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will age of conans specs be too high for the average mid range pc
sandgrown
Member Posts: 78
this is a snippet from an article i found on the eurogamer website .
"John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, said that accessibility - particularly on a technical level - was key to WOW's success and the failure of most competitors, including his own. "One of the biggest places we made a mistake with EverQuest II is the system requirements," he said, noting that the same mistake had been made more recently with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.
None of this bodes well for notorious system hog Age of Conan, which launches this month."
even though i m not going to liken funcom to soe (god forbid) could they be right ??? are age of conans specs going to be too high and have funcom made the greatest mistake in mmo development and produced a product will exclude a huge percentage of potential customers.
personally i hope not because conan was one of the bight sparks on the mmo horizon . i dont want to see another failed mmo that could have been great just because the developers overestimated what the average home sytem was capable of .
we will know in a very short time . i m keeping my fingers crossed for funcom i want this game to be a success . the last thing the mmo community needs is another big name game to crash and burn .
Comments
Great post and article from Sony. I think that he is right on the money about wow's sucess. You can play it on a shit computer and still have a great time. I played eq2 from the start and I do know that a lot of people stopped playing due to the harsh requirements.
With AoC, I must say that I have a mid range system, maybe low at this point, AMD X2 5600, 3g of DDR2 800 Ram and a 8800gts 320 8(. I was running decently in beta, not great by any means. While it may be more of a driver issue, at some points I was getting 25fps, some points, 13fps and other times 50-60 fps.
Great question, but I will have to reserve a final answer until release to give Funcom a fair shake.
i would say thats exactly the same experiance i had . i thought the game looked like it could be fun but the way it ran on my pc would be too frustrating in the long run . if it was having trouble with tortage god knows what the pvp would be like in a large battle . if the release client is anything like the beta i think a lot of people with range systems will leave after the first month .
the reviews will be mostly favourable and should this game have been released in a couple of years time when the average home system was slighly more powerful this game would have been a massive success .
my prediction it will sell well in the first month but there will be a massive drop off once people have to subscribe and also there will be a lot of disapointed gamers who read funcoms minimum required specs (which are relativly low) and recomended specs and decide given thier system falls somewhere inbetween that it should play well on the lower settings at least .
i expect if this is the case we will see a lot of angry posts in these forums within the coming weeks from disgruntled gamers .
my hope is that the retail client is a signifcant improvement on the beta when it comes to performance on mid range ( and low range systems) .
fingers crossed.
I'd have t osay that u8nless you havea half-way decent gaming rig....AoC is not goingto play very well for you. Even with my rig, in certain areas before the "miracle patch" it would turn into a virtual slide show. After the miracle patch it seemed to smooth out(both the CB and the OB). So the question is...will the final release version play as well as the patchd version of the CB abd OB. If it does, then I suspect that AoC will run decently on a mid-range rig with 2gig of ram, 2.4 ghz cpu and a decent vid card with atleast 320mb.
Lol considering I was running on a 2 year old laptop(Not even a gaming laptop, getting 20-35 FPS) I would say it would run fine on new mid range systems as long as they have a video card.
SPECS:
1.8ghz C2D
5400rpm 70gig HD
2gig ram
7600go GPU
Vista 32bit
Incase anyones wondering.
He is not the only one doing this.....just check out all the same people creating simialr big '?' mark threads over the game here..its getting stupid now, they seem to be more frequent heading into launch, hope they stop it after launch and leave us alone to actualy talk about the game and the fun/problems we are having.
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
I would say I have a mid range system ,
Intel) Core 2 CPU 6420 @ 2.13GHz
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
2.0 GB ram, cant remember the speed though.
TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S182D ATA
Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, 32-bit
And it ran great for me apart from a few issues early on. One thing i did notice was that in Tortage I suffered from poor frame rates but on the White sand Island i was getting a constant 60 fps with loads of people there on medium settings, same with the Pict Village and the Under hall 60 fps no probs. Go to Tortage or the city hubs and im down to 10-20 fps.
Twas very strange.
ran great on my laptop (£500 from PC World recently).
Dell Inspiron 1520, XP, 2 gig ram, 2GHz Core 2 duo, GForce 8600M GT
Although my much higher specc'ed desktop had all sorts of troubles...
guess it will take some time before all the hardware compatability issues are resolved, but it was much better after the last patch they released.
I was very random in my fps 18-30(on low) still was getting 1st almost evey mini game tho
with my crapy 3.2p4 2 gigs ddr3
8600 gt 512 win xp asus pk5c mobo
Hmmmm.........
I think that AoC has just redefined what a mid range spec PC is....as this does happen everytime a cutting edge game is released.
So yes...of coarse an average mid range PC will run it...so will a high range, and apparently a pentium 4 will run it also...imagine that!
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
I had a P4 3.0,2gig of ram,Nvidia 7600 with windows xp. I couldn't move my fps were so bad. I gave in and bought a new computer. My new computer is a Quad-core 2.4,4gigs of 800 ram,nvidia 8800GT (preoverclocked..performance better then a 8800GTS 320g) and windows vista 32-bit. Now the game runs VERY smooth and I have all the setting maxed out. Needless to say I'm very happy now
I want a quad core cpu, don't have the cash for one though, clocked my 8800 GTS 320's GPU up to 603 MHz though, runs like a champ mem clock runs at about 1700 MHz. Nice system you have there, I'm jealous lol.
its very strange i ve seen a lot of posts in these forums saying that it runs very well on lower spec pcs than any of mine and also lots that are of a similar spec or higher that have said they ve had no end of problems . i can only speak from personal experiance and the experiance of friends who are also in the beta . all of which have experianced performance problems which does nt seam to be consitant with a few posts i ve read . perhaps its a matter of how well some people expect a game to run . i found the so called miracle patch to be like a like any miracle some are believers and some are sceptics :P . i will be fair it did resolve some issues but unlike some people i did nt throw my hands up and say halleluyah .
i do recall shortly after vanguard came out there were lots of people saying they could run it on similar machines to those that found it unacceptable in terms of performance . now i dont think age of conan will be a total disaster like vanguard by any means but i if your considering on playing on an average pc it might be worth waiting for a free trial to see how it runs .
maybe the xbox360 version will be the success story at the end of the day . although i m not sure how well an xbox360 version would compare to a pc one .
it will be interesting to see how this all plays out over the course of the summer .
Steam does a hardware and system survey of computers using their program. It's probably the most accurate data we have as to what the average gaming rig looks like.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
I'm not sure how to interpret the results, but I guess someone else can use it to figure out if AOC is too cutting edge for the current market.
Thats a very interesting servey, not as many people running more than one core as i thought there would be. CPU speed is not as high as i thought either. Most people seem to be running 7600 and 8800 cards, nVidia seems well upfront on that score. Nice find.
Even if it had problems AOC's perfomance had nothing to do with Vanguard's. Do not hesitate since the only thing that's worthy in my PC is just a cheap 8800 GT (140 Euros) with 4 gigs of 666 mhz ram (about 80 euros) and a 3 mhz single core (HT) Intel CPU on XP 32 bit (SP2).
I got many errors but most of them were handled (attempt to continue ...). There is a big diff between a handled error and a crash. I will complain of course and i will demand much better perfomance but i will buy the game since i don't have an xbox (and wait playing GTA IV) and i miss my Bear Shaman.
There is no MMO with graphics like AOC. That's a good start imo.
I've always used Valve's survey as a benchmark for the "real" state of computer gaming. It's pretty funny to see the disparity between what hardcore gamers (such as many on this very site) think is the average vs. what that survey shows.While you could debate the validity of the sample pool (no way to be sure if the pool of people that could and will play AoC is the same as the one that uses Steam) if it's assumed to be a representative sample of the casual - hardcore gaming spectrum then AoC is definitely limiting their possible success by pitching the game as high as they are.
Ironically it's only likely to be the processor requirement that hangs people up - which speaks about what computer users upgrade. Memory reqs are well within the average (~70% are 1 GB or higher), and video card specs are too (nearly 80% have at least a shader 2.0 card). It's the 3.0 GHz processor req that'll hang people up - only 40% of people have multiple cores, and only ~12% of those with single cores are above 3.0 GHz.
It really comes down to how accurate the minimum specs are. If they're a minimum but playable experience then slightly lower comps might be able to run the game. If they're the bare minimum to even launch the game then it'll likely exclude even some people that are bang on minimum or slightly above.
Smed's right in his quote (happens to everyone now and again - even him) developers chasing the gold ring that is WoW's sub numbers need to aim lower with their system reqs. It's that simple.
I'd rather they made a visually appealing MMO than cater to the mass populace, but from a business standpoint it does make more sense to have a larger potential customer base. With all of that said I will enjoy the fact I am not playing a game that looks like a cell shaded piece of garbage. SoE was correct though as this type of game could never have the same numbers as WoW does, however that does not mean it can't be a financial success.
Yes, Conan is way above the ability of the average range PC today. Most computers that people have been gaming on will simply not handle AoC at all. The average computer is over 3-years old and Conan will tax anything but a high end computer from over a year ago and will be unplayable to any real extent on any system greater than three years old.
That being said... So? I don't think that is a bad thing.
World of Worthless came out, as they say, at the right place at the right time. Computing power, graphics, bandwidth and the internet were coming together in the early 2000's. In the 1990's UO, EQ and Asheron's Call were all dealing with computers that had less power than a modern day cell phone.
WoW was there at the right time. It is a game that can be played on a toaster oven and by 2004 enough people now had internet access and a computer that could handle something the scale of WoW. People forget that a half a decade passed between EverQuest / Asheron's Call and the launch of Warcraft. During that time computers evolved and created a market that simply had never existed before.
Add to that the fact that there was a flood of Nintendo-style gamers suddenly arriving on the web and demanding a nintedno style MMO - Voila! Presto! you have WoW. There is a LAw of the MMO Gaming world that says, "You will never find a game that is as good as your first MMORPG." These nintendo kids all stumbled into the world of gaming at the time and place that WoW was born. They are hooked on a basic, nintendo-style lack of detail, shallow, and flavorless game... why? Because it was there and they were hungry.
AoC is now shinning a light in to the future of gaming. Will all the Wow-children come running? No. Will some, yes. Will some come running and find that their toaster oven can't play AoC? Yep... look around these fora, they are already here.
"The reality of the poor in America isn't the difference between The Haves and The Have Nots, it is the difference between The Haves and The Have Lots."
QFT (Quite F'ing True. You never can tell what things will be interpreted as these days...)
Thats a very interesting servey, not as many people running more than one core as i thought there would be. CPU speed is not as high as i thought either. Most people seem to be running 7600 and 8800 cards, nVidia seems well upfront on that score. Nice find.
Neat survey.... but just off the top of my head I would also suggest that this survey is weighted to the high end of the computers too. People that just 'use' a computer don't do things like these surveys. People that are interesting in computer performance do. And that likely skews the results higher than actual population would suggest."The reality of the poor in America isn't the difference between The Haves and The Have Nots, it is the difference between The Haves and The Have Lots."
Thats a very interesting servey, not as many people running more than one core as i thought there would be. CPU speed is not as high as i thought either. Most people seem to be running 7600 and 8800 cards, nVidia seems well upfront on that score. Nice find.
Neat survey.... but just off the top of my head I would also suggest that this survey is weighted to the high end of the computers too. People that just 'use' a computer don't do things like these surveys. People that are interesting in computer performance do. And that likely skews the results higher than actual population would suggest.Would that argument not also sway to the fact that people who are interested in MMORPG's would most likely have a decent mid range computer and the more casual types would have say the lower end....
"Trump is a blunt force, all-American, laser-guided middle finger to everything and everyone in Washington, D.C." - Wayne Allyn Root
Personally I have a 2 ghz AMD processor, 1 gig of ram, and a geforce 6800 and I run AoC on low at 20-25 fps with occasional stutters but it is completely playable. I dont think they are going to have too many problems.
interesting...you did? i was thinking to wait until i get a new desktop pc this summer, but when one can actually play on your laptop... i might give it a shot already at release.
I have almost the same specs:
2.0 ghz C2D
2gig ram
7700 go gpu
xp
wow thanks...thats pretty cool to see