Games - Age of Conan. The train wreck is a comm'in! (1 Viewer)

[Ripperjack]

A lot of you who are feverishly biting at the bit, waiting for Age of Conan, are probably asking yourself... is it ready yet?

With the current state of the AoC beta… NO FRIGGING WAY! :mad:

My few good friends of mine and myself are currently in the beta, and I can see how the game REALLY is at this point in time. Not some sugar coated FilePlanet advertising hype fest, but the REAL deal.

I have to say this game is NOT ready for release. It needs at least another 6 months of solid debugging and polish before it should even be considered ready for consumption. Between me and my small group of fellow beta testers I have seen in person, crashes to desktop, hard-lock freezing, data corruption requiring a reinstall of the entire client, and the ever popular "PAGE FAULT IN NONPAGED AREA" BSOD. All other games run do not show this behaviour, and running tests like Prime95 and Memtest 86 do not show any issues with the hardware.

This in all is a real shame, as when the game is running it is awesome. However, when you are really getting into the game, and then find yourself sitting in front of your machine for half an hour waiting for the zone to load, only to find that your cursor isn't moving due to a hard lock, you just have to say… "Is this game worth the pain to my machine?"

At this stage I have to say NO! It is not worth it.

To this end I have canceled my pre-orders and will wait at least another month to see how the dust settles after the "free" month is up. However from what I have seen now and over the past 8 years I have been MMO'ing, I can honestly say that this is what we have to look forward to:

May 14th - Head start people begin to download the 12GB+ client from FunCom. Forums are flooded with people lamenting on why it is taking soooo long to get their data.

May 17th - The 50% of so of all head start clients who have managed to get their data ( Mostly Europeans and Americans on high-speed, unlimited cap plans ) begin to log in. They find that all those issues in the Beta that were supposed to fixed, aren't and a whole host of new issues crop up with the immense server load that is created, from large initial sales generated the hype of the game. The other 50% still keep trying to get their game client downloaded, however with the frantic nature of not being able to join in at precisely 12:01 am on the 17th now totally flood the forums with nerd rage and threats to cancel their accounts.

May 20th - "Crash and burn, huh Mav?"… pretty much sums up the state of the server farms on release day. Despite all the warning from the beta crowd, people on mass purchase and log into the game. Technical issues abound and the forum is flooded with, "This game sux! It doesn't work" posts, followed by the ever present "It's working for me, it's your computer!" posts, which are then typically followed with "It's not my computer, it's the game!" replies. The first of the daily downtimes occur, with the game barely playable during release and many angry posts/threats made.

Over the next Month - As May wears on into June, the game more or less remains another reincarnation of Vanguard. People press on with their "free" month. The bugs are slowly squashed and the downtimes slowly abate, but by the end of June when the game is more or less playable, the damage is done. Many of not ALL of the "Warcraft crowd" churn back to WoW, finding the game is too much for their "It's a new machine... back in 2004!" computer and/or that the bugs just spoil the experience.

Over the next 3 months - Further bugs are squashed, the game becomes a tad more playable, however populations crash as players see this is just another Vanguard and thus flee back to their "safe" games. A small group of hard-core players remain, but its nothing like what Funcom as hoping for.

End of the year - Warhammer and Lich King release. AoC, from a promotional point of view is pushed back into the background. The small group of hard-core remain but by and large the WoW crowd have churned back to WoW, with another large chunk of gamers going to WAR.

That's my call for AoC in 2008.

 

[RedBema]

Nice outlook, could very well be a prophetic outline in my book.

 

[Ripperjack]

Well, to further my claims on this, I offer to you this gem of a post from the QA manager from the forums:

Note that this was posted on the 5th of May. 15 days out from general release and 12 days out from the head start.

So with little time, they are STILL uploading untested code that, by their very omission is breaking the game? Now??!! So close to release?? What are they guys thinking?

This is going to HURT!

 

[wite]

Man that is depressing.

 

[Khatib]

Hey RJ...

I've been playing open beta with little to no problems... 4 toons to the lvl 13 cap and two of them played extensively at the cap with only like 3 crashes total.

Any chance I could have your closed beta account if it's unplayable for you?


I'm actually liking the game so far.

 

[dupa]

Hey RJ...

I've been playing open beta with little to no problems... 4 toons to the lvl 13 cap and two of them played extensively at the cap with only like 3 crashes total.

Got 3 characters to lvl 13 and had like 3 crashes to windows, and 1 serious crash - i had to hard reset.

I too like the game.

 

[Ripperjack]

I too like the game.

Same here. When I CAN get the game to run its an awesome experience. Hence why it pains me so to see the current game beta in such a mess, days out from release. :qq:

I bloody well hope their release client has some type of miracle patch installed into it, as it needs a miracle not to crash and burn at this stage.

 

[EvilHomer]

I myself won a closed beta key in a contest, and it took me awhile to get in to the actual game. LOTS of downloading, etc. Unfortunately, I didn't get to play it for long because my computer had some serious problems (nothing to do with AoC) and I have to start rebuilding it tomorrow (i'm in safe mode w/ networking right now, ftwftw). When I did manage to get in to the game, I had a bunch of serious lag problems that was fixed with some forum posts and searched and a few hotfixes.

AFTER the lag problems, this game was unbelievable. The combat is exciting, leveling is interesting, and the combos add a level of complexity that makes you have to actually pay attention. WoW as a hunter is spamming your shot rotation macro, or manual weaving if you want something "exciting". This is fast-paced, multiple enemy action that is both challenging and rewarding.

If they fix the lag problems (which got pretty bad at times, even with the fix) I will LOVE this game, and probably not leave it for a very long time. On a side note, I did enjoy the starting zone, although I never finished it, computer had some real issues. unfortunately, I can see it getting really mind-numbing after the 900th time.

 

[Bladee]

Would be really appreciated if beta guys stated their PC details, and on how high graphics you run the game, also how smooth it runs when it doesn't crash :P

Im sitting here on intel 4 with 3gb ram and ATI radeon HD 3870.. tried to play aoc once with friends acc, must say it was bit hacky on medium graphics, but in overall it was decent for my pentium :p

 

[Bladee]

Btw, looks like the game will have enough of bugs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xVgoCZ75pE

 

[sirandal]

10 minutes to go on my beta download. I should get at least a couple of days in before the end of beta!

 

[Bladee]

http://www.aocdev.com/

 

[dupa]

AMD 64X2 4400 2,41Ghz
2GB RAM
GF8800GTS 320
Win XP

yeah... a time to upgrade, but no money though

I run 30-50 FPS outside the city - depending on the area,
20-30 FPS in the city - depending of the number of players around.

That's on Medium setting. On low setting its not much better but looks worse. On high settings it stutters to much be playable.

The final client wont be having built in debugger - that will make it run a little bit smoother, but not much.

 

[Khatib]

You can try all this. I sent it to my buddy and he went from crashing about 3x an hour to maybe once every 90 minutes.

------------------------------------------------------------

Many people seem to have shitty performance or just simply can't run the game. I've come across some settings that may give you a huge boost in performance. Before setting these, I was able to play for maybe 2 minutes before either crashing or just lagging too hard to do anything. Now I can play for hours with at least 25fps.


Resource Compression:
Run ConanPatcher.exe from your AoC directory. This will install the latest patches automatically. After the patching is done, click "Settings" and the "Verify/Repair" on the first tab. Check both "Verify data integrity" and "Compact Resource Files."

On my computer, I didn't see any improvement in speed until I ran "Compact Resource Files" a second time. I'm not sure if it is bugged, but after running it again, the difference was huge. If you run it a second time, just do "Compact Resource Files" by itself and not the "Verify data integrity." Also, at the very end of this procedure, ConanPatcher.exe crashes on my computer, however it seems to have finished. Your results may vary.


Processor Affinity:
If you have dual cores, many have reported an increase in performance by setting the processor affinity to one CPU. To do this, after launching the AoC Client, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and go to your Task Manager (You can also right click on your task bar and go to Task Manager). Click the "Processes" tab and find "AgeOfConan.exe". Right click on it and go to "Set Affinity." Now uncheck all but one CPU. For me, I select the last CPU in the list.


Video Settings:
Before logging into your character, go to the "Settings" button inside AoC. Click the "Video" tab. Use the following settings:

Basic Tab:
Full Screen - Unchecked (optional, but I personally see a performance boost)
Anti-alias quality - None
Enable bloom - Unchecked
View Distance - 110m

Advanced Tab:
DirectX Version - DirectX 9
Shader Model - 2.0 (this is the most important setting)
Shadow Quality - Disabled
3D Ambient Occlusion Quality - Low
Texture Filtering Quality - Bilinear
Texture Resolution - Medium
Anisotropic Filtering Quality - 3
Details on Ground - Unchecked
Parallax Mapping Quality - Disabled
Shadow Map Resolution - Low


Audio Settings:
Before logging into your character, go to the "Settings" button inside AoC. Click the "Audio" tab. Use the following settings:

Performance Tab:
Audio Quality - Medium


Other Tips:
While there are plenty of guides on fine tuning your machine, I just wanted to mention you need to close any programs that don't need to be open (look in your tray) and defrag your machine.

I want to note that there are a lot of options I skipped in this guide. Just leave them at their default settings. Once you get up and running at an acceptable performance rate, feel free to tinker with those settings and any of the others not mentioned in this guide. If anyone has anything to add or if I made a mistake, please let me know and I will add it / correct it in this post.

*IMPORTANT* After changing these or any settings in the game, be sure to exit and reload the client. If you don't do this, and you crash, there is a chance those settings won't get saved.

 

[Wilbur]

From what I've been told, a lot of the problems come from the amount of "Unique textures" that you are always loading.
Try putting the AOC install on a drive thats not used for much if you are getting texture lag.

 

[Khatib]

Apparently closed beta got a patch today that people are saying is basically a miracle patch performance wise. It's night and day so they say...

There are a couple of animation glitches that Funcom said they know about, but that they had the shader issue worked out and they wanted to push out the new rendering system so they just put it out right away instead of working out the few animation issues before releasing it. Animation issues are mostly with quest NPCs from what I hear too, not regular combat animations and stuff.

So you might want to give it a go tonight RJ and see if it's improved or not.

 

[darkeros]

All of the things RJ posted would happen did happen to WOW, but they made it through. I haven't seen anything specific to Conan that hasn't happened with WOW, so I'm not seeing a basis for these doomsday predictions.

 

[Ripperjack]

Apparently closed beta got a patch today that people are saying is basically a miracle patch performance wise. It's night and day so they say...

There are a couple of animation glitches that Funcom said they know about, but that they had the shader issue worked out and they wanted to push out the new rendering system so they just put it out right away instead of working out the few animation issues before releasing it. Animation issues are mostly with quest NPCs from what I hear too, not regular combat animations and stuff.

So you might want to give it a go tonight RJ and see if it's improved or not.

Hummm... A miracle patch you say. I might give the beta another shot then. I really do want to play this game, but not in the train wreak state that I have been seeing it in when I was running the beta.

 

[Ripperjack]

All of the things RJ posted would happen did happen to WOW, but they made it through. I haven't seen anything specific to Conan that hasn't happened with WOW, so I'm not seeing a basis for these doomsday predictions.

My doomsday prediction doesn't meant the end of the game. Far form it.

What I do say is that launch day is going to be a absolute cluster phuck, with the game steadily getting better from release, until about 6 months later when it will be in the state it SHOULD have been at launch.

In short it's going to be Anarchy Online all over again. However, unlike AO, which did come good about 6 months to a year from release, AoC is going to have to deal with Warhammer and WoW:Lich King, right around the time it does hit its stride.

 

[Bladee]

In short it's going to be Anarchy Online all over again. However, unlike AO, which did come good about 6 months to a year from release, AoC is going to have to deal with Warhammer and WoW:Lich King, right around the time it does hit its stride.

I believe its longer time that you think. Woltk is not even in beta, so we wont see it untill late 2008, that gives AOC several months to get people addicted to it.. But I dont think it will be enough to keep people away to go take a look at Arthas.

 

[Ripperjack]

I believe its longer time that you think. Woltk is not even in beta, so we wont see it untill late 2008, that gives AOC several months to get people addicted to it..

But that is what I said. It is midway May now, 6 months time it will be into the November/December holiday period. AoC should have the major kinks worked out by then, but around that time Warhammer and WoW:Lich King will go head-to-head with Christmas releases, effectively pushing AoC into the background and off the top of the sales leader board.

Sure AoC does have 6 months to get its act together by then, but from what I've seen, I have doubts it will ever be good enough to be a WoW killer. The UI alone is so primitive and clunky, reminds me of all those single player RPG's from the late nineties and early naughties.

But I dont think it will be enough to keep people away to go take a look at Arthas.

Nope, not by a long shot.

 

[Bladee]

The UI alone is so primitive and clunky, reminds me of all those single player RPG's from the late nineties and early naughties.

Well, WoW default UI isnt any better in my opinion.. But I guess there will be UI addons for AoC, as there is now for WoW

 

[Khatib]

I dunno, I thought their UI was decent. It's fairly minimal, but it gets the good info out.

The only really horrible part is the pet control bar, which is MINISCULE to the point that you wouldn't notice it was there maybe if you didn't know to look for it. Pet control is bad and the tiny bar you can barely see to click on makes it worse.

They have an extra two hotbars that can be moved/rotated, they have nice region maps that show coordinates and quest locations... which I don't necessarily like quest locs being in game, but if they weren't, someone would make a data mining site to show em anyways, thottbot/wowhead/allakhazam style. And you can set your own markers on the map, which is really nice. Their buff/debuff icons could use a little work though... They have a target of target bar built in. It's small, but it shows the name and health of the ToT.

It isn't necessarily pretty, but it gets the job done pretty well I think.