Just turned my graphics detail up, and...

Talthanys

But first, some background. When I initially bought AoC I was using, at the time, a mediocre system. To even get the shipwreck intro to run half-smoothly I had to dial down the graphics detail. No shadow, Medium setting, no bloom, etc. The world still looked nice. Even so, Tortage was choppy at best.

Then I quit due to memory leaks.

When I came back for a second brief stint, my computer had been upgraded to a (back then) beastly powerhouse including dual 8800 vid cards. However, I never really went back to turn my graphics back up and retired from the game before too long.

Forward to last night as I restarted another character (I am fussy when it comes to getting the look that I precisely want for my character), I go in, slap the Detail on High, DX10, bloom, reflections, etc. The only thing I turned off was shadows from everything except characters. My god, the entire game just blossomed. What an astonishingly beautiful game this is. No choppiness or lag (likely a combination of having a better system and the work Funcom has done toward optimization).

While I do have some concerns regarding overall PvP in this game (on Cimmeria), and the recent slanting towards PvE, I can say that right now, completely starting over with a new character, I am very happy I came back to AoC after a short self-imposed sabbatical from MMOs in general.

-tal

Artean

My experience is about the same as yours; played at launch, cancelled short thereafter due to bugs, lags etc. Just reactivated and playing on a new comp and have most settings maxed out on dx10 with mostly good fps. The game runs so much better and actually gives an impression of being in a good shape.

Lets see if I can keep my enthusiasm this time around. 

drbaltazar

they had a great look back then but they were victime of their own popularity so they had to pull down dx10

even without that it still laged,and the fact donnybrook didnt exist back then did help them either

internet connection upload speed werent 1mb/sec like today they were a lot slower.

techno evolved and hopefull they had time to mod their server,game and network so they dont have issue anymore but you will know more when lot of player are around you since that was the main issue back then.

if you were solo with only npc you had no issue but if you had 15 player within view it skipped the whole way like a reluctant child.

AmazingAvery

The DX10 client on a 64-bit system I hear scales better/ better optimized than the game being played on 32-bit windows.