Age of Conan

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

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...

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.)

Well it was late by the time everything patched and I could log on. So I only played for 15 min or so. I have some tweaking to do and I'm a little concerned. At the default graphic settings I was getting a frame rate of say 1 every 2 seconds. I had to run it down to low quality before it was almost smooth.

Granted my computer isn't the meanest on the block but its a 2.3g dual core with 3g of ram and a Nvidia 7300 with 256mb.

It easily runs WOW at full graphic load.

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.

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.

Originally posted by Czzarre

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

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).

I know mine was, thankfully my computer could handle the load

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.

Originally posted by Blackbandit9

 

Originally posted by Czzarre

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 yo