Originally posted by bryan1980

Originally posted by WSIMike

Originally posted by Daffid011

While I think it is pretty early for people to be making claims about what this game will be and won't be, I'm pretty sure it will have plenty of loading screens between the different gaming areas.  Considering the game takes place in many of the worlds major cities, I don't think funcom is going to make a seemless replica of earth.

Indeed.

Thing is... I think people blow zoning a *bit* out of proportion. 

I can understand the frustration of instancing common/shared areas.. That drove me nuts even back in Anarchy Online with the different starting areas (pre Shadowlands).

But, as long as the zoning is reasonable, it's not that bad and you get used to it.

-shrug-

That's my 2 cents anyway.
 

 

If you have to have a load screen to get from one large outdoor area to another, that is fine.  The part that bugged me about AOC was having a loadscreen when you went into the basement of an inn.. the room you entered was like 8x10 feet, and still they had to have  loading screen?

You had a load screen because those were single player or group instances.  I could take the instancing or leave them but I understand why they did things the way they did them. 

Originally posted by bryan1980

Originally posted by WSIMike

Originally posted by Daffid011

While I think it is pretty early for people to be making claims about what this game will be and won't be, I'm pretty sure it will have plenty of loading screens between the different gaming areas.  Considering the game takes place in many of the worlds major cities, I don't think funcom is going to make a seemless replica of earth.

Indeed.

Thing is... I think people blow zoning a *bit* out of proportion. 

I can understand the frustration of instancing common/shared areas.. That drove me nuts even back in Anarchy Online with the different starting areas (pre Shadowlands).

But, as long as the zoning is reasonable, it's not that bad and you get used to it.

-shrug-

That's my 2 cents anyway.
 

 

If you have to have a load screen to get from one large outdoor area to another, that is fine.  The part that bugged me about AOC was having a loadscreen when you went into the basement of an inn.. the room you entered was like 8x10 feet, and still they had to have  loading screen?

Must have been a really popular basement.

Do they hide all the booze there?

Originally posted by WSIMike

Originally posted by bryan1980

Originally posted by WSIMike

Originally posted by Daffid011

While I think it is pretty early for people to be making claims about what this game will be and won't be, I'm pretty sure it will have plenty of loading screens between the different gaming areas.  Considering the game takes place in many of the worlds major cities, I don't think funcom is going to make a seemless replica of earth.

Indeed.

Thing is... I think people blow zoning a *bit* out of proportion. 

I can understand the frustration of instancing common/shared areas.. That drove me nuts even back in Anarchy Online with the different starting areas (pre Shadowlands).

But, as long as the zoning is reasonable, it's not that bad and you get used to it.

-shrug-

That's my 2 cents anyway.
 

 

If you have to have a load screen to get from one large outdoor area to another, that is fine.  The part that bugged me about AOC was having a loadscreen when you went into the basement of an inn.. the room you entered was like 8x10 feet, and still they had to have  loading screen?

Must have been a really popular basement.

Do they hide all the booze there?

 

The only 'basements' that I remember doing that were dungeons, it's fun to exaggerate. :D Tell me where this 8X10 basement was ?

 He might be talking about the small prison cell you have to enter in Tortage. Small instance with a single NPC in it.

Originally posted by Thillian

Originally posted by jaxsundane

Originally posted by Thillian

OP no offense, but this thread is a joke. Instead of googling this out in a few seconds, you rather asked here. Yes, it uses the same engine. It was already confirmed by Jorgen Tharaldsen and Erling Ellingson.

 

Will play be instanced or streamed?

Ellingson: We're not ready to go into too many details here, but I can promise you that we have some huge environments in the game.

The engine we're using is the same as the one we're using for Age of Conan (though we are always improving upon it, and The Secret World will launch much later than Age of Conan so expect to see a lot of improvements), and that engine is by now renowned for the massive landscapes that we are able to render - from massive mountain-ranges to vast cities.
 

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=182406

 

What other games have they used this engine for because in his statement he says this "engine is by now renowned for the massive landscapes that we are able to render" but I have never heard any praise for AoC massive mountain ranges or vast cities.

I'm certainly tainted against much of anything they say because of how I view the moves I've seen them make but I am no hardcore technological expert so truly wonder if this game engine is in use somewhere other than AoC or does he in fact mean that the above statement is about AoC?

 

Dreamworld.
 

Dreamworld is the name of the engine, not the name of the other games it's been used for.

And I'm sorry, but the engine is not "reknowned for the massive landscapes". It is "reknowned" for being the buggy piece of shit spaghetti-spliced code that powers Anarchy Online, and which also powers Age of Conan.

Originally posted by WisebutCruel

Originally posted by Thillian

Originally posted by jaxsundane

Originally posted by Thillian

OP no offense, but this thread is a joke. Instead of googling this out in a few seconds, you rather asked here. Yes, it uses the same engine. It was already confirmed by Jorgen Tharaldsen and Erling Ellingson.

 

Will play be instanced or streamed?

Ellingson: We're not ready to go into too many details here, but I can promise you that we have some huge environments in the game.

The engine we're using is the same as the one we're using for Age of Conan (though we are always improving upon it, and The Secret World will launch much later than Age of Conan so expect to see a lot of improvements), and that engine is by now renowned for the massive landscapes that we are able to render - from massive mountain-ranges to vast cities.
 

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=182406

 

What other games have they used this engine for because in his statement he says this "engine is by now renowned for the massive landscapes that we are able to render" but I have never heard any praise for AoC massive mountain ranges or vast cities.

I'm certainly tainted against much of anything they say because of how I view the moves I've seen them make but I am no hardcore technological expert so truly wonder if this game engine is in use somewhere other than AoC or does he in fact mean that the above statement is about AoC?

 

Dreamworld.
 

 

Dreamworld is the name of the engine, not the name of the other games it's been used for.

And I'm sorry, but the engine is not "reknowned for the massive landscapes". It is "reknowned" for being the buggy piece of shit spaghetti-spliced code that powers Anarchy Online, and which also powers Age of Conan.

Well that would depend on who you ask :). Like anything else, it's all in the eye of the beholder. Some report but nothing issues... some report having very few. I know I've had similar situations.. playing MMOs without a hitch that others seemed to have nothing but problems with... and vice versa.

And of course, people do tend to exaggerate, on either side of the fence (especially around here). People will dismiss any issue with a game because they like it. Likewise, others will amplify the smallest issue of any game, because they don't like it. If they like it, it can do no wrong. If they hate it, it can do no right. This is why I pay little attention to individual accounts of a game's stability. I play it myself and see how it performs for me.

I've known people personally who might have crashed twice in a week, if that, playing a game. They would turn around and relate it as "the game crashing constantly"... obvious exaggeration.

That said...

I never had substantial problems with the engine in AO (crashes, etc), and I played it on and off over several years.

Can't speak much for AoC as I've not done much more than Tortage, which of course is (or at least was) the most polished part of the game, so that's not an accurate assessment of the whole game.

However, I've heard/read multiple accounts of the engine being improved overall; and they've got time yet to improve it further for TSW.

Maybe AoC being closer to TSW's release than AoC was to AO will keep where they went wrong more "fresh" in their memories.

Or.. they could completely botch it again.

Hopefully they won't.

But, only time will tell.

Originally posted by DragonShark

 He might be talking about the small prison cell you have to enter in Tortage. Small instance with a single NPC in it.

Is that instanced to 1 person now? I hope so because at release it wasn't and people camped there... Fricking annoying you'd go in to talk to the guy and some guy in stealth would start attacking while you were in talking mode with the NPC.. It's difficult to provide good story telling and world PvP at the same time.

Originally posted by Cynthe

Originally posted by DragonShark

 He might be talking about the small prison cell you have to enter in Tortage. Small instance with a single NPC in it.

 

Is that instanced to 1 person now? I hope so because at release it wasn't and people camped there... Fricking annoying you'd go in to talk to the guy and some guy in stealth would start attacking while you were in talking mode with the NPC.. It's difficult to provide good story telling and world PvP at the same time.

I'm talking about zoning.. where you have to have a loadscreen to get to a place.  Most of the underground areas in AOC were zoned, including the basements of most of the buildings.  You could go there and see other players, but you still had to endure a loadscreen first.

AoC is older then WoW, or rather: AoC started development before WoW. That was its major undoing. It didn't learn. AoC compared to say EQ and others of that age wasn't a bad MMO. Buggy, but then, have you ever played EverBugged?

AoC didn't even fail because of the bugs, it failed because while the graphics were somewhat modern, the game itself was a throw back to dawn of MMO's all those years ago. Crap chat channels, arcane cmd line inspect, no fast travel, idioticly expensive horses only available after a long long play time, boring quests, dungeons concisting of nothing more then endless straigh corridors.

It is almost as if half a decade ago the Goat and his cronies locked themselves up with some good ideas about how to make a game that would beat EQ and then emerge blinking into the day light 1 year ago, totally unaware that other games had already done it, and done it better.

Take for instance voice acting, it only was available in the beginning of the game, JUST like in EQ2. But EQ2 was already an old game when AoC game out, so they lost any novelty value and got slammed for not having voice acting throughout.

To little to late. It wasn;t the engine itself, it was the entire design of the game from the bottom up that was flawed. 

/SIGH

When will people stop feeding trolls?

Urf.. you've got a weird way of thinking. 

It's not that they didn't learn from WoW, it's that they tried not to be a WoW clone. Quite a difference. 

Age of Conan had a very smooth technical launch, a lot better than WoW had for example. Aside from performance issues the game didn't have that much bugs as people made it look, compared to a 4 year old WoW there were a lot of bugs yes, compared to a just released WoW AoC definitely didn't have much more bugs. Nor had WoW  much more end-game content when it released.

If the AoC team made a design-fault it was trying to get too much content in the game, resulting in a game with tons of unfinished features. The huge potential of the game still remains, if Funcom manages to finish all their content, no MMO to date could match that amount of content. Right now, the game is still unfinished, and it probably will remain so for quite some time, but people tend to forget that AoC just has tons more content than other MMO's, and as such, more content that needs to be finished and fixed. I'm quite sure that within a year or two years the game will be one of the best MMO's out there, yes, it should have been that from the beginning, but to keep nagging about that is just boring yourself. 

I have personally quit AoC quite some time ago because of the poor optimalisation for laptops, but when I go back to the other MMO's like WoW, WAR, LOTRO, ... they just can't match the atmosphere and details of AoC. Not to mention that when you played Age of Conan's combat system, any other MMO's system is utterly boring. 

Next to that, The Secret World is being developed by a completely different team then that of Age of Conan. They do things differently, they've got other ideas and methods about how to make an MMO. Prime example is their focus on an open world, while the Age of Conan team had announced very early on they'd go for heavy instancing.

If you'd like to bash Age of Conan, then at least do it on the Age of Conan forums, and not on the TSW forums. 

There wont be any instanceing in TSW. The instanceing in AoC, have nothing to do with the engine. It was just a bad choise from the AoC team.