Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Guess I am done.
mudge002
Member, Alpha Two
I really wanna play AOC. Play and help test. But it feels like every update they make causes my computer to have more and more problems being able to just exist in the world.
My computer meets the minimum specs, a little better than the required in fact (not a lot, but some) and I can't do a single thing. I can't even walk around. When I finally go far away from any other players the fact that i had to set the graphics to the maximum lowest settings meant everything looked absolutely horrible. Unplayable even, and I am someone who sharply criticizes the overuse of that term from others.
I had to save up and make an exception in my budget to buy into the Alpha just to play, there is no way I can afford the upgrades or completely new computer I would need in order to play this game properly.
Really disappointed because I have been waiting for a game like AOC to come out for over a decade.
My computer meets the minimum specs, a little better than the required in fact (not a lot, but some) and I can't do a single thing. I can't even walk around. When I finally go far away from any other players the fact that i had to set the graphics to the maximum lowest settings meant everything looked absolutely horrible. Unplayable even, and I am someone who sharply criticizes the overuse of that term from others.
I had to save up and make an exception in my budget to buy into the Alpha just to play, there is no way I can afford the upgrades or completely new computer I would need in order to play this game properly.
Really disappointed because I have been waiting for a game like AOC to come out for over a decade.
JimmyMaddox
0
Comments
My issue has nothing to do with how well or poorly the servers are or are not lagging.
I have an assumption of what you mean by this, but since I don't know 100% for sure what you mean, I won't respond on that assumption and instead ask - can you clarify what you mean by this?
I don't agree.
I suppose that all games should offer the possibility to run a game smoothly with the lower settings possible.
I have what they call the recommended specs but I play with a laptop (*) and even with the lower settings the game is not running 100% smoothly for me.
I can't complain, right now i don't care about graphics.... but I would say, maybe it is a problem with performance?... let's see in the next weeks.
*Yes, yes, I know what are you thinking.
By the game release, I am planning to buy a good fixed gaming computer
Yes I get it but IS has been slowly optimizing things as well. Phase 1 I could not even load the game on my old gaming laptop that's rocking a 1660. Today I was able to get in and it was playable enough in town to craft. Playing a hunter on mobs was a little harder but doable. Optimization will get better.
I'm running the game on a GTX 1660Ti laptop i7-10750H, 16g, all SSD (4 years old) and a T1 fiber connection.
All settings set to low, except textures on medium, and make sure the shadow optimization is checked. Also, make sure the over-buffering, frame pre-loading, thing is off. Runs OK, doesn't look great but framerate is up around 60.
If you can't get it working, hope Santa is generous this year!
i think he's saying if you can't afford a computer to play games with you shouldn't be wasting time playing games, but rather increasing your real life money earning level. not bad advice at face value, but everyones situation is different.
the game is still being developed, i'm sure if you mean minimum requirements you'll be able to play at launch with minimum settings. but as it now there's going to be issue.
The OP has a computer that is barely above the minimum specs for an alpha test - there is no way thst computer is going to be able to play the live game.
I'm unsure if they assumed the minimum specs would enable anything other than the worst possible performance, or if they didn't automatically assume that the minimum specs would go up (as is the case with almost all MMORPG's during development), but all i can think of to say to their plight is; well, yeah.
Game has not been optized. We don't know that.
We don't, but we can assume.
Every MMO i have ever had anything to do with pre-launch has had its minimum requirements go up. Most MMO's have their minimum requirements go up post launch as well, often with the second expansion.
The current minimum requirements for WoW, as an example, are for a GTX 900 series graphics card. This was released 6 years AFTER WoW was released.
If you have a computer that is just meeting the minimum required specs of an MMORPG alpha test, historically, you aren't playing that MMORPG.
Being a Steam deck gamer there is entire community that's figures out game setting to get even AAA games running really good on the steam deck. It's cool doing that for lower end games. I do that with my old gaming laptop that has a 1660. I have managed to get ashes running by playing with the settings. It's at 720p as well but it works.
For the laptop, that 1660 is above the minimum spec. Not by much, but above it. It is quite possibly what the OP is using.
Sure, it runs the game, but even as you say - not well.
That kind of isn't the point though. The point was the OP's expectations. They have specs that are only slightly above the current minimum requirements, and seem upset that the game can only just run for them.
Keep in mind that - as with everything in testing - there is a specific note with the minimum system requirements that they may change during testing. If you only just had the minimum requirements and knew those requirements may change during testing, again, what could you expect?
On medium settings I get around 50 FPS with a high view distance setting and it looks just slightly better than WoW classic did back in 2004, I can't imagine how bad it must look on low settings..
I got 5+ years working in development and my salary is competetive; it's competing with my loans and expanses. You can't just go about telling people that they should go earn more money for a PC, some people aren't living in their parents basements rent free.
On the other hand UE5 has notoriously bad optimization in general - lumen is just eating VRAM like a kid on halloween and introducing temporal smears and whatnot (look at the desert preview where the sand drops from the statue - a curated marketing version that's even in the best case full of temporal smears/other AA artefacts). The sad truth of UE5 graphics is that even though they look better than most using different tricks that introduce their own problems they are very much power hungry and devs are quick to offload the graphics requirements to users instead of implementing their own solutions - because it really is a hard process to make lighting work "realistically" especially for big non single player games that are mostly using static light sources, but UE5s lumen technology conveniently does the trick at the cost of framerates. that is why sometimes games from 2015 on 8th gen graphics look sometimes even better than current 9th gen.
TLDR; UE5 says if you want big graphics spend big moneys.
I have tried to do art online (like the Riverlands map I posted a while ago) but commissions are few and far between, and certainly don't afford me the ability to buy a new computer the likes of which I would need to play this game.
While I understand all that, I don't get the point of the thread still.
MMO's always have their minimum specs increase as they are in development. It is normal for the hardware needed to meet the minimum requirement of an MMO at launch these days to not even be for sale when that MMO started development.
If your computer only just met minimum requirements for the alpha, the assumption should have been that it wouldn't meet them by the time the game is released.
Because this is a valid test of the environment and a valid result
I encourage you to keep following the game and giving feedback after every milestone patch in the Alpha Phases.
If meaningful performance/graphical optimizations are going to be happening, you're the exact person who will feel and be able to report on their impact the most.
I'd expect most updates to lower performance for you as they add this or that thing, but sometimes someone will need to know 'this made things better'.
It did passable run the game. The game ran.
It didn't run it well enough for their liking.
If Intrepid listed a higher minimum spec than they have, someone would come along and say "your minimum spec is too high, I can run it acceptably on a machine that is under spec".
What you shouldn't do is expect minimum specs to run the game at 60fps.
Might not have to do with the servers directly, but with my i9+4080S, I get MASSIVE drops in FPS whenever I get near a high populated area. (~70 to ~30).
My suspicion is a problem like the one I had with early SWTOR builds:
The client probably waits for some info from the server until it continues its calculation cycle. If you follow this logically, it reduces your FPS based on server density.
What adds to this suspicion is the fact that whenever my FPS drop, my HW is barely used at all:
I get 70-90FPS when its relatively empty at 95% GPU utilization.
When I get 20-40 FPS, my GPU is only utilized at 20-50%.
The first days of P2 i thought I had to buy a new laptop but now the game runs more smoothly. I suppose they made some changes in the last 10 days to improve it.
Its not a 'game', its an unoptimized test bed.