All Posts by ethion

These are the GU4 update notes from the test server.  I believe it was next week that this is going live or maybe it was the week after.

You can recustomize your characterize your character whenever you like.

With gu4 next week you will have helms. Yeah! but you will loose a lot of the facial customizations.

With gu5 in two months aprox you will likely get tails, yeah, you will also potentially get more customization options to make up for some of the loss in gu4.

Originally posted by Kemplar

As quoted by Silius in the link you provided.

“In looking at the variety that could be generated with our current character face customization, we saw minor differences between what could be achieved versus the default, and virtually no differences at range.  Since we are already iterating to new models after this update, we made the decision as a team to remove facial customization to increase performance and also to allow us to get helmets into the game at the same time.

Your characters will change as we move into phase two, and customization options and methods will also change.  Your character will not look like it has looked in the past because the geometry and other factors will change.  Customization will change.  So whether we push the character customization, skeleton, and helm changes to Live or not, your characters are going to change anyway in the near future.“

First of all let me just say his statement about how there’s barely any noticeable difference between what you can accomplish and the default look as complete BS. I spent a lot of time on my characters appearance and I’ll be damned if I’m going to condone this crap by paying them a monthly fee. If you can tell someone’s face from their ass then you can most definitely tell the difference between the default and any combination of faces you could make with the customization that was in place.

Secondly he states this is just the beginning of the destruction of my avatar. Apparently they will start removing body customization options in the future? Well that’s fine with me since I won’t be apart of their game by then anyways.

Yeah it looks like these changes will wrap up in gu5 where the entire character model will be changed.  Will be interesting to see what the end results will be.  He did say the goal was sexier, more heroic avatars which all sounds good.  He also said that they customization would be changed and that what we see now is a phase in the overall implementation and that they lack of customization was more then he expected.

So I'm gonna predict that we will see more options coming back not less in the future and that the avatars will look better and game performance will be better.  While it might be a change it isn't clear weather the long term will be good or bad.  I don't know that helms adds substantially to the customization I can do to my character now that people can actually see from more then 10 feet away...  but time will tell...

Originally posted by d3moliti0n

Hey there

Well I bought Vanguard in August last year and I quit playing it after like a week as my system couldn't handle it. I have recently upgraded my system (my parents gave me their PC cos they didn't use it anymore so I upgraded the Ram and Graphics card and maybe the CPU to a dual core sometime soon) and was wondering how will it play on this? My specs are:

Athlon X64 3200+ (2.00GHz, 512KB Cache)

2GB DDR Ram

Radeon HD3850 256MB (PCI-E)

I know you get these threads all the time so any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks for your help and time.

Well the game will play on your system but I'd say stick to balanced as you won't be happy playing in higher modes.  Memory is good but your cpu and your video memory will both provide you with limitations that will make higher quality modes more laggy or just slow.

The good news is that as you upgrade your computer things will improve.  I have a pretty high end system and have no problems playing on max settings which is something I can't do in say eq2...

So while the engine is demanding I don't think it is inefficient.  The only downside is the texture compilation still gives lag in new areas.  The texture cache however does do an excellent job caching the textures so that once you run around in the area ll the hitchyness will go away.

Saradon has a good population on it.

I really liked playing a kojan human monk of disciple.  I love the oriental flare in the area and the lore.  It was a lot of fun.

The wood elf area is also pretty nice.  I tried a druid here which was kinda nice.

After that I liked the dark elf area.  A bloodmage was fun.

For a wierd start try one of those cat people.  They have a really interesting starting area and the newbie dungeons in the area are pretty cool as well.  Be sure the check out that ship wreck.

Then I'd go with a barbarian if you like cold weather

Or maybe a human/halfling bard in the tursh area

Oh I almost forgot a dwarf paladin/warrior....  No wait how could I forget the orc/goblin area.  Yeah a goblin necro is cool...

You know what, you really need to make a character in all the areas they are all great fun :P  The more I think about it the more I think about how cool the other areas were.  I clearly have too many alts when I've had to start deleting them to make room for new ones...

Ive also got an 8800gtx and play with everything maxed.  I never see my fps ever drop below 25fps now and most of the time it is around 50+.  The only exception is when I first run into a new area I still get a few bouts of hitching till all the textures are cached then it is smooth as silk.

Definitely nothing like at release where I was playing on balanced and had huge hitching problems in places like Kahl, Tursh, Lomshir that made playing a pain.

Originally posted by solareus

Shadowbane sieges  pretty much wrote the book on the subject. Every game is trying to play catch up the massive ammounts of innovation Shadowbane has created. I beleive if you think any game "made seging" epic, you where never at shangrilla battling 200 Chinese for 5 hours straight. 200 vs 50 of us, and we almost beat them !

Conan will have great innovations , but seiging will not be one of them.

Yeah shadowbane was really the ultimate on city building/sieging.  AoC is really just reproducing what's in shadowbane.  Shadowbane city/siege/pvp system was really the best one I've seen in any game so far.  Other aspects of the game fell appart but these things shadowbane definitely did right.  I especially loved how shadowbane added people who killed you to a log book for future reference ;)  Revenge is best served cold!

I think eq2 is a good game for a newbie to the industry.  It has an ok tutorial to kinda get you going with the basics and the game play is pretty straight forward and not very harsh when you make mistakes.  Mentoring also makes it easy for a new person to get help from more experienced people without trivializing the entire experience.

And as you grow into eq2 there is a lot of depth you uncover that will keep your intrest up where with other games you might get tired of the repetative single track...

Does this option work properly on ATI cards??  I always wondered that.  Since it is hardware occlusion it makes it sound like it is a video card issue.  but who knows.

Probably should default to off....

Originally posted by Sovrath

 

Originally posted by ethion

I was thinking about the AoC game and another game popped to mind that would be a really great game world and in my opinion even better then AoC's world of Conan. 

I'm thinking about Barsoon and the worlds of John Carter's adventures.  Conan doesn't have the same level of exoticness and I think barsoon has the same robust brutal world just with more variety.  Anyone share my thoughts on this??

 

Wow... you really blew my mind with this post as I was thinkng of these books a few weeks ago (and yes, it was Conan that made me think of them) and was wondering if anyone remembered them.

Apparently so!

It might make a good setting, though in the end people might just think of this as "Conan on Mars".

I was thinking the game might be called barsoom or something like that.

but yeah the conan connection is definitely there.  Although didn't the John Carter books actually come out before conan?!  Maybe I'll go look it up.

yeah even more important you would have naked aliens with 4 tits which would kick Conans ass big time.  Based on the amount of tit screaming in the AoC forums that would make this game twice as attractive!!

Turn based combat isn't that you take a turn the game pauses etc.  But rather that it has the structure of a turn based system which flows in real time.  So you pick an ability then I pick and ability the key being that you are playing the character and that combat is strategic.  EQ was an example of a generally bad combat system where you hit autoattack and pretty much do nothing more unless you are a caster.  eq2 is also not a very good system although better.  The issue with eq2 is that while you have lots of ability it is really light on strategey since you pretty much use all the abilities continuously as soon as they become available. 

look for a setting called hardware occlusion I think that is the one.  Anyway disable it and the problem should go away.

The difference is that before it wasn't that special nor that common.  I mean yeah in wow there is probably some night elf standing near the auctionhouse striped down and dancing.  Sure that happens and is no biggy but then on the other hand that really isn't that impressive.

I'm just thinking about AoC now where people can build a sexy female character and run around naked.  Just seems to me like it's more extreme and therefore it will be more common.  In most games it never really happens and is never very common but then again you can't be a sexy naked character either.

Maybe I'm wrong and maybe it won't be a big deal.  But I'm just envisioning dozens of naked characters running around fighting naked and trying to just perminently play naked just cause they can and because it is extreme.  So yeah for me that is going to ruin the game immersion of the world. 

But hey maybe it won't happen and maybe it will be a non issue :)  If it is bad and I don't like it I'll just quit and play some other game and I'm only one person so it won't make any difference at all in the large scheme of things and I'm sure I'm going to be easily offset by some teen age boy dying to run around as a naked babe...

Sure you can compare them!!

AOC has amazing looking graphics.   Realistic, Good use of color, artistic, good animations.  Seems to run reasonably well from beta vids.  AOC graphics are immersive and make you feel like you are in a fantasy world.

War graphics look like wow rehashed.  Graphics make you think of an arcade game.  Artistry looks inferior to wow and really falls short of wow which is sad.   Bottom line is war graphics suck and only a war fanboi would say you can't compare them since war is so inferior. 

But thats just my unbiased opinion ;)

I don't know that any system will play it on max settings.  I think the engine is just bad...

I have a quad core, 4g ram and an 8800gtx and I can't play it on max.  I can run it on max and it is ok but the fps will drop below 10 at times and the worst part is that it starts crashing every 30-60 minutes.  I play on high settings with a few tweeked settings up.  I still find places like enchanted lands will drop down to 15-20fps..

So generally graphics performance in EQ2 is just never going to be great.  I still find it ironic that I can play VG which is notorious for sucky performance and I can get 30-40fps with everything maxed and no crashes where I can't even come close to that in eq2 and vg looks a lot better....

But besides the graphics eq2 is really a great game.  Good quests, nice variety, good community.  Well worth playing and on high settings or lower the graphics work well and I never crash.  4gb is really required for high settings as well.

My biggest fear is that there will be lots of teen age kids playing naked women characters running all over.  Will just kinda ruin the immersion of the game if that kinda stupidity occurs...

I sure hope they take out PC nudity before the game goes live as I'm not sure how much of that kinda stuff I can tolerate before just quiting in discust.

eq2 unlink many games has an animation setting in the graphics options.  If you move the setting to the low end animations get really aweful and choppy.  I think it is trying to reduce the number of frames the animation plays and it can make the animations look bad.  You might take a look at the settings and look for one that talks about animation detail or something like that.

Maybe the game is autodetecting your computer and tuning the settings down lower then it should and thats what you are seeing.

I love my new helms.  And if you think they look anything like eq2 you need to really get glasses they look night and day better then eq2....  and a lot more variety as well.

You can also download the beta of station launcher and it will install from the launcher.  I think this gets different download servers that actually seem faster.