Age of Conan

In terms of gameplay (not zone size), you'll need to zone every 10-20 minutes in the Tortage starter area and every 2-4 hours in the rest of the game areas (excluding the race cities which follow the Tortage pattern). On average.

Originally posted by bongo123

can any wow players playing AOC give an accurate description on the size of the zones in relation to wow zones, i really want to try this game but i effing hate zoning, drove me mad in EQ2 and im becoming a tab bit bored with wow, but to go from wow's open world to a game that has zones doesnt gel well, so roughly how big a zone we talking about before you need to load the next area in?

The open zones in AoC (think Barrens) are considerably larger in WoW. Let me explain how AoC is structured in WoW terms:

Ok... first of all you can't define Tortage in WoW terms. At all. Did you ever play DDO? Tortage is almost exactly like DDO (with about as much content, but I digress). You have to be at least level 19 to get the quest to leave Tortage. A lof of (mandatory) content on Tortage is solo content.

Once you leave Tortage you begin in your racial hub (think Orgrimaar/Ironforge/Thunderbluff etc). Now each racial hub has an open questing zone immdiately outside of it (like the Barrens). These zones run levels 20-40 and are huge (bigger than the barrens and considerably less flat). Now here's the trick: You can not simple run from Thunderbluff through the Barrens to Orgrimaar. Basically, if your in Thunderbluff and want to go to Orgimaar you go find the NPC that runs the Caravan to Orgrimaar and talk to him, then the game reloads and you spawn in Orgrimaar. Now you want to go to The Barrens and kill stuff, so again you go to The Barrens NPC and tell him you want to go to the Barrens, the game reloads and you spawn at the Crossroads. Beyond that it's really not fundementally that diffrent.

Originally posted by Xasapis

In terms of gameplay (not zone size), you'll need to zone every 10-20 minutes in the Tortage starter area and every 2-4 hours in the rest of the game areas (excluding the race cities which follow the Tortage pattern). On average.

I would say that is a fair estimation, but once leveling slows down, you'll find yourself rarely zoning during a play session unless you are invited into one of the party dungeons.  Even then, you wouldn't be exposed to more zoning than you would playing WoW.  With only a single zone to satisfy the content requirement from level 40 to 50 and then 50 to 60 you won't find yourself zoning at all for entire play sessions.  (40-50 does have the Noble District as well, but is more of a mini-zone really that is used mostly for AoE grinding). Really the only exception to this is the Destiny quest chain which sent me back from Cimmeria to Stygia and back and forth again.  I think I used 20 to 30 stamina potions.

Originally posted by Zorndorf

 

Originally posted by brihtwulf

Ok, this game is NOT WoW, thankfully!  People should stop complaining because it isn't exactly like WoW.  The areas are broken up into multiple instances (much like EQ2 and TR) to prevent massive lag that would be there from hundreds of thousands of potential simultaneous players.  The game would just lag out and drop if it were an "open world".  And it uses "zoning" for a similar reason.  There is just too much data and too many players to be in a single continuous world.

Now, Warcraft can do this for one main reason: their technical quality is outrageously sub-standard.  Their characters are extremely low-poly and their textures are very low-res.  So the data both takes up little room and takes little time to load.  They can therefor "stream" in the content as needed when the player crosses a geographical threshold.  With AoC's visual quality alone, this is NOT possible.  And I'm not sure of the number of max players per server in AoC, but because they use this instancing formula, I would imagine it's higher than the few hundred you can have in a WoW server (before queues set in).

As for the dungeons, there aren't many MMOs at ALL that don't instance them in some way (except perhaps EQ1).  Technology, quality, and gameplay almost require dungeons to be instanced in some way to prevent overpopulation and players standing around screaming because the creature they need for their quest has been camped for 2 days straight by other players/guilds (EQ1 anyone remember?).

Ultimately it comes down to the question: is the game fun for you?  If it is, then play it.  If it's not, then move on to something else or go play your previous game again.  I would, however, give anyone playing this game the advice to get a bit past level 20 to experience the gameplay beyond Tortage (which is meant to be an introduction to the game).  If anyone remembers, the first 20 levels that encompass Tortage were originally meant to be single-player until the testers begged for them to include other newbies in the experience from day 1.

 

Biggest crap I have ever seen.

 

More then 50 people in a city and even your 9800GTS cards stop functioning. Instancing .

Ah, so now its 50 people that cause your system to hang.......before it was only "a handful" that was causing serious issues for you.

Wow, keep going zorf.  I think you're nailing what the issue is here.....you're simplification of the truth in order to suit your argument.

Originally posted by bongo123

can any wow players playing AOC give an accurate description on the size of the zones in relation to wow zones, i really want to try this game but i effing hate zoning, drove me mad in EQ2 and im becoming a tab bit bored with wow, but to go from wow's open world to a game that has zones doesnt gel well, so roughly how big a zone we talking about before you need to load the next area in?

i came directly from wow to aoc. im only lvl 17, and still in the starter area, tortage, so thats where my perspective will come from.

first i want to differentiaite between types of zones. there are what i call 'public zones', where you see other players running around, and 'private zones', where its just you and/or your group (think barrens as the public zone, wailing caverns as the private zone). the starter public zone includes a city, and surrounding area, and has appendige public zones in it. as for size, just in terms of how long it takes to get from one end to the other, the city of tortage is roughly the size of the main part of orgrimmar, but it has some alley ways and what not to navigate, so it seems more intricate than the open bowl design of orgrimmar.

the overall zone, if you include the appendage zones, is roughly the size of durator (the WoW zone around org),perhaps a little smaller.  you always see other players running around, and if you go into an appendage zone, say acheron ruins, there are other players in there as well. imagine it this way, in durator you have to go into the ravine and kill harpies, the ravine is a zone, with other players in it, but the whole surrounding area is open. i hear that the zones after the start area are larger, much larger.

so in the start area, the zones arent huge, but they are big enough for what they are (a start zone). i also thought that the zoning would put me off. i realized, that in WoW the openness was as much in my head as in the game. yea im in the ravine klling harpies, but its completely surrounded by cliffs, not really open, theres only one way in or out, so it is essentially its own zone. i never ran from zone to zone, always took a flight, so in the end, what difference was it really that i zoned in or alt-tabbed during a flight? gameplay elements have all  been better, imho. the combat system is a lot of fun, it keeps your attention. you cant just smack a guy in the head forever, he'll defend himself and you wont do any damage, you have to change it up. so even 'grinding' mobs is far less tedious, as you have to pay a little attention to what you are doing.

like i said, i can only give the impression of someone who is still in the start area, but coming from WoW to AoC, the zoning has been a complete non-issue. hope my long post has been of some help.

---

Now, Warcraft can do this for one main reason: their technical quality is outrageously sub-standard. Their characters are extremely low-poly and their textures are very low-res. So the data both takes up little room and takes little time to load. They can therefor "stream" in the content as needed when the player crosses a geographical threshold.

---

Blizzard was more clever and achieved a better technical balance when it comes to resource utilization. Part of this is using a graphic style that doesn't require tons of high resolution textures and polygons to look great. I'd call the end result, achieving a better balance between visual quality, framerate and general performance, a higher technical quality, myself.

---

With AoC's visual quality alone, this is NOT possible.

---

There's also the fact that during AoC development, artists and world designers were essentially left alone doing about whatever they wanted for something like three years into the project. It was only at that point, as the original projected release date loomed closer, that the question of optimizing the loading times, client size and performances arose.

A lots of meetings were had, and a lot of solutions were envisioned that were difficult to implement because it largely involved artists being more disciplined in their texture utilization, sharing of textures between things (using atlases etc).
The problem is that it's pretty difficult to do all those things AFTER the bulk of the assets were already made.
There's also the fact that early versions of cheetah REQUIRED about everything to have both a diffuse map and a normal map, which was pretty wasteful given that many things don't really need the later.

Anyway, the "let's crank up texture resolutions and polygons" approach of achieving a better graphical quality is misleading, especially when you're doing a game set in a universe as visually uninteresting as conan's. I was flying through northrend on the sandboxed leaked wotlk client yesterday, and I found the place much more enthralling than anything I've seen in conan (and the graphics generally looks more cleanly executed in wow, too). But I concede that it's largely subjective.

---

And I'm not sure of the number of max players per server in AoC, but because they use this instancing formula, I would imagine it's higher than the few hundred you can have in a WoW server (before queues set in)

---

I prefer to be on a realm (or dimension in funcom's lingo) with a maximum of a few hundred players with the guarantee that we'll always share the same world, rather than one that pretend to be one single world but is actually several parallel ones.

The end result is the same, except in the former case (the one that works like WoW), you get more consistency. If someone says that your nemesis that you absolutely want to corpse camp to oblivion was spotted at place xyz, you can go there and find the guy.

In the second case, you effectively only share the world with a few hundred other players as well, only never the same ones. How is that better?

---

As for the dungeons, there aren't many MMOs at ALL that don't instance them in some way (except perhaps EQ1).

---

I'm fine with instancing when it's done solely for gameplay purpose (as in WoW). Instancing for performance reasons, or to pretend that you can have a shitload of players on the same realm, is a poor trade off.

---

players standing around screaming because the creature they need for their quest has been camped for 2 days straight by other players/guilds (EQ1 anyone remember?).

---

Yet such things are very anecdotal in WoW, and mostly only happen when new content is released and everyone is gang raping it.

---

If anyone remembers, the first 20 levels that encompass Tortage were originally meant to be single-player until the testers begged for them to include other newbies in the experience from day 1.

---

That, and having one entire instance of tortage complete with its own NPCs and stuff for each player turned out to cost too much server resources.

Originally posted by Zorndorf

 

Biggest crap I have ever seen.

 

More then 50 people in a city and even your 9800GTS cards stop functioning. Instancing .

Do you ever get tired of compaining over the same thing ? Where did you buy a 9800gt"S" card ?