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.