Originally posted by jensen_34

I would be interested to see how much time all these people with top end systems actually devoted to testing.  My guess is some of them started the game up, got the stuttering a couple crashes (happened to me too) and then wrote the game off. My first day I crashed about 8-10 times in 2 hours, stuttering and freezes of up to 10 seconds galore.

It wasn't until about the 2nd or 3rd day of logging back in did all the crashes disappear and the stuttering reduced to within reason.  I read this has something to do with cached shaders and it made sense to me.  Basically your hard drive has to memorize the different shaders in each zone when you first enter.  As you store more shaders it will run smoother and smoother.

I run XP, 2.4 GHz AMD, 7800GT, 2 Gigs of DDR 400 ram so basically the low end and I'd say it's very playable.  I upgraded another gig of ram and saw a big jump in performance so my best advice is to have 3 Gigs ram minimum.

I'm not saying go pre-order, but definitely take the opinions you see here with a grain of salt.  My advice for those on the fence; wait for a buddy key/ free trial and see if the game is for you.

PS Anyone who says this beta is in a class of VG or AO is fos.

Also the rabid fanbois would tell people that had posted about the problems to: go away, get a more ram, video card was too new/old, sound card was too new/old, your machine sux, Features would be added and finished later, this is only beta, stop wining, called them haters/liers.. pretty much what you see here. Oh and they went live anyway despite what players were saying.

Well the good thing is most got fired in a parking lot and the game served as another reminder to NOT buy beta...  hope the same doesn't happen here...

But don't take my word on it just go dig up some of the old post on the vanguard forums here starting from jan of last year

This game has a good "shell" or foundation but it is far from being ready.  The performance is the same as Vanguard when it was released.  It will have the same fate.

Funcom.  You guys wasted a lot of money.  Performance first, everything else last.  It is not a "minority" of people.  When you are down to 1 server due to people leaving your game you will have a "minority".

my own experiance on the aoc beta has nt been good i did see in the article that people would be suprised how well it runs on low end computers . my pc fall somewhere inbetween the required and recomended specs . i cant run it smoothly in tortage and especially in the inns on even the lowest settings . i defrag my pc regulary and update my drivers . i ve tried all the tweaks i know and also some of those suggested in these forums and i still cant get it to run well enought to consider buying it . there is rumour that this beta client is nt the same as the release client . the only thing that i can judge by is the beta and i ve seen enough to make me think my pc proberbly wont run the game that well even though it runs things like lord of the rings on the ultra high settings .

if it really is a case that aoc cant be played on the average pc then it wont be popular untill the average pc catches up with it . by which time it may be just another failed mmo .

i hope this is not the case .

Funcom : " Hey lets distract them with Boobs, they way we can say we are releasing a "mature" game .  Never mind it running.

Corrected:

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?

Yes, it could have been made w/o them, but the technology we use for our world requires them.

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?

It isn't the client that will be used on release because we'll have patched a few times before release, but it wasn't an "old" client when they received it. In fact, they received the latest client, but we had a few patches to apply, so we delayed launch and then patched a little later because we wanted to test them before we finalized our shipping client.

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

While we do have many reports of issues, we have many reports where players aren't having issues. Honestly, we don't know and we're just going to ship and let our tech support department spam canned responses to people who are unhappy. In the end, it will all even out.

Do you expect performance issues to be resolved before launch?

As with any other project this size, we fully expect to have some issues on launch. For example, those having issues in beta will likely have issues on launch. Those that don't have issues probably won't have issues with the final client.

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

WoW has low end graphics. If we want to compete, we have to do something better. We're putting all our eggs in one basket, graphics. We're also going to do what we can to convince people that our combat system is so unique and FUN, that we're that much better.

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 would like to avoid getting K.O.'d by Apollo on launch. Having said that, what do those people know, they're just gamers!

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

We learned a lot from all the clients patching and trying to connect on the first night. We really weren't ready for that and hopefully we'll have the servers to handle it when the game is released to the public.

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

We're going to have DEATH MATCH (aka FFA) EVERYWHERE (except in towns and starting area). Exciting right?

TLDR summary: spoof

I am glad and happy for those who can run the game with minor glitches.

The simple fact is that there are massive amounts of people who cannot.  This is no small issue.  An unplayable game is a broken game.

I hope you will be around to explain to all the people who buy this meeting the required specs and can't play it because it is fundamentally flawed.

I played the open beta and... well...

Funcom thinks quality is graphics over immersion.  Loading screens are not a new level of immersion... it's a step backwards.

WELCOME TO SPIN CITY.

The first question is the most important - why would graphics require a loading screen? Why would you need to stream more if you wanted 'lush graphics' without a loading screen? That doesn't make sense at all.

It's quite clear that Funcom simply does not have the capacity to make it's seameless.

Loading-screens on normal zone-progression is bad coding, nothing else, all the damage control/PR mumbo jumbo in the world won't change that - pure and simple, bad coding.

If this is the level of coding, GL spending your money on AoC the first 6-9 months.

I'm a newbie here,and want to know more about Age of conan, thank you in advance.

I'm glad we have such expert game designers and coders here that they can enlighten us with their knowledge, no doubt based purely on facts.

Funcom has some truely brilliant people... unfortunately they also have some hardasses in the finance dept.

Most likely they are launching before the game is ready, having forgotten the hell which was AO.. or thinking that ANYTHING is better than an AO launch.

What is most certain and true is the fact that I HAVE learned my lessons, and I DO remember the AO launch. So I may buy Conan... after summer has come and gone.

my rig: e6600/2.4ghz/8800gts512/1600x900/2AA/bloom/all sliders maxed/everything checked.

2gb ram, have another 2 sticks waiting to be installed tonight for when i reinstall vista64.  i'm running the latest nvidia beta drivers.

performance = extremely good.

i have a weird issue though when the sun is shining on my back (which is more often than not) the back of my char has weird jaggies on it that i haven't been able to get rid of no matter what i toggle, haven't exhausted the options, but not putting much effort into it at the moment since i'll be running the retail in vista64 (for the dx10).  whereas right now i'm using my XP side.  maybe its the beta drivers, maybe its the beta code, i'll find out in a week i guess.

Originally posted by Mortemia

I'm glad we have such expert game designers and coders here that they can enlighten us with their knowledge, no doubt based purely on facts.

Some of us do infact make a living coding you know!

Some are even former Funcom employees that decided to work a place where quality of design and code matters more than textures...

Originally posted by Miklos

 

Originally posted by Mortemia

I'm glad we have such expert game designers and coders here that they can enlighten us with their knowledge, no doubt based purely on facts.

I'm glad to be of service.

 

Some of us do infact make a living coding you know!

Some are even former Funcom employees that decided to work a place where quality of design and code matters more than textures...

The game runs fine for me and the people that have judged the game by the open beta code, which has been patched twice all ready since some of you uninstalled, have made a premature decision about the game.

I like AoC and it kind of reminds me of old school SWG. I really enjoy the combat and the stories in the quest lines.

So for those of you that haven't played the game, don't jump on the cool guy bandwagon and hate on a game you've never played.

I'm not commenting on wheter it runs smoothly or not, the storyline/lore neither on the combat system, so stop trolling.

I'm commenting on the poor code and choices of design in regards to having non-seamless zone traversal.

It's poor design - regardless if you like/dislike/love/hate the game, it's still poor design.

Originally posted by Miklos

I'm not commenting on wheter it runs smoothly or not, the storyline/lore neither on the combat system, so stop trolling.

I'm commenting on the poor code and choices of design in regards to having non-seamless zone traversal.

It's poor design - regardless if you like/dislike/love/hate the game, it's still poor design.

Oh that's right you're just some arm chair quaterback that has no idea what he's talking about.

You keep talking about this elusive "horrible code", but you don't use specifics. Your posts have been shallow drivel designed to try to make you look like you know what you're talking about when it's obvious that you don't.

There a few games that have "seamless zone traversal". If you're refering to WoW, they hide the loading really well, but it's still there. Vanguards "chunking" was and is a load of crap, instead of a loading screen your character just freezes there until the zone loads.

I timed my load screens the other day when I was reading people's post about how long the load times are. My longest time was 24 secs, but most of them were 10-14 secs.

I thought I would post a response  a staff member for AOC put up on the IGN boards today  forum name pasandra

"LOL. Where'd you get your information from? That's just so far off the mark it's untrue. I'm on this and CB forums every day, and i would guess at 5-20% of CB posters are saying they experience only has mild issues. About 1-2% say they have tiny issues, and i actually can't think of any (though i'm sure they exist), who say it's pristine, or close. The other 80% are saying how it is; buggy.

In fact, they'd be bullshitting, when funcom themselves admit to everyone (incl OB) that it isn't."

He went on to say

"It IS buggy. The client IS unstable. There's NO secret. There are posts on this front page from Funcom explaining just that. It's in beta. The devs are trying to work out the bugs. Where's the big mystery"

Also here is a link to what are the notes to the new patch for CB  that someone in CB posted on the ign boards 

http://msgs.ageofconan.com/patchnotes.php?UniverseName=GeneralBeta2&Language=en

one line that is interesting from those notes:

"There are some larger known issues with the version, but we decided to release the version with them due to the greatly increased performance of the client"

 I would say if they are pushing a patch with known larger issues inorder to increase performance of the client  that contrary to some of the 'fanbois" in this thread  there are major issues with the  client casuing the problems and it is not the lack of ability of people to turn their rigs that are causing the issues.

  Either way  I am still hopefull that they can get this fixed intime to have a relativly clean launch  as I do enjoy the game when i am able to play it

Originally posted by Miklos

I'm commenting on the poor code and choices of design in regards to having non-seamless zone traversal.

It's poor design - regardless if you like/dislike/love/hate the game, it's still poor design.

it's poor design to those who don't like the zoning aspect of the game.  from what i've read, it was done to provide better visuals/graphics for the game, rather than having to 'dilute' the visuals so that things are generic enough that less loading of textures is necessary and seamless zoning is viable.

you prefer seamless to eye candy, i prefer extra eye candy to seamless, ANY DAY.

TO ME, the poor design would have been "yet another mmo with lackluster graphics".  

just because YOU as a programmer like one thing over another, DOESN'T mean 100% of your audience agrees with you.  Last i checked you're a person like everyone else, your likes are your own, not anyone else's.

Originally posted by Riker99

If AoC can provide solid performance on Vista and DX10 a few months after release, it will be a great boon for the game development industry as a whole, as it will prove that Vista and DX10 can in fact perform better than, or at least on par with, DX9 and XP (Crysis absolutely failed at this goal, with DX10 performance being absolute crap).

And thats the point, isn't it?!

Edit: Thought of one more thing.

Crashes under Vista may not be the game's fault at all. The programmers may have followed the OS API perfectly to the tee, but if the code of the OS itself is buggy for certain aspects of the API, then utilizing those aspects will cause issues.

The solution is either Microsoft fixes the problem (unlikely in a reasonable timeframe), or the developers try to workaround the issue, which may or may not be possible.Debugging these kinds of issues is particularly painful as development could have centered around one buggy aspect of the API, forcing that entire part of the software to be redeveloped.

Turbine seem to have it sorted out with LoTRO

Originally posted by Wytchen

I can't understand why people bitch about this game so much jesus If you don't wana play the game please don't buy it .    I have been in the Ob from the 1st and have had little issues with the client

I run an Intel duel core 2.4 2mb ram 8800 GTS  video card and I'm getting 54-64fps.

Yes game has a few issues with shaders but I'm running it on med setting with a few tweaks and game looks nice. Love the quests and combat but the spells need work .

 

Stop fooling urself no game is ot of beta just look at wow I have been playing it for 4yrs and still get server lag and what not .. I stress if you don't like the game please don't play.

Haha and in the next post you advise someone to loose the WoW tone.

Did it occur to you that some people really like the game and really want to play? The fecked client of course makes this impossible for a large percentage. Maybe you think people enjoy spending hours trying different drivers different settings rather than playing? Have fun playing with yourself...sounds like you have had lots of practice.