given by Valve; on page 20 you can clearly see that some of the known big issues with cross-platform gaming "Out of Memory" Error. Sound familiar??
Want to know why your Age of Conan is instanced?
To address the problem with cross-platforms and the memory loads the game zones are split (Instanced) to accomodate the varying memory loads on the different platforms.
Want to know why your Age of Conan Emotes have the /e command and the emote list?
Not all Xbox gamers will invest in a keyboard and mouse for their system; therefore they have to make the emote system accessible through use of a joypad; thats why you see the list of emotes and thats why you as a PC gamer have to type the /e before executing an emote to bypass this list.
Spent a fortune on a PC System but getting low FPS?
Isn't it strange that you get higher FPS on High graphical settings and lower FPS on Low graphical settings? It's because of the cross-platform issues with the game engine and how it manages memory, textures; so on and so forth.
I really don't need to go on. This presentation from Valve which was delivered to the Game developers Conference 2008: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/GDC2008_CrossPlatformDevelopment.pdf
I think the above presentation highlights all of the issues currently being experienced by Funcom on Age of Conan; and all because the game is cross-platform.
So yes you may be a fan, yes you may hate the game. The truth is; your beta testing a game so that it can launch to Xbox.
Comments
It's not big secret that the game's finish state will be when it launches on the Xbox and not before. Most of us are just amazed at how much of it is still unfinished.
Here are the facts. Get used to it, the lure of easy money has a very strong appeal. Making an MMORPG that is popular cross-platform is the dream of every Game development house out there today, (yes even Blizzard) and companies will continue to experiment to try and pull it off.
Trouble with experiments is there always are a lot more failures than successes.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
I am just amazed that the game actually passed it's certification stage when it is totally unfinished. What botehrs me more is that we as PC gamers are expected to buy into this and stress test for console gamers!
How are we supposed to know what a game is like? It's not as if we can take a MMORPG game back to the store and request our money back once the game key has been activated. This is why the MMORPG industry needs to change or perhaps we as PC gamers need to start being more reserved when it comes to purchasing just launched titles.
The game runs fine on my system.
instancing - it's zoned and instances only spawn if the zone goes over X amount.
/e??? lol I don't even know what you're talking about there. In every mmo I've played I've had to type a /something to do an emote.
Clearly I should just take my PC outside and shoot it.
Have you ever played an mmo?
All i can say is thank god a friend in town here bought the game. I got to try it many times at his place. Just glad he tested the game out (which he cancelled his sub) and not me wasting the time and money.
I'm sorry, but I don't see any proof at all.
Age of Conan is not build for the Xbox, it's build for the PC and dumbed down for the Xbox360 later on in the form of a port. If Age of Conan was build with the 360 in mind it would
- Be released prior or simultaneously with the PC version
- The client would be much, much smaller.Age of Conan is 30gb, the vast majority of Xbox360 owners have a 20gb hard drive.
Wish I could have done the same; I cancelled my Sub but still £30.00 down the drain.
Look at the valve document and read the developers notes. I think that will answer your statements.
Wish I could have done the same; I cancelled my Sub but still £30.00 down the drain.
Ya i tested it with the fileplanet thing, and knew a friend was going to buy it. I thought well since the OB wasn t exciting me at all i ll try his game out. I was actually going to get a buddy pass etc, but i won t bother now, i know i will never buy the game anyways.
Theres a good reason why the PC gamers are more or less testing this game, console gamers would never put up with the s**t we have had from Funcom, if the game is released broken they will return their copys en masse. Console gamers do not tolerate buggy games.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; I don't see how this could be classed as trolling when I am providing proof of cross-platform issues which are obviously evident in AoC.
And I have a very good life thank you very much; I can't help it if your jealous and twisted but we can't all be sociable animals. Some of us have to be pecker heads
And I have cancelled my subscription; im just providing information to the community to answer questions to the problems experienced by Funcom. It's up to players to make their own decisions to pay for a Stress Test.
You can pretty much take any console game back to the store and say it doesn't work to get your money back. It's a different story with a PC because the store will just say it's your hardware.
So we PC Gamers fork out money for these unfinished games with no recourse to a refund! Thats why the industry needs to change or we as PC Gamers need to change.
uhm to the emote thing:
cox also has an emote list and i am sure there are other mmorpgs that do too, there are actually people who rather have a list of them as an alternative to directly type in the command. whether you have to type /dance or /e dance has certainly nothing to do with the existence of an emote list or an xbox version, it's simply a difference in parsing inputs, there are other mmorpgs that also do it with an /e, there are sometimes alias's like :dance for /e dance and stuff like that, it's all about how you feel it makes most sense to parse the input data.
While the cross-platforming thing does make some sense it really doesn't matter at this point. Just look at the AoC forums on here and their main site. Most people have already figured out that the game as a whole was released too early and for the most part is a big let down under its current status. Give it 6 months to a year and all the gripes you and other people have will hopefully be taken care of.
I'm not sure why people keep making new threads on here about all of the problems with AoC. It's been a month since the game was first released. The vast majority of problems were figured out in the first two weeks. Stop kicking a dead horse.
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A work in progress: (Update: 08/09/10)Easily find your favorite type of MMO
First if you did really read the valve document then you would have found out that the memory troubles are usually happening on the console in the cross platform developement. for a pc you can easily set a min requirement of 1 gb ram, and recommended of 2gb, but on a console you only have limited ram with no way of upgrade (512 mb combined system&gfx ram for xbox 360). also if pc runs out of ram the os starts swapping data from ram to harddisk so the pc doesn't crash, while a console will just crash.
Yes on pc's aoc still crash with out of memory error, but mostly thats happening on stadard 32bit windows, where windows limits every program to utilise a maximum of 2gb ram, you can change that with a bootoption to allow 3gb per program too.
Now the big question why is the game using more than 2gb ram on systems where it should not be allowed to use more than that? The answer is most likely a memory leak, they exist in every bigger application/game with dynamic memory management especially when the programm is new, with time most of them will get fixed but completely removing all memory leaks from a big software is nearly impossible.
why are instancing and zoning needed?
First Zoning and Instancing are different things (these things get mixed up too often here and on other forums) that often apear together, but could also be used without each other.
Zoning is simply splitting the world in small parts to reduce resource needs by only having to keep track of the current zone the character is in. Basically nearly every mmo is zoned, only some try to hide it like wow where the game loads the next zone in the background when you get close to the zoneborder. Vanguard works the same way as wow but there it did not work out as smooth as in wow cause the amount of data to be loaded is bigger so the background load is not finishing in time usually and gameplay usually stops short during the loading. Wow also used some other tricks like the small passages between the zones that don't let you see far ahead usually so that you don't notice that you cannot see whats hapening in the next zone to give you the illusion of a seemless world.
Instancing is allowing the game to duplicate zones for individual players/groups or also in case that a zone gets overfilled. nearly every mmo today uses instancing for special story instances/instanced group dungeons/raid instances. For the singleplayer/group ones it is usually used for storytelling aspects, in raiddungeons it is usually used to allow all players access to the raids based on special timescales (to limit the influx of the good raiditems without allowing some guilds to permacamp & get a lock on some mobs).
Also there is the additional way of instancing that aoc & Eq2 use to balance load, once a zone has too many players in it it will create a identical copy and split up people between these. This gives the developers the advantage that they betetr can controll how many playercharacters are in a zone at same time and so they can balance as an example polygon count of that zone based on that number, additionally a limited number of players in each zone also allows to balance respawn timers around that number, and avoid to have to use dynamic spawn timers based on actual number of players in the zone.
So in my opinnion zoning is mostly negative if its not done in background (but its nearly impossible to avoid it without limiting the graphics) while on the other side i see both positive and negative sides of instancing. (and i think only very few players would really want a mmo completely without instanced dungons /raids, while the opinnions on the open world instancing are more negative).
Just as final summary even without the xbox version coming out the devs would not have had a chance at creating aoc with same graphics without zoning & instancing. If they had decided not to use these techniques the characters would have been a lot less detailed, and the zones probably too.
I think paying for something which doesn't deliver what was stated on the box is the main reason why there are so many player issues with AoC. I for one am dissatisfied with paying £30.00 for something which is so unfinished and barely playable due to it's current state.
Providing information so other gamers don't waste their money like I did is all fair. I just provide the factual information and gamers can make their own decision.
I for one will never ever buy another MMORPG pre-release or just after release.
The game run fine on the 2 pc I have at home. (20 to 70fps on one system and 15 to 40 on the other (high settings both 9800gtx and 8800gts320)
In our version (french) we do /laugh to laugh , no need to do a /e ...
I think paying for something which doesn't deliver what was stated on the box is the main reason why there are so many player issues with AoC. I for one am dissatisfied with paying £30.00 for something which is so unfinished and barely playable due to it's current state.
Providing information so other gamers don't waste their money like I did is all fair. I just provide the factual information and gamers can make their own decision.
I for one will never ever buy another MMORPG pre-release or just after release.
Like I said give it 6 months to a year and try the game again on a buddy key. They will have hopefully fixed all of their major issues with the game by then. Then you will more than likely get your moneys worth. If you are unhappy with the instancing and/or emotes you should have done some research about the game before buying it if it's that big of a turn off.
The primary point of your original post is to not buy the game since it is currently poop. The information you are providing is not something new. You missed that bandwagon by about 3 weeks.
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A work in progress: (Update: 08/09/10)Easily find your favorite type of MMO
I don't even think the problem is companies releasing unfinished games anymore, I mean, who doesn't do it. But that's not the point, the point is Funcom blantantly lied out of their ass about the state of the game, the features, and etc.
The game runs fine on my system.
instancing - it's zoned and instances only spawn if the zone goes over X amount.
/e??? lol I don't even know what you're talking about there. In every mmo I've played I've had to type a /something to do an emote.
Clearly I should just take my PC outside and shoot it.
Have you ever played an mmo?
Woot!!! Good for you that it runs fine on your system... Have a cookie.
But it does run like crap on a lot and I do mean a lot of other peoples systems.
Have you never had a game run poorly on your system?
<modedit>
I haven't played the game, but want to comment on the false assumptions from this post.
AoC had initial intentions of being XBox 360 and PC. What you don't seem to understnad the development tools, and architecture between the XBox 360 and the PC are virtually idential with the exception of using a controller in design and DVD based loading.
The XBox 360 is running Windows XPx64 with a croos implementation of DX9 and DX10 features.
So developing for both the PC and XBox 360 is fairly seamless and would not result in errors like out of memory, etc.
Now if the game was designed for the PS3 and PC,then you have major differences in development.
(For newbies, go look up even XNA, it develops games for both the XBox 360 and PC seamlessly.)
The reason? The XBox 360 is running Windows and uses DirectX technologies, JUST LIKE A PC.
In fact the reason gaming has done well on the XBox 360 isthe same developmwent and optimzations work on both the PC and 360, unlike the horrid PS3 development platform that is very foreign to PC gaming, and is still having tons of development platform issues.
(Many of the XBox 360 technologies are at the heart of Vista from the waythe OS handles theGPU(WDDM) to RAM virtualization and DX10 features and the push for NVidia and ATI to move to unified shaders - again unlike the PS3 that has a slow non-unfied shader NVidia Geforce 7800 with peformance closer toa 7600. - Meaning most laptops from 2005 have more graphica power than a PS3.)
Im a amazed at how much time people are willing to invest on trashing this game. Its like your angry because your experiance was the ultimate and if you are feeling down you need to spread your anger. If the game sucks I dont need you to let me know about it, I would of already found out for myself. The fact is this daily rant on how bad AoC is comical. Get lives people or invest your time in helping the community rather then tear it down. AoC is the new world and accept it or move on.
The game runs fine on my system.
instancing - it's zoned and instances only spawn if the zone goes over X amount.
/e??? lol I don't even know what you're talking about there. In every mmo I've played I've had to type a /something to do an emote.
Clearly I should just take my PC outside and shoot it.
Have you ever played an mmo?
Woot!!! Good for you that it runs fine on your system... Have a cookie.
But it does run like crap on a lot and I do mean a lot of other peoples systems.
Have you never had a game run poorly on your system?
<modedit>
I have to agree with Neya on most points regarding AOC and the 360, but i dont agree with the "/e" command theory seeing that coh/cov has been using "/e" commands for emotes for as long as ive been playing.
personally I understand the whole cross-platforming appeal but its not an easy thing to do since no system even if made by the same company(i.e. Xbox 360 and windows pc's). if companies really want to reach the console people aswell as the pc people the best thing is to do what EQ did back in the day. making a separate game for their console( Sony that is). Sure it would be fun to find a seamless way for both platformers and pc folk alike to mingle but lets face it that's the impossible journey unless every pc was made with the exact same specs. It's not so much that consoles are the problem the truth is that pc's are because no two pc's are alike where as consoles are alike in majority of ways.
I thought the idea of everquest online adventures being the PlayStation's own personal MMORPG made it that much better simply because it staid to the same basis as its pc counterpart while at the same time breaking console owners into the EQ and in some cases the MMORPG world. But companies will continue to try their best to make a MMO game cross-platform because the players keep wishing for it. But trust me on this it will be a long time before its perfected so don't expect greatness, always keep a bit of judging till you see it yourself or you'll be disappointed everytime.
I also believe that console gamers and pc gamers should stick together as gamers but not go looking for that amazing MMORPG or just any MMO to cross-platform perfectly the first time. I'm sure age of Conan will improve over time just be patient and hope for the best. The only game to cross-platform and survive the battle was Final Fantasy XI. Altho it should be noted that it didn't get there without a few hitches along the way.
One day we may see that breakthrough but till then be patient and just try to get through all the glitchy laggy screen punching hair pulling strain that some people will experience.