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.
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?
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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.
/e is for the people who will play AOC on the 360 with a keyboard and people without it will use the emote list I guess is what they were trying to say.......... But EQ2 has the same thing a /e and a list but its not on a console.
Im so glad I didnt waste my money on this game. I was really excited about it at first but then decided to wait a bit and see if I wanted to buy it after launch cuz Ive had bad esperiences with pre ordering. Ended up this is not the game I was looking for.
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.
cuz its a free world (for the most part) an we are allowed to voice our pissed off opinions. if i play a game, use a product, or anything else and its not what its supposed to be (broke, or just down right not worth the money i paid) yeah *IM* going to say something. im not going to leave it up to someone else to voice my opinion for me who may or may not get it right. if no one said anything it would look like the games/other products have nothing wrong with them. if only 5 people say something about a game.. then it just seems like nothing is really wrong with it. if 50,000 people say something.. yeah then its probably got something wrong with it. im a father and lets say if i buy my son a toy and he chokes to death on it when it was suposed to be a safe product your damn right im going to say something to the company who made it, the community, news, whatever. aoc and games may not be life or death situations but the principle is the same, nothing gets changed for the better if everyone just sits quietly saying nothing. by the way im sure we would have less pissed off posts here if FC wasnt CENCORING its players on aoc fourms. but thats another pissed off arguement entirely.
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.
Actually the game was designed from the ground up for Xbox. Hence the reason for the so called revolutionary combat....it's simply a way for Xbox users to interface with an MMO combat system without the need for as many buttons as a keyboard - biggest lie in MMO history.
Also the PC version was dumbed down for Xbox from the start not later, allowing for a simple port.
Of note, I don't blame Funcom for anything beyond ignoring a few class bugs. I expected more from the way they'd spoken about the state of the game up to launch, but it's not really suprising that it's in the state it is in or that it will take so long to feature-complete it.
After all, every other MMO company has taken us for a ride, and Funcom don't exactly had the pedigree of producing quality at launch.
i am sooo tired of people blaming cross platforming for games being terrible. So what this game was developed for both PC and 360. BIG DEAL. Did everyone forget that one of the most popular and longest lasting MMOs was developed for PC and PS2 (FFXI anyone?) later they even added 360 to that list. that game has always run great, and while it may not be a graphical marvel anymore, its still a good looking game. Maybe its just because Square knows what they are doing. I haven't played Vanguard, dont plan on playing, but the OP needs to find a different reason for its woes. FFXI proves to us that the cross-platforming thing isn't it.
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.
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.
So far there has only been one cross platform MMO...FFXI. It was highly successful and continues to be.
AoC isn't cross platform yet.
AoC is a victim of poor design, surprise - Funcom. Honestly, what did you expect? The last MMO these guys launched made Vanguard look polished and bugfree
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 I understand what you're trying to suggest...
AoC is only optimized for the one setup, while things like the "Low" settings aren't tweaked, because they don't care; the only audience that matters is the Xbox 360 crowd? Is that about right?
It's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't think I've seen enough proof. You'd need a hard-line coder to come in, dissect the coding of the game, and give a statement on it... which I don't see happening any time soon.
Also, there have been immensely successful cross-platform titles before. Final Fantasy 11 was one of my favorite MMORPG's ever, and it originated on the PS2, and worked it's way to PC. At no point did I eve felt that SE didn't want me playing their game either.
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
or perhaps we as PC gamers need to start being more reserved when it comes to purchasing just launched titles.
I think that is indeed a key solution. I don't even buy most single player games before the first round of patches is released. Gives you time to read the reviews and to watch the price drop. Of course if everyone waited, there would be no reviews or patches in the first place. But hey, let's not worry about that just yet
AC (retired); EQ (retired); DAoC (retired); Horizons (retired); EQII (retired); CoH (retired); AC II (tested); Lineage II (beta); Neocron (tested); Saga of Ryzom (beta); SWG (retired)...
Can we stop blaming consoles for the crappy design of games? .. Fact is that both PS3 and Xbox 360 are a powerful pieces of hardware, and while they are not on par with the top of the crop PCs, they are way ahead the usual mid-range gamind desktop. It is a hardware capable of running stuff better than many PCs out there. They also have 100+ gig hard drives and a plethora of control hardware outside the gamepad.
I am both PC and console player, and I can say that some of the control solutions of the consoles are way ahead because of lack of available keys, they are forced to develop context commands and key combinations and alot of them are very intuitive and many times let you be more involved with the game and less with the controls. Think of it this way - whenever they think of the new thing for you to do on PC, they throw in more keys (just look how the AOC combat system evolved - it was actually way more console-friendly in the initial stage than it is after the changes about a year ago). Whenever the console programes think of more things for you to do, they have to find a way to squeeze it in on the very limited number of gamepad keys. That leads to them having to figure out alternative approaches instead of just throwing in more keys and thus ends up being more innovative.
Mouse is way more accurate though.
AOC has some crappy mechanics because they made some stupid design decisions, and also were unable to optimise alot of things, it is not the console problem.
Can we stop blaming consoles for the crappy design of games? .. Fact is that both PS3 and Xbox 360 are a powerful pieces of hardware, and while they are not on par with the top of the crop PCs, they are way ahead the usual mid-range gamind desktop. It is a hardware capable of running stuff better than many PCs out there. They also have 100+ gig hard drives and a plethora of control hardware outside the gamepad. I am both PC and console player, and I can say that some of the control solutions of the consoles are way ahead because of lack of available keys, they are forced to develop context commands and key combinations and alot of them are very intuitive and many times let you be more involved with the game and less with the controls. Think of it this way - whenever they think of the new thing for you to do on PC, they throw in more keys (just look how the AOC combat system evolved - it was actually way more console-friendly in the initial stage than it is after the changes about a year ago). Whenever the console programes think of more things for you to do, they have to find a way to squeeze it in on the very limited number of gamepad keys. That leads to them having to figure out alternative approaches instead of just throwing in more keys and thus ends up being more innovative. Mouse is way more accurate though. AOC has some crappy mechanics because they made some stupid design decisions, and also were unable to optimise alot of things, it is not the console problem.
The problem is when they make cross-platform games, its usually dumbed down for the PC because of the limitations of the console. If it was developed just on the PC it would most likely be better, but it won't make them as much money. Remember the sequal to Deus Ex ? Garbage because it was cross platfomed with the X-Box. Also whats stopping you plugging a USB keyboard in your console, thats what I do.
or perhaps we as PC gamers need to start being more reserved when it comes to purchasing just launched titles.
I think that is indeed a key solution. I don't even buy most single player games before the first round of patches is released. Gives you time to read the reviews and to watch the price drop. Of course if everyone waited, there would be no reviews or patches in the first place. But hey, let's not worry about that just yet
Actually, I think this would ultimately just force developers to hold off releasing games until they were significantly more complete and bug-free than the latest round of MMORPG releases have been. Better for everyone actually.
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.
Agree but 6 months to a year most of us will be looking forward to other games if not playing other games by then. First impressions mean everything.
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.
Exacly
There is one more details.
The idea AoC has been tested in PCs for the 360 is pure non sense.
No one would test a game for a closed system as the 360 using an open system like a PC.
A console game doesnt need to ( and will not ) be testet in a system with a myriad of variations...
Originally posted by Mordria Originally posted by neya 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.
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?
Bub an instance is a zone that has a cap how many people can enter and once cap is reached creates another instance. So AoC does not have zones only instances.
"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"
No need to be amazed friend outcry usually happens when people feel cheated now let's stop lying to ourselves no one is saying the game is just bad it's broken and the company lies or at the very least spins almost as bad as SOE
"If the game sucks I dont need you to let me know about it, I would of already found out for myself."
Hmm I'd think the topic of the thread pretty much let you know your game was getting trashed why come in? And guess what? I'd be willing to bet you that not everyone reading these forums would know what you know about this game though you deny it
"Get lives people or invest your time in helping the community rather then tear it down."
This statement gives much insite on why mmo players put up with such trash so freely, I've never seen anyone trash the community of AoC if you didn't know, community are players usually funcom is getting trashed for putting out this half baked pile of dung.
"AoC is the new world and accept it or move on."
Uhhh yeah ....ok
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Gears of War basically did the same thing, and I still enjoy that series. Gears takes forever to get working on the PC and it came out seemingly years ago for the PC. Assuming you are computer savvy, you can do the research and build the patch it takes to make the game work on your own, after you install their patch. If you're not, you won't get Gears of War working unless you luck out and have one of the 2-3 system configs that work. Business is business.
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lols at the xbox fanboy, east has always been better at what we do be it cars or consoles and a laptop from 05 has more power than a ps3? ROFL, Ok bill gates will love you, you should work for him, and the best thing happening on ps3 atm battlefield bad company, but dang its broken for xbox what a shame, and yes battlefiled is a pc game and yes its uber on ps3 and broken on xbox... should not judge all games on 1 experiance of a game
O and nvidia is ps3's gfx card, the guys i have always trusted for my pc, im sure they know what they are doing and im sure they made the right decission, Poor ati LOL, ok im gona play some BF bad company now.. or shall i watch a blu ray hmm ...
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.
Agree but 6 months to a year most of us will be looking forward to other games if not playing other games by then. First impressions mean everything.
I agree with you, but if future games are a let down also AoC is what some people will keep their eye on because it has promise to eventually be something good. I am one of those people.
Bub an instance is a zone that has a cap how many people can enter and once cap is reached creates another instance. So AoC does not have zones only instances.
Your definition is not right. Aoc has zones, cause zones are just seperate parts of the world that have to be loaded whenever you enter them. Right now all mmos that i know have zones, even wow has thim it just hides them very good with all zoning & loadiung going on in background.
An instance is a area (usually a zone) that gets replicated for different uses, like single player instances for the story mode in aoc or other games, dungeon/raid instances in wow eq2 and other games to give each group/raid their own dungeon, and it also might be used for load balancing like aoc does with a set char limit before a new instance is created on each zone.
It is theoretically possible to use instancing without zoning, you could just make an area of a zone instanced just by sending different data from server to players (which would make you swap from a non instanced area of a zone to an instanced boss area in a seemless way). i don't know if any game uses that allready or if its just theory, someone said to me that deepspace complexes in eve are based on it, but i don't know if its right.
I was getting 25fps on the beach, 15-20 in Tortage while using a P4 2.8ghz prescott (skt 478), 2x 1gb ddr400, ati x1950 pro agp.
Currently I get 40-70 and it only drops down to 25-30 if/when there's close to 10-15 things hacking away on each other while FULL/MAXED graphics are set: e8400, 2x 1gb DDR3, 8800gt
Being that some simple things were able to improve the frame rates I honestly believe that a lot of the users are purely part of the "lowest denominator". This is not taking away that the game was far from polished and needs several months before it's considered "worthy", and it in no way explains why Funcom recently introduced the memory error which requires a client restart every time the maps or textures turn grey.
Cry Havoc and let loose the dogs of whiny misanthropists who think their opinions are worth something more than the toilet they dredged them out of!
Fact is, computers are a pain in the ass to develop for. What works fine for Intel might have problems with AMD, or Nvidia might have a problem while ATI sails through fine. And then of course are all of the chipsets out there, combined with every concievable mixup between all of the different vendors and basically it becomes a nightmare, with it being inconcievable that a developer can test for every possible PC makeup out there.
I've run this system on two AMD FX-60 systems with a 6800GT and 7600GS with no problems other than having to set everything on low. I've run into a memory leak situation maybe three times so far since the game was released and haven't had it in some time since. What's the cause? Beats the hell out of me. I can't say it's Funcom's fault anymore than the rest of you. The difference between us is, I don't assume it's Funcom's fault. It could be any number of different factors that cause it, and since I don't run into it regularly, it leads me to believe that the fault is not solely in Funcom's arena. Could be a driver issue, or an OS issue. Any number of different things could contribute to it. That's the fun of PC architecture.
Which then leads me to my next point. The ideal system for a developer is one that is standard across the board. One that is made by one manufacturer with the same specs in all of their systems. Consoles have always been the big moneymakers, which is why it is more attractive to developers. Also, it makes it easier to combat piracy, which is a contributing factor to the lack of profit many games might have seen, since the manufacturer can take steps to hardwire anti-piracy technology into their hardware.
People are crying about the bugs and the problems that the software has. Wow! It's like this has never happened before. Christ, grow up kids. Welcome to the world of software. Companies are out to make money with the least amount of expenditure. Patching is accepted as a form of cost control. It's cheaper to release and patch than it is to hold it and polish it more. If you can't handle it, then go back to the consoles. When you buy something that just came out, you're running the risk of running into an incomplete product. Same as if you buy new technology. There's the chance that it might not work as well as you were led to believe, the Nvidia chipset catastrophy the latest I can think of.
My point is that people cry foul and complain bitterly, all the while blissfully contributing to the problem by buying the software in the first place. Speak with your wallets, not your mouth. Cancel your subscription and write letters. Act! As they say, actions speak louder than words. All you're doing here is contributing to the fact that people look at MMORPG.com less as an information tool and more as a place where a bunch of whiners lurk, waiting to bash whatever the latest game is.
But you're wrong. Posting here is similar to speaking with your wallet. even if it is a small population, many people have been put off of AoC and aren't buying it because of mmorpg.com
I was tempted to buy AoC, but saw how bugged it was. I've used this site to look up every bug I can find and decide if it would be worth playing. The simple answer was no, but It didn't stop there. When a friend of mine mentioned us starting up AoC I told her about everything I learned and she agreed that it wasn't a good idea.
Less box sales, speaking with the wallet. Without public access to AoC forums how are we supposed to know about mass exploits, entire genders broken ect?
its because these people come here and cry that others know what to avoid. and MMOs live and die off word of mouth. 1 person on these forums can spread information to hundreds outside of them. Unhappy customers who come here prevent other unhappy customers, and reduce how much someone makes on an unfinished game.
So while you think their opinions don't matter at all, I do and thank them for them. both good and bad information helps us make our choices, telling people not to share it just because its bad is silly.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
Comments
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?
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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.
/e is for the people who will play AOC on the 360 with a keyboard and people without it will use the emote list I guess is what they were trying to say.......... But EQ2 has the same thing a /e and a list but its not on a console.
Im so glad I didnt waste my money on this game. I was really excited about it at first but then decided to wait a bit and see if I wanted to buy it after launch cuz Ive had bad esperiences with pre ordering. Ended up this is not the game I was looking for.
cuz its a free world (for the most part) an we are allowed to voice our pissed off opinions. if i play a game, use a product, or anything else and its not what its supposed to be (broke, or just down right not worth the money i paid) yeah *IM* going to say something. im not going to leave it up to someone else to voice my opinion for me who may or may not get it right. if no one said anything it would look like the games/other products have nothing wrong with them. if only 5 people say something about a game.. then it just seems like nothing is really wrong with it. if 50,000 people say something.. yeah then its probably got something wrong with it. im a father and lets say if i buy my son a toy and he chokes to death on it when it was suposed to be a safe product your damn right im going to say something to the company who made it, the community, news, whatever. aoc and games may not be life or death situations but the principle is the same, nothing gets changed for the better if everyone just sits quietly saying nothing. by the way im sure we would have less pissed off posts here if FC wasnt CENCORING its players on aoc fourms. but thats another pissed off arguement entirely.
Actually the game was designed from the ground up for Xbox. Hence the reason for the so called revolutionary combat....it's simply a way for Xbox users to interface with an MMO combat system without the need for as many buttons as a keyboard - biggest lie in MMO history.
Also the PC version was dumbed down for Xbox from the start not later, allowing for a simple port.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
Of note, I don't blame Funcom for anything beyond ignoring a few class bugs. I expected more from the way they'd spoken about the state of the game up to launch, but it's not really suprising that it's in the state it is in or that it will take so long to feature-complete it.
After all, every other MMO company has taken us for a ride, and Funcom don't exactly had the pedigree of producing quality at launch.
Life sucks, get over it.
i am sooo tired of people blaming cross platforming for games being terrible. So what this game was developed for both PC and 360. BIG DEAL. Did everyone forget that one of the most popular and longest lasting MMOs was developed for PC and PS2 (FFXI anyone?) later they even added 360 to that list. that game has always run great, and while it may not be a graphical marvel anymore, its still a good looking game. Maybe its just because Square knows what they are doing. I haven't played Vanguard, dont plan on playing, but the OP needs to find a different reason for its woes. FFXI proves to us that the cross-platforming thing isn't it.
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.
So far there has only been one cross platform MMO...FFXI. It was highly successful and continues to be.
AoC isn't cross platform yet.
AoC is a victim of poor design, surprise - Funcom. Honestly, what did you expect? The last MMO these guys launched made Vanguard look polished and bugfree
Let it be quaiky, neya is a
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I think I understand what you're trying to suggest...
AoC is only optimized for the one setup, while things like the "Low" settings aren't tweaked, because they don't care; the only audience that matters is the Xbox 360 crowd? Is that about right?
It's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't think I've seen enough proof. You'd need a hard-line coder to come in, dissect the coding of the game, and give a statement on it... which I don't see happening any time soon.
Also, there have been immensely successful cross-platform titles before. Final Fantasy 11 was one of my favorite MMORPG's ever, and it originated on the PS2, and worked it's way to PC. At no point did I eve felt that SE didn't want me playing their game either.
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
I think that is indeed a key solution. I don't even buy most single player games before the first round of patches is released. Gives you time to read the reviews and to watch the price drop. Of course if everyone waited, there would be no reviews or patches in the first place. But hey, let's not worry about that just yet
AC (retired); EQ (retired); DAoC (retired); Horizons (retired); EQII (retired); CoH (retired); AC II (tested); Lineage II (beta); Neocron (tested); Saga of Ryzom (beta); SWG (retired)...
Can we stop blaming consoles for the crappy design of games? .. Fact is that both PS3 and Xbox 360 are a powerful pieces of hardware, and while they are not on par with the top of the crop PCs, they are way ahead the usual mid-range gamind desktop. It is a hardware capable of running stuff better than many PCs out there. They also have 100+ gig hard drives and a plethora of control hardware outside the gamepad.
I am both PC and console player, and I can say that some of the control solutions of the consoles are way ahead because of lack of available keys, they are forced to develop context commands and key combinations and alot of them are very intuitive and many times let you be more involved with the game and less with the controls. Think of it this way - whenever they think of the new thing for you to do on PC, they throw in more keys (just look how the AOC combat system evolved - it was actually way more console-friendly in the initial stage than it is after the changes about a year ago). Whenever the console programes think of more things for you to do, they have to find a way to squeeze it in on the very limited number of gamepad keys. That leads to them having to figure out alternative approaches instead of just throwing in more keys and thus ends up being more innovative.
Mouse is way more accurate though.
AOC has some crappy mechanics because they made some stupid design decisions, and also were unable to optimise alot of things, it is not the console problem.
The problem is when they make cross-platform games, its usually dumbed down for the PC because of the limitations of the console. If it was developed just on the PC it would most likely be better, but it won't make them as much money. Remember the sequal to Deus Ex ? Garbage because it was cross platfomed with the X-Box. Also whats stopping you plugging a USB keyboard in your console, thats what I do.
I think that is indeed a key solution. I don't even buy most single player games before the first round of patches is released. Gives you time to read the reviews and to watch the price drop. Of course if everyone waited, there would be no reviews or patches in the first place. But hey, let's not worry about that just yet
Actually, I think this would ultimately just force developers to hold off releasing games until they were significantly more complete and bug-free than the latest round of MMORPG releases have been. Better for everyone actually.
Agree but 6 months to a year most of us will be looking forward to other games if not playing other games by then. First impressions mean everything.
Exacly
There is one more details.
The idea AoC has been tested in PCs for the 360 is pure non sense.
No one would test a game for a closed system as the 360 using an open system like a PC.
A console game doesnt need to ( and will not ) be testet in a system with a myriad of variations...
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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?
Bub an instance is a zone that has a cap how many people can enter and once cap is reached creates another instance. So AoC does not have zones only instances.
"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"
No need to be amazed friend outcry usually happens when people feel cheated now let's stop lying to ourselves no one is saying the game is just bad it's broken and the company lies or at the very least spins almost as bad as SOE
"If the game sucks I dont need you to let me know about it, I would of already found out for myself."
Hmm I'd think the topic of the thread pretty much let you know your game was getting trashed why come in? And guess what? I'd be willing to bet you that not everyone reading these forums would know what you know about this game though you deny it
"Get lives people or invest your time in helping the community rather then tear it down."
This statement gives much insite on why mmo players put up with such trash so freely, I've never seen anyone trash the community of AoC if you didn't know, community are players usually funcom is getting trashed for putting out this half baked pile of dung.
"AoC is the new world and accept it or move on."
Uhhh yeah ....ok
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
So much anger on these boards... I blame swg for it!
I7@4ghz, 5970@ 1 ghz/5ghz, water cooled||Former setups Byggblogg||Byggblogg 2|| Msi Wind u100
Gears of War basically did the same thing, and I still enjoy that series. Gears takes forever to get working on the PC and it came out seemingly years ago for the PC. Assuming you are computer savvy, you can do the research and build the patch it takes to make the game work on your own, after you install their patch. If you're not, you won't get Gears of War working unless you luck out and have one of the 2-3 system configs that work. Business is business.
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lols at the xbox fanboy, east has always been better at what we do be it cars or consoles and a laptop from 05 has more power than a ps3? ROFL, Ok bill gates will love you, you should work for him, and the best thing happening on ps3 atm battlefield bad company, but dang its broken for xbox what a shame, and yes battlefiled is a pc game and yes its uber on ps3 and broken on xbox... should not judge all games on 1 experiance of a game
O and nvidia is ps3's gfx card, the guys i have always trusted for my pc, im sure they know what they are doing and im sure they made the right decission, Poor ati LOL, ok im gona play some BF bad company now.. or shall i watch a blu ray hmm ...
Agree but 6 months to a year most of us will be looking forward to other games if not playing other games by then. First impressions mean everything.
I agree with you, but if future games are a let down also AoC is what some people will keep their eye on because it has promise to eventually be something good. I am one of those people.
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A work in progress: (Update: 08/09/10)Easily find your favorite type of MMO
Your definition is not right. Aoc has zones, cause zones are just seperate parts of the world that have to be loaded whenever you enter them. Right now all mmos that i know have zones, even wow has thim it just hides them very good with all zoning & loadiung going on in background.
An instance is a area (usually a zone) that gets replicated for different uses, like single player instances for the story mode in aoc or other games, dungeon/raid instances in wow eq2 and other games to give each group/raid their own dungeon, and it also might be used for load balancing like aoc does with a set char limit before a new instance is created on each zone.
It is theoretically possible to use instancing without zoning, you could just make an area of a zone instanced just by sending different data from server to players (which would make you swap from a non instanced area of a zone to an instanced boss area in a seemless way). i don't know if any game uses that allready or if its just theory, someone said to me that deepspace complexes in eve are based on it, but i don't know if its right.
Nope, cancelled...and my account is locked as of yesterday. And I won't be back. Don't have time for paying to develop unfinished products.
Have fun guys.
I was getting 25fps on the beach, 15-20 in Tortage while using a P4 2.8ghz prescott (skt 478), 2x 1gb ddr400, ati x1950 pro agp.
Currently I get 40-70 and it only drops down to 25-30 if/when there's close to 10-15 things hacking away on each other while FULL/MAXED graphics are set: e8400, 2x 1gb DDR3, 8800gt
Being that some simple things were able to improve the frame rates I honestly believe that a lot of the users are purely part of the "lowest denominator". This is not taking away that the game was far from polished and needs several months before it's considered "worthy", and it in no way explains why Funcom recently introduced the memory error which requires a client restart every time the maps or textures turn grey.
Cry Havoc and let loose the dogs of whiny misanthropists who think their opinions are worth something more than the toilet they dredged them out of!
Fact is, computers are a pain in the ass to develop for. What works fine for Intel might have problems with AMD, or Nvidia might have a problem while ATI sails through fine. And then of course are all of the chipsets out there, combined with every concievable mixup between all of the different vendors and basically it becomes a nightmare, with it being inconcievable that a developer can test for every possible PC makeup out there.
I've run this system on two AMD FX-60 systems with a 6800GT and 7600GS with no problems other than having to set everything on low. I've run into a memory leak situation maybe three times so far since the game was released and haven't had it in some time since. What's the cause? Beats the hell out of me. I can't say it's Funcom's fault anymore than the rest of you. The difference between us is, I don't assume it's Funcom's fault. It could be any number of different factors that cause it, and since I don't run into it regularly, it leads me to believe that the fault is not solely in Funcom's arena. Could be a driver issue, or an OS issue. Any number of different things could contribute to it. That's the fun of PC architecture.
Which then leads me to my next point. The ideal system for a developer is one that is standard across the board. One that is made by one manufacturer with the same specs in all of their systems. Consoles have always been the big moneymakers, which is why it is more attractive to developers. Also, it makes it easier to combat piracy, which is a contributing factor to the lack of profit many games might have seen, since the manufacturer can take steps to hardwire anti-piracy technology into their hardware.
People are crying about the bugs and the problems that the software has. Wow! It's like this has never happened before. Christ, grow up kids. Welcome to the world of software. Companies are out to make money with the least amount of expenditure. Patching is accepted as a form of cost control. It's cheaper to release and patch than it is to hold it and polish it more. If you can't handle it, then go back to the consoles. When you buy something that just came out, you're running the risk of running into an incomplete product. Same as if you buy new technology. There's the chance that it might not work as well as you were led to believe, the Nvidia chipset catastrophy the latest I can think of.
My point is that people cry foul and complain bitterly, all the while blissfully contributing to the problem by buying the software in the first place. Speak with your wallets, not your mouth. Cancel your subscription and write letters. Act! As they say, actions speak louder than words. All you're doing here is contributing to the fact that people look at MMORPG.com less as an information tool and more as a place where a bunch of whiners lurk, waiting to bash whatever the latest game is.
But you're wrong. Posting here is similar to speaking with your wallet. even if it is a small population, many people have been put off of AoC and aren't buying it because of mmorpg.com
I was tempted to buy AoC, but saw how bugged it was. I've used this site to look up every bug I can find and decide if it would be worth playing. The simple answer was no, but It didn't stop there. When a friend of mine mentioned us starting up AoC I told her about everything I learned and she agreed that it wasn't a good idea.
Less box sales, speaking with the wallet. Without public access to AoC forums how are we supposed to know about mass exploits, entire genders broken ect?
its because these people come here and cry that others know what to avoid. and MMOs live and die off word of mouth. 1 person on these forums can spread information to hundreds outside of them. Unhappy customers who come here prevent other unhappy customers, and reduce how much someone makes on an unfinished game.
So while you think their opinions don't matter at all, I do and thank them for them. both good and bad information helps us make our choices, telling people not to share it just because its bad is silly.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.