Originally posted by Khenthir

Originally posted by Zorvan

Originally posted by Tarka

A slightly offoptic question:   When I played AO 5 years ago, there wasn't much in the way of quests (aside from the armour quests and the mission generators).  Is AO still centred around grinding the levels in order to progress to the next area?  Or did that change and they perhaps put more quests in to take the "edge" off grinding?

 

There have beem many quests added, both on RK an in SL. The ones on RK mostly center around the Dust Brigade and start around level 150ish, I believe. But as far as quests from say 1- 220, no. There's still mainly a grind. But figure the original grind through sub, then totw, then foreman's, head to the borgs camps, then start looking for DB quest teams, plus doing AI mishes and such. With a smattering of SL play along the way to add variety, it's not nearly as bad as it was 5 yrears ago. You'll need someone else to really tell you about stuff past 125-130ish, as that's about the highest I've ever gotten  toon in all the years I've played. I suffer from extreme alt-itis.lol

While the SL quests do give decent XP and reward items, they're more about exposing the Shadowlands storyline.

That's actually much-needed.  If you remember before the quests were added in SL, the story was mostly hidden in item descriptions.  And with so many rare (and often also useless) items in SL, that meant browsing the item database instead of actually playing the game.

SL started the AO downfall.  That whole fantasy, wanna-be World of Warcraft disrupted what AO was all about.

Mission running got tedious, but the grind is part of the game.  Plus, the AO world is open, full of bosses you can try to tackle with teams.  Players came up with their own ways to grind, instead getting pre-written quest lines.

I think another downfall was lack of upgrading former boss's to make them worthwhile.  I would love to kill mercs again with 30-40 peeps and gain upgraded azure armor or something.  Or tackle random low lives like Babyface or actually do the real old school Mantis Hive again and get upgraded corona MKI + MKII armor... God this brings back memories.. I remember when MKII Armor was the top of the line stuff and my enf had it equiped about 7 years ago and I was flaunting it in Tir Grid as well as the giant support beams. lol

Originally posted by NeokiNaomi

I think another downfall was lack of upgrading former boss's to make them worthwhile.  I would love to kill mercs again with 30-40 peeps and gain upgraded azure armor or something.  Or tackle random low lives like Babyface or actually do the real old school Mantis Hive again and get upgraded corona MKI + MKII armor... God this brings back memories.. I remember when MKII Armor was the top of the line stuff and my enf had it equiped about 7 years ago and I was flaunting it in Tir Grid as well as the giant support beams. lol

Well i think that is a given.  Players flocked to Shadowlands for hecklers, which were basically OP xp & money.  I personally hated Shadowlands, my biggest memory of it was that it was a lot of running around, occasional falling, no grid just some idiotic portals for which you needed mob dropped items.  And the whole goal was just grinding hecklers and upgraded gear/imps.

Anyway, regarding this new graphics engine, I have been hearing about this since like 2006 when I resubbed to the game.  Is there any real progress or release date?

Originally posted by cerebrix

 i did read they are shooting for a november launch though.  we'll have to see if they hit that or not though.

Where did you read that?

Originally posted by miramira2

Originally posted by cerebrix

 i did read they are shooting for a november launch though.  we'll have to see if they hit that or not though.

 

Where did you read that?

When Means, the Game Director, announced a few months ago that they scrapped all the work on the first new engine they were making ( which was using OGRE ) and were starting over using the AoC engine ( which is a reworked version of the Dreamworld engine which AO currently uses ). As of right now however, they're barely getting stuff into the engine as talked about here: http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=558658

So although they are intending a November launch, I'd say it's a safe bet it's going to be much later than that. However, there is now confirmation that avatars are getting redone, both heads and bodies. There are screens of one redone Nanomage female head ( complete with glowing eyes which pulsate ) linked at the bottome of Means post. Body pics will be in a few weeks.

You can also see the pics here where I posted them for easier viewing: http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/163799/page/2

The easiest way is to follow Means every Friday in his "Friday with Means" updates: http://forums.anarchy-online.com/forumdisplay.php?f=204

 I think the avatars will look much better in the Dream Engine when implemented. I downloaded the game. 

Update: veryyy cool game! 

With this graphics engine update, are they going to update the animations as well? Normal movement and combat animations, always sorta looked robotronic and stiff to me. I know 8 years ago in 2001 that was OK, but now it just looks really stupid.

As posted here and elsewhere before, they won't be touching animations.  It is far more expensive to do that then to put in a whole new graphics engine. They will rework the models some to look nicer but animations work is labor intensive.  As is, I think most of the animations look better than those in a lot of more recent games, like WoW.  Even AoC animations, while smoother, sometimes are a bit lame in comparison.

I'm just waiting for them to do this upgrade to come back.

I loved the game back in the day, but my guild fell apart due to all the bugs at launch :(

Heck, I'd almost rather see them to an AO 2 without all this crap they added and go back to the original story arc.  Improve the skill system a bit and let it fly!

But WHEN are they going to upgrade the engine, it should of been released over a year ago and Still no news about it? anyone

That, my friend, I do not know.

There has been news about it every few weeks.  Current target is November but most suspect it will be right at the end of the year.  They've budgetted in a big advertising campaign for the start of the new year.

Originally posted by JGMIII

 

I was sad when the guys shelved Ogre but I can see how this AoC engine could really improve AO.

My problem is wouldnt such a radical jump in graphics kill off alot of players that use older systems?

I don;t mind a bump in the requirments but to need an entirely new system is a bit much.

I know I would need a new system since AoC runs like half baked dog shit on my Old PC.

I hope its optimized and doesn;t require a freaking brand new machine to run.

Ogre looked nice but it also looked like it could run on a single core 5+ year old PC.

if you put regular graphic you can get insane looking stuff but when you add those new bloom effect and those new shaders even the best computer are on their hand and knees often they disable those feature because it doesntnt improve visaual because its either wrongly set up for each vcomputer (probably)

or its meant to look that way  beurk!

Originally posted by burmese

There has been news about it every few weeks.  Current target is November but most suspect it will be right at the end of the year.  They've budgetted in a big advertising campaign for the start of the new year.

 

All sounds great, just wish Funcom had any real credibility with their word.

Do they plan to use real servers, instead of the cheap knockoffs they use now?

Originally posted by Hydroblunt

Originally posted by burmese

There has been news about it every few weeks.  Current target is November but most suspect it will be right at the end of the year.  They've budgetted in a big advertising campaign for the start of the new year.

 

 

All sounds great, just wish Funcom had any real credibility with their word.

Do they plan to use real servers, instead of the cheap knockoffs they use now?

AO runs now on the same server farm that AoC runs on, and that hardware farm has proven to be fast and stable.  If you want to call that cheap knock-off hardware, provide links showing the hardware compared side-by-side with the  server farms from some MMO's you consider to be better.

4 days ago, Means posted some screenies showing the differences

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=561710

In my opinion, the updates are obviously needed.  But they won't bring much to the table to entice people to play.  Like the situation or not, the mainstream MMO market in general has certain expectations.  And acceptable graphics is only one of them. 

Although the current players of AO will enjoy and appreciate the graphics update (and I hope for the sake of the game that everything goes well on the day of the patch), I personally don't think it will be enough to entice a sizeable quantity of customers to play the game for longer than a short term.  More will be needed in order to pull that off.  Considering that FC prefer to do things THEIR way rather than listen to constructive advice from its playerbase then server populations will most likely, on the whole, stay as they are now.  Which in my opinion, is a shame.  Because AO deserves so much more than what FC are prepared to give to it right now.

I think FC does a good job of listening to the playerbase.

Originally posted by burmese

I think FC does a good job of listening to the playerbase.

From my own experience, and in my humble opinion:

Theres a subtle difference between wanting to listen to a playerbase, and implementing a few changes that just so happen to coincide with some suggestions from a playerbase.  The former actively wishes to seek information and dialogue, the latter doesn't care what the playerbase is saying, and any similarities are purely coincidental.  In other words, FC does what FC wants, not what it playerbase necessarily wants / suggests.  After all, they have a right to do what they want to do.  It's just a shame that's all.

Originally posted by burmese

Originally posted by Hydroblunt

Originally posted by burmese

There has been news about it every few weeks.  Current target is November but most suspect it will be right at the end of the year.  They've budgetted in a big advertising campaign for the start of the new year.

 

 

All sounds great, just wish Funcom had any real credibility with their word.

Do they plan to use real servers, instead of the cheap knockoffs they use now?

 

AO runs now on the same server farm that AoC runs on, and that hardware farm has proven to be fast and stable.  If you want to call that cheap knock-off hardware, provide links showing the hardware compared side-by-side with the  server farms from some MMO's you consider to be better.

Don't need link, I can just log into the game and experience the nightmarish lag.  That says plenty.

Any lag you have is an issue between your pc and the game.  Once the game moved to the new servers and game was recompiled under the new compiler, the old lag is virtually gone.  The vast majority of the posters in the AO forums said they had far less lag than before.  Basically, if you can't punch thru Borealis or a good 50-person tower fight and sustain 20-60 fps and smooth frames, you got some incompatible hardware (probably the hard drive since current AO relies enormously on streaming data from it).  Note I didn't say your hardware is bad, just incompatible. Of the few who still have major lag issues, a significant % are on very high end PC's, whose drivers just don't like working with DirectX7.  The new engine will solve that remaining issue, with its' full DX9 functionality.