The level bump in MMO betas

I’ve been thinking about my experiences in the AoC open beta PvP weekend, and how it’s shaping my decision to buy the game or not.

For those who might not know, Funcom gave each open beta player a token that bumped their level up to 20 from the previous cap of 13. Your character was moved out of the starting area and into one of the three main cities, based on your race.

Getting moved and having your level increased can be disorienting. I’m still under NDA for the WAR beta, and all I will say about that is I’ve experienced similar bumps there, and it definitely throws me off. So I’m aware that part of my reaction to Age of Conan last weekend had to do with the level bump.

There’s something precious about building your character organically in an MMO. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t identify with a 20th level character who’s been bumped from 13 the same way I would if I had leveled the character those 7 levels. I’ve never considered buying a character from friends who are quitting games for the same reason. That relationship with the character (wow, dork alert there) is what ties me to the game world. Without the experience of growing a character, I don’t feel as connected to the world around me.

That’s why I haven’t completely ruled out buying Age of Conan. I’m aware that my disjointed experiences in the open beta aren’t going to get me to buy into the virtual world the same way a real level 1 character will make me feel. It’s like I’m driving someone else’s car, or dating someone else’s girlfriend. Well, not so much the girlfriend part, that would probably be a lot more fun than any MMO beta. At least until I got caught.

So I’m still torn. Bildo said in the comments of another post to just buy the game. He’s right in the sense that I’ll feel more connected to my character, and everything that Funcom has designed to help me develop that character will be experienced in the order they intended. I know that’s true, and that’s what I love about MMO’s. I really enjoy that first 20 to 30 levels of making someone new and seeing a new world.

I’m torn because of the performance issues, the bugs, the unitemized areas and a little voice in the back of my head saying “Wait a month! Wait for the reviews!”. I guess it’ll come down to whether I want to make a leap of faith, and chalk up my unease about AoC to the level bump disorientation, and hope that Funcom gets the bugs and performance issues polished up quickly after release. I’m still not sure which way I’ll go. I haven’t pre-ordered, but I may still swing by a Gamestop next Tuesday evening, just to see if there’s a copy lying around. There’s something about the first week of an MMO that is almost worth the price of admission, even if the game itself isn’t worth playing long term.

Decisions! I suck at ‘em.

Conan’s second PvP weekend

If open betas are as much about marketing as they are about testing, turning the Age of Conan servers into open PvP for the remainder of beta was a strange decision.

Funcom was in an interesting position. They previously let players level up to 13, but they didn’t allow open beta players to go further because they didn’t want to reveal the end of the single-player storyline, which goes to level 20. Therefore, they increased your character’s level to 20 and moved you out of Tortage to your racial home city. Once you left a certain area within your home city, PvP was enabled.

While they preserved the mystery of levels 13-20 for the open beta testers, I wonder how much confusion and annoyance they created for testers who aren’t fans of open-world PvP.

When I logged in to the open beta yesterday, there was a note that said to use the only item left in my inventory, and it would level me to 20 and move my character out of Tortage. Once that was done, I was left in an area I’ve never been to before, with no instructions about what I should be doing next. I was in a huge city, so I had to start off wandering around, trying to find an exit or any touchstone that would indicate how I can progress from level 20.

I suspect that if I had leveled to 20 in Tortage and progressed to a bigger city without the 13-20 leveling bump, there may be quests that would give me some direction in the new city. Instead, I managed to find an area of the city where guards 20 levels higher than me aggro when you get near them. Then I found a PvP-enabled area in the city, which wasn’t noted as PvP-enabled until I got attacked shortly after zoning in. Then I had to fight through graveyard camping when I respawned.

Fine, I’m familiar with PvP servers, so once I escaped the graveyard Wheel of Re-Death, I decided to move out into the world to see if I could find what else was available. Problem was, I had no idea where to go. I left the East Gate of the city I was in and wandered the countryside. There wasn’t a single NPC beyond the city, and I didn’t see a single player either. I followed all the roads on my mini-map, but they led to zone lines with no way to cross to new territory. The zone just ended at a flat wall. It was a huge un-itemized area, with roads and buildings, but no apparent purpose.

I ran back into town to try and find my way to places where I could quest and level, but I got annoyed feeling lost in a big new city and logged out.

Listening to the chat channels as I wandered the empty world outside the city, the usual PvE vs. PvP arguments were raging. Anyone who has played mmorpg’s for any length of time can imagine the AoC chat this weekend between players who want to camp respawn points and the players who would never choose to play a FFA PvP server.

I know Funcom wants to preserve the 13-20 content for release (which is maybe another reason the closed beta NDA hasn’t been lifted). I know they want this game to contrast with WoW’s nicey-nice world, and I think that can be a selling point. However, dumping everyone (PvE and PvP fans alike) into an environment where there’s no clear direction and turning the FFA hose on all the PvE types seems like a bad marketing move. The PvE fans can just choose a PvE server, and lots of them were saying that’s what they would do, but Funcom’s decision to go FFA with a level bump was another weird misstep while introducing their game to a larger group of players.

I wish I had time to log in today, but I don’t think I will. I think the open beta ends soon, and I’m left with a strange feeling about whether I should buy the game or not. Yesterday just felt so disjointed, and I wonder how much of the game is done beyond the 1-20 area. I can’t imagine why Funcom would have an exit from a city that leads to a totally empty countryside, with roads that clearly just run into zone walls. Clearly, I missed something in town, but I got tired of talking to every single NPC I meet trying to see if they have something of interest to say way back in EQ. The “level to 20″ token should have at least dropped a quest into your journal to tell you where to go, but instead, players are left to wander. I’m not sure what Funcom was thinking. It wasn’t a great introduction to the levels beyond Tortage, and I think Funcom missed another opportunity to get their hooks into undecided gamers.

New Age of Conan beta build

I downloaded and installed the latest Age of Conan patch last night. It seemed to fix a lot of my performance problems.

First, the patcher was pretty quick. Compared to World of Warcraft, it was great. Compared to WoW, though, downloading the latest Netscape browser overnight on a 14.4 modem in 1995 seems quick.

Second, load times seemed much quicker in all areas.

Third, I didn’t have change anything regarding the number of cores the Ageofconan.exe file used, or change the process affinity. The client performed pretty well with no adjustments. I don’t know if the build actually utilizes multi-core technology now, but at least it doesn’t hose my machine.

Whatever was causing stuttering, lagging, hitching, and generally dismal performance in the previous build seems to be corrected, at least on my machine. Age of Conan does still tax my machine in a way no other mmorpg has done (I haven’t played Vanguard), but this build is much more playable. I spent my time paying attention to the game instead of feeling like the performance level prevented me from playing.

I haven’t tried to crank up the graphics yet, I’ll do that later today. I just wanted to get through a play session without things breaking. Comparing graphics is highly subjective, but I want to turn them up  to LoTRO settings and see how Conan runs on my machine. LoTRO is remarkably smooth at high levels, and I want to see if Conan can perform similarly.

My biggest problem with the new build is a graphical glitch. There are times when light is displayed incorrectly, and I get the cathedral effect, like sunlight streaming through a gap in the clouds. The screenshot below shows what I mean. I get this on random light sources, every time blood spatters, and every time an opposing NPC casts a spell. It pretty much obscures the screen. Hopefully it gets fixed, or I figure out what setting causes it so I can turn it off.

That’s just a static shot. It’s much more annoying in combat, when I’m trying to see opponent shield settings and the blood spatter is blocking things out.

I’m encouraged, though. It’s not perfect, it’s still not as smooth as I’d like, but it’s definitely progress. I could play it at launch like this, I think, although I’m not sure the rest of the world will be as smooth as my experiences in the starting areas and Tortage last night. I’m cautiously optimistic, I suppose.

What would Mythic do?

Funcom’s explanation of the open beta snafu, which I first saw over on Bildo’s site, finally cleared up my questions about what the hell’s been happening over the past few days. Gotta say, I’m not really thrilled with the answer. I’ve been hoping that Funcom left old code in because they wanted to test some sort of cumulative effects with 50k new users, but no, that wasn’t it.

Darren quoted the important part of the explanation, and I’ll trim it down even further here:

We tried to include the best we had on a stable approach, but in our eagerness to please we wanted to get a few additional fixes out (hence we pushed the launch back a couple of hours). In order to reach the May 1st date some of those fixes led to unwanted side-effects which weren’t discovered in time. For some, it got a bit rockier than we wanted.

Let me highlight a bit there. “we wanted to get a few additional fixes out“. Fixes. Umm. Hello? Your eagerness to please should only include shipping heavily tested code. It’s a bit horrifying that they pushed back a launch to cram a couple more “fixes” into a build, especially when the fixes ended up breaking so many things for so many people.

I can’t even address the survey. ‘4 of the first 6 votes for President went to Ralph Nader. I think he’s going to win this year!’. Right.

I can’t help but think about Mythic, who was also contemplating a launch around this time. I posted over on Darren’s blog that I was trying to imagine Mark Jacobs saying “Yeah, we jammed some features in at the last minute, before we patched”. I played DAoC for a long time. Sure, things went wrong, but I don’t think they ever went wrong because someone dropped in the code at the last minute, without testing the build extensively.

Maybe that Midgard Left Axe thingy, that could have been a last minute change God, I hated Savages and Berserkers for the longest time.

In fact, when Mythic was faced with the decision to go with what they had, or pull it back in for more testing and refinement, they pulled back. Funcom decided to forge ahead. Now they’re in the position of having to be right with each decision, as their decisions go public pretty quickly. You can mess around all you want in a closed beta, take chances, try things out, but that time has passed. There needs to be stability, and better communication about your decisions, even if the changes are tested and stable. I’ll give Funcom a mulligan, but you only get one. I’m hearing the word “Vanguard” way too much, and I think AoC is too good a game to get that label because Funcom gets impatient.

Starting all over in Age of Conan

First, the bad news; I don’t know what fixed Age of Conan for me late last night. After trying (and failing) to get things working through a variety of suggested fixes, I decided to do everything but reinstall. I reset all my video settings to low again, ran Simpleconfig and made sure I wasn’t playing fullscreen, made sure I changed the CPU settings for Ageofconan.exe so it only used one core, set the Affinity to High, and suddenly the game decided to work again.

The weird thing is, I’ve done all of that in a variety of ways over the past couple days, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. Last night, something changed, and I have no idea what it was.

I managed to run a Barbarian up to level 8 before I zoned out of the inn in Tortage and everything froze. I had to hard reset the computer, and it was late enough that I didn’t log back in. That’s not a good way to end a play session, but I’ll take it. It was only the second time since the open beta began that I was able to play for any length of time with reasonable performance.

So, things I like: I enjoy combat so far. I’m more reactive than other mmorpg’s, and for the time being, I’m enjoying that. Keen called it button mashing, but I’ll disagree. I’m hitting a lot of buttons, but to me, button mashing is mindless. You don’t know or care what each button you press is supposed to do. In Age of Conan, it matters which buttons you’re pressing. There is a lot of button pressing, since there’s no auto attack, but it’s not mindless mashing.

Keen’s concerns about macroing combos do seem appropriate, though. I’d definitely find it easier to hit one button for my directional combos than hitting the combo first and the appropriate directonal key second. Advantage: Macro players. I have to play with it more to say I prefer a one-button reactionary attack, like DAoC, but I think I’d want to get a keyboard that supports macros if I was going to play serious PvP.

The world isn’t that pretty on low settings, so I can’t talk too much about the graphics. I prefer performance over graphic realism, so I’ll probably be missing the graphical bells and whistles. Maybe one of the newer client builds that utilize two CPU’s will help. I’ve got a gig of video RAM running in SLI, and I’m getting around 40 frames a second on the lowest settings. If the game stays stable, I’ll test bumping up selected video settings. Maybe I’ll even find what broke the game for me earlier.

I like the story so far. I expected that from Funcom, and I haven’t been disappointed. I like the 1-20 solo play too.

If the game stays stable, I’ll be able to dig into a little more and report about gameplay instead of stability. That’d be a nice change I think it has the potential to be a lot of fun. I just wish Funcom would hurry up and test the release build on the open beta players! I’m still not sure why I’m playing such an old client. If the release version has bugs that should have been revealed during an open beta with 50k players, I’m going to be pretty annoyed they had us testing on something older.

I’d still say I’m unsure if I’m buying it at launch, or buying it at all. It still depends on how Funcom handles things over the next couple weeks. Last night was promising, though!

Funcom Survey - How’s Open Beta?

Funcom mailed me (and probably the rest of the Open Beta participants) a survey asking about the open beta experience so far. If you received the survey, take a second to fill it out. It’s really quick, and maybe it’ll help Funcom gather some helpful data.

Like most surveys, your answer options don’t always provide the answer you’d choose. For example, the last question asks “Do you plan to purchase Age of Conan? My possible answers are:

1. Yes. I’ve already preordered or I plan to pick it up as soon as I can.
2. Most likely, I have some slight reservations, but I will probably pick up the game.
3. Undecided. I could go either way at this point.
4. Most likely not. I have some serious reservations and will be waiting for the reviews to come in.
5. Definitely not.

I was wishing for a “Undecided. If you fix all the damn problems I’ve experienced, I think I might actually enjoy your game”. There’s no way for me to tell them that for the one evening I ran the game fairly successfully, I found myself enjoying the game, but for the rest of my play time, the game has been partly to mostly unplayable. That’s a limitation of a survey, though, it’s not really Funcom’s fault. I just want my gripes to be heard by someone at Funcom Maybe I’ll shoot them a mail, although they’re probably a little busy at the moment. I’ve been bug reporting and putting in detailed descriptions.

I was interested to notice that in their questions about hardware, they didn’t have a selection for SLI video card setups. I guess that’s not a potential issue? They did have a multi-core question, so they’re at least aware that could be causing problems.

There’s a small update on the Age of Conan boards about known issues. Apparently the first post has been updated today. They didn’t do a good job of identifying what issues were updated, though. Some of those notes have been there since the beginning of open beta. If you’re having trouble, you can try the listed fixes. Just an FYI;, none of them have helped me except for limiting multi-core to one core for Ageofconan.exe, and that only helped briefly, through a handful of play sessions. I haven’t had a chance to try the game today, but as of last night, the beta was unplayable for me.

It’d be nice if Funcom’s community people were keeping better track of the problems they’re seeing, possible fixes, and which updates are current. That’s probably the most frustrating part of the whole open beta experience so far.

T - 11 days until pre-release!

And suddenly, nothing works

I didn’t make any changes to Age of Conan since I last posted about it. I was actually almost encouraged the last time I played, despite a couple cut scene videos that didn’t play, despite the terribly long load times, and despite the zoning which seems way too often.

Today, I can’t do a thing in AoC. It takes forever to load the client, the multi-core workaround isn’t making a difference, my latency is around 1500 and my frame rate was (seriously) hovering around 1 frame per second. I tried the client at various times today, and it was unplayable every time.

I looked around on the forums, trying to find other people having similar problems, but nothing jumped out at me. Maybe it’s just me, but every other game I try to play is running just fine.

It’s been about 30 minutes of trying different things each time I logged in today, and each time, I had to hard-close the client because the 30 second logout was taking more than a minute.

I guess I’ll try again tomorrow. It’s a big bummer, having this many problems. I can’t even feedback or bug report in game, it’s so bad. Ugh.

*edit* Just found this exchange on the forums:

I’m sad. Yesterday after the patch, everything ran beautifully for me. I even was able to bump my settings up off low and have almost no lag, even inside Tortage daytime.

Today? I can’t get above 0.3 fps. I have no idea what changed between yesterday and today. I’m guessing this is my punishment for saying I could play just fine

And this suggestion:

try erasing your shader cache, shader cache temp, and shader cache log (im not sure its log… but its the 3rd shader cache file) from the aoc folder and reboot through the patcher… it will reDL one of the patches from the other night.

Increased my FPS and slowed my mem leak.

It’s about a 30mb download, which is coming down much faster than the first day of open beta.

And…no difference when I got in game. One frame per second. Latency up around 1000. Wow. If anything, it took longer to load a character into the game, and that’s not easy to do at this point. I was reading my Civ 4 manual, I was so tired of watching the progress bar not move.

And yet, I took the quotes above from a forum post titled “Wow! Game is running super smooth now”. I’m glad someone’s happy!

Open betas: Marketing, testing, or both?

“There’s plenty of potential there and it’s in better shape than most MMOGs I’ve beta’d (minus LotRO and WoW of course which seem like flukes in the industry).”

That was part of a comment from Bildo, about my last post, talking about the Age of Conan beta. It got me thinking about beta testing, marketing, and competition in the mmorpg marketplace.

I agree with both of Bildo’s points. It’s true, mmorpg beta tests can be quite unpolished. Making mmorpg’s isn’t an easy task, and getting hit with your first large influx of users can reveal all sorts of problems that must be addressed. I agree that stable mmorpg open betas are fairly rare. I’d add DAoC to Bildo’s mention of WoW and LoTRO, and WAR has the potential to be a pretty solid open beta/stress test candidate.

While I agree with both Bildo’s statements (has potential, polished beta tests are rare), here’s why I don’t think those facts offset the problems of Age of Conan’s first open beta weekend.

It’s precisely because we’ve endured so many bad betas and shaky launches that Funcom is facing an uphill battle over the next couple weeks. They have to convince everyone who’s new to beta that they have a solid, polished game. Expectations for mmorpg’s have changed since the days of, say, SWG, where you could release a buggy, underperforming game and have people stick around for the novelty while the game matures.

I’m guessing, since Funcom has been fairly quiet this weekend, that they have their own testing priorities, and their own reasons for releasing what is, in some ways, a gimped client compared to what the closed beta testers can access. In a pure test environment, I could understand that decision. However, in the current mmorpg landscape, I think you have to treat your open beta as marketing as well as testing. Despite the fact that polished open betas are rare, one of the more recent major mmorpg’s accomplished that (LoTRO), and the biggest mmorpg (WoW) is justifiably famous for polish. There is a standard upon which your game will be judged.

If Funcom had a damn good reason for going with an older build (which I suspect they did, this isn’t their first time developing a game), they didn’t fail at testing. They might be getting incredibly valuable information from testing on this build, and it might have many positive ramifications upon launch. Where Funcom failed was in marketing. They didn’t engage the community, explain what their testing plan was, or explain why they used an older build. That kind of communication and transparency would have gone a long way toward establishing some trust in their decisions and in their game.

I trust Bildo’s opinion, and Keen’s opinion. I believe them when they say there’s a good game here. I can see flashes of it myself. What I’m worried about is Funcom’s ability to communicate their decisions to their customers. Managing your community doesn’t start when the game goes live. It started when you lifted the NDA and let 50k more people into the game.

I think Mythic has an edge here. I can’t imagine a whole weekend going by without a post from Mark Jacobs explaining why they put in an older build, when a newer build with multi-core support might be added, and addressing concerns head on. Yep, open betas are for testing, but you can’t ignore the marketing.

The good news is, I don’t think this is impossible for Funcom to turn around. I think releasing a build that performs as well as the closed beta supposedly performs will go a long way toward getting everyone excited again. Talking to us about why they chose the old build, what they learned, and what else we might expect during beta would also help. Those two things could quickly swing community favor fully behind Funcom, and I think the game can reach the potential Bildo’s talking about.

Age of Conan impressions

After starting up Age of Conan and making my necessary multi-core adjustments, I actually got to play for a little while this evening, without memory leaks, without gameplay degrading, without crashing.

Well, that’s almost true. The first time I logged in, appearing in the Inn in Tortage, I had graphic artifacting and I had to restart.

The second time, things went fine. I finished up one quest and started another, replacing a vial of blood atop the volcano outside Tortage. It’s another step in the storyline/single player progression, and it’s the first step I’ve been able to complete without laggy, stuttering gameplay.

I think there are some aspects of the 1-20 solo play that are attractive. It’s a pretty good way to learn the AoC combat system. Combat is quite different than other mmorpg’s, and by the time you’ve killed your way through a couple quests, things start to make a little sense. I could have stealthed my way through a lot of the volcano quest, but I think I gained some good combat experience.

The quest line is fairly simple, but I’m enjoying it. I don’t think I’ve seen a mmorpg put this much effort into a story, and breaking it out into single player sections is a good introduction to some of the factions in Hyboria. I don’t know how well Funcom will continue telling the story through questing once the single player portion is over at level 20, but so far, it’s a nice change of pace from your standard mmorpg conventions. I don’t think every mmorpg has to do this, or should do this, but Funcom should get some props trying something different.

Unfortunately, at the climax of the quest, when I stealthily exchanged a vial of blood to ruin a ceremony, the game switches to a cut scene, and the cut scene hung. I’m watching myself crouched before an altar (in pretty cool armor, another successful design point that I hadn’t been able to appreciate before today), with soot and ash from the the volcano falling behind me, waiting for something to happen, but I think I have to restart the client. I know I have to, and it’s a bummer.

I’m curious what prevented Funcom from finding problems with cut scenes in earlier betas. It’s possible that I’m expecting too much, but it feels like a bad sign that your scripted events, just switching to a movie, is breaking this late in development.

There’s a lot of talk on various message boards about the state of the game, and you get a couple points of view. Some people overreact and say they’re not going to buy the game (and people of course ask for their stuff, in this case their beta key), and other people overreact and say things like “I guess you don’t know what a beta test means”.

The truth is somewhere in the middle, I suppose. Sure, it’s a beta, and sure, it’s rough on various people at the moment. There’s a germ of truth in each reaction. But I think there’s a good game in here, if Funcom can overcome their obstacles. I do think it’s worth testing, bug reporting and feedbacking, and I don’t think overreacting and claiming the sky is falling is an enlightened reaction.

That said, I am concerned about all the problems I’m seeing, and the types of problems. I’ve been in a lot of betas, and I’ve been in a lot of games at launch. There are two extremes in experience. The first extreme is games that launched fairly smoothly, and probably includes WoW, DAoC, LoTRO…hmm, that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. There were server load issues, queuing, problems related to figuring out how to handle retail traffic. Those kind of problems, I really don’t mind dealing with. There’s no way to realistically test your game to scale, and if your game is successful, you’re going to have issues you have to deal with while the game is live.

The second extreme, in my experience, was SWG, Anarchy Online, Shadowbane, L2 (in beta for me, didn’t buy it). When I look back at those games, either in beta or at launch, I realize in hindsight that I probably knew subconsciously that those games were in trouble in one form or another, long before I admitted it out loud. See, I want games to succeed. I want to enjoy them, to experience a new world, a new place to adventure. But when a game goes bad, you kind of feel it. You see quests not finished, mobs falling through the ground, design choices that aren’t intuitive or don’t fit together smoothly, gameplay elements that feel tacked on or not well-integrated. For whatever server load issues WoW, DAoC, and LoTRO had at launch, they were coherent gameworlds; well-designed, the developer vision was communicated to the player and most of the gameplay elements just worked.

I’m not sure how I feel about AoC yet. There are things I like about the 1-20 storyline. I like that they tried something new with combat. The graphics are growing on me (although I haven’t been too excited about either WAR or AoC). I’d like to see more of Hyboria, and I’d like to see it while I have a solid framerate and no stuttering.

That said, I worry about the problems I’ve seen. I worry about a gameworld that allows players to climb down into areas, but not be able to climb back out of them without recalling or killing themself. I’ve found far too many dead ends, and that’s really frustrating. I don’t like that I have to mess with my cores to get the game to run stably. Whether Funcom fixes it or not isn’t really the issue; the decision to go with an older client that requires some people to disable cores, without communicating that clearly, was a bonehead move. I’ve had a couple BSOD’s today (display-related), plus the artifacting. The load times are still fairly significant, although much better with a core disabled.

I’m in the middle today. I’ve seen enough to hope that there’s a WoW/DAoC/LoTRO launch and future for AoC. Funcom has a lot of work to do between now and the 20th, but I prefer to hope, rather than hate Even if they fail, I give them credit for their ideas, their creativity, and for taking risks. I suspect we’re going to see some major fixes in the next week; just the fact that the PvP weekend code was newer and more stable gives me hope that the multi-core and load time issues can be addressed.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed, and hope that I move from cautious to enthusiastic about AoC. We’ll see!

My morning with Age of Conan

If I wasn’t the kind of person to poke around forums, read other blogs, and dink around with computers because I enjoy a challenge, I would have already given up on AoC, and I wouldn’t have looked back.

I posted about the multi-core solution yesterday, and it continues to work today after the patch. In other words, whatever they patched this morning did not allow me to run both CPU’s and get good performance. I’m hitching and lagging all over the place until I disable one of the cores and set the AoC .exe Process to High priority. I have to do that every time I log in, it doesn’t save the setting from the last time it ran.

I can’t believe, with the number of dual-core or multi-core machines out there, and all Funcom’s “cutting edge graphics” advertising, that I can only run one core at a time. But whatever, at least I can run around without stuttering the entire time. I’m hoping that it’s stable this week, and I can actually write about my impressions of the game. I don’t want to start reviewing things while I’m annoyed about performance and Funcom’s decisions for open beta. I think it’d be a little slanted right now, and that’s not totally fair.

I seem to be able to hide regularly now, and climbing points work the way they should. I’m hoping to get some time today to actually play, instead of struggling through poor performance and not really getting a feel for the game. We’ll see, though, I suspect my wife and daughter might have other plans. It’s a very nice day outside…you know, that shiny place with the big bright yellow thing overhead. I might actually go out there for a little while

Age of Conan beta and multi-core problems

This thread helped fix some of my performance issues for the Age of Conan beta. I can play without the game slowly dying on me.

I have a lot of polish issues still, but at least I can honestly test the game now, instead of just watching it wither and die in front of me.

I’m not going to speculate what Funcom did or didn’t do to make multi-core processors have problems with their build, but I hope they fix it quick! I wonder how much smoother things might be if the client can take advantage of both cores.

I’ll write up more about my polish issues tomorrow, but I wanted to post this tonight in case it helps anyone else running multi-core and having problems. Thanks to pEpz on Keen’s blog for mentioning this in the comments!

It seems my Age of Conan problem is…

…memory leaks. I wrote in my last post that I couldn’t climb down a ladder, like the server couldn’t process my commands. I restarted the client, and then I could move again.

I got to the next section of my quest, finding a slave handler in the Volcano instance. I got uncovered by an enemy, fought he and his friend off, and I couldn’t restealth. It wouldn’t drop me out of combat, even thought I didn’t have anyone aggroed. I restarted the client again, and I could stealth just fine.

I snuck a little further, got uncovered by more NPC’s, killed them, couldn’t stealth again. *sigh*

I saw a link in the comments of Keen’s post today, about what problems Funcom has seen, and what they’re working on. Glad they see ‘em, glad they’re on ‘em, not encouraged that they’re seeing this kind of problem a few weeks before release.

I filled out my feedback tonight, I’m going to go play something else for an hour before bed, something not quite so frustrating