Age of Conan

personally I understand the whole cross-platforming appeal but its not an easy thing to do since no system even if made by the same company(i.e. Xbox 360 and windows pc's). if companies really want to reach the console people aswell as the pc people the best thing is to do what EQ did back in the day. making a separate game for their console( Sony that is). Sure it would be fun to find a seamless way for both platformers and pc folk alike to mingle but lets face it that's the impossible journey unless every pc was made with the exact same specs. It's not so much that consoles are the problem the truth is that pc's are because no two pc's are alike where as consoles are alike in majority of ways.

I thought the idea of everquest online adventures being the PlayStation's own personal MMORPG made it that much better simply because it staid to the same basis as its pc counterpart while at the same time breaking console owners into the EQ and in some cases the MMORPG world. But companies will continue to try their best to make a MMO game cross-platform because the players keep wishing for it. But trust me on this it will be a long time before its perfected so don't expect greatness, always keep a bit of judging till you see it yourself or you'll be disappointed everytime.

I also believe that console gamers and pc gamers should stick together as gamers but not go looking for that amazing MMORPG or just any MMO to cross-platform perfectly the first time. I'm sure age of Conan will improve over time just be patient and hope for the best. The only game to cross-platform and survive the battle was Final Fantasy XI. Altho it should be noted that it didn't get there without a few hitches along the way.

One day we may see that breakthrough but till then be patient and just try to get through all the glitchy laggy screen punching hair pulling strain that some people will experience.

Originally posted by jinxit

Originally posted by EbonHawk

Originally posted by Mordria

Originally posted by neya

Here are the facts:

Age of Conan is intended to be released on the Xbox; if you were not aware of this; check out the article on this very site. http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/191/feature/1958

Want to know why your Age of Conan runs terrible on your computer?

It's because the game is cross platform designed.  In other words; tailoring the game to Xbox hardware is much easier than tailoring to PC hardware as the specifications for each idividual PC varies wildly.

Valve ran into problems with cross-platfrom when developing Team Fortress 2.

See page 20 of this article: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/GDC2008_CrossPlatformDevelopment.pdf

The above article was a presentation given by Valve; on page 20  you can clearly see that some of the known big issues with cross-platform gaming "Out of Memory" Error. Sound familiar??

Want to know why your Age of Conan is instanced?

To address the problem with cross-platforms and the memory loads the game zones are split (Instanced) to accomodate the varying memory loads on the different platforms.

Want to know why your Age of Conan Emotes have the /e command and the emote list?

Not all Xbox gamers will invest in a keyboard and mouse for their system; therefore they have to make the emote system accessible through use of a joypad; thats why you see the list of emotes and thats why you as a PC gamer have to type the /e before executing an emote to bypass this list.

Spent a fortune on a PC System but getting low FPS?

Isn't it strange that you get higher FPS on High graphical settings and lower FPS on Low graphical settings? It's because of the cross-platform issues with the game engine and how it manages memory, textures; so on and so forth.

I really don't need to go on.  This presentation from Valve which was delivered to the Game developers Conference 2008: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/GDC2008_CrossPlatformDevelopment.pdf

I think the above presentation highlights all of the issues currently being experienced by Funcom on Age of Conan; and all because the game is cross-platform.

So yes you may be a fan, yes you may hate the game.  The truth is; your beta testing a game so that it can launch to Xbox.

 

 

The game runs fine on my system.

instancing -  it's zoned and instances only spawn if the zone goes over X amount.

/e??? lol  I don't even know what you're talking about there. In every mmo I've played I've had to type a /something to do an emote.

Clearly I should just take my PC  outside and shoot it.

Have you ever played an mmo?

 

Woot!!! Good for you that it runs fine on your system...  Have a cookie.

But it does run like crap on a lot and I do mean a lot of other peoples systems.

Have you never had a game run poorly on your system?

<modedit>

 

I have to agree with Neya on most points regarding AOC and the 360, but i dont agree with the "/e" command theory seeing that coh/cov has been using "/e" commands for emotes for as long as ive been playing.

/e is for the people who will play AOC on the 360 with a keyboard and people without it will use the emote list I guess is what they were trying to say.......... But EQ2 has the same thing a /e and  a list but its not on a console.

Im so glad I didnt waste my money on this game. I was really excited about it at first but then decided to wait a bit and see if I wanted to buy it after launch cuz Ive had bad esperiences with pre ordering.  Ended up this is not the game I was looking for.

Originally posted by Goldknyght

Im a amazed at how much time people are willing to invest on trashing this game. Its like your angry because your experiance was the ultimate and if you are feeling down you need to spread your anger. If the game sucks I dont need you to let me know about it, I would of already found out for myself. The fact is this daily rant on how bad AoC is comical. Get lives people or invest your time in helping the community rather then tear it down. AoC is the new world and accept it or move on.

cuz its a free world (for the most part) an we are allowed to voice our pissed off opinions. if i play a game, use a product, or anything else and its not what its supposed to be (broke, or just down right not worth the money i paid) yeah *IM* going to say something. im not going to leave it up to someone else to voice my opinion for me who may or may not get it right. if no one said anything it would look like the games/other products have nothing wrong with them. if only 5 people say something about a game.. then it just seems like nothing is really wrong with it. if 50,000 people say something.. yeah then its probably got something wrong with it. im a father and lets say if i buy my son a toy and he chokes to death on it when it was suposed to be a safe product your damn right im going to say something to the company who made it, the community, news, whatever. aoc and games may not be life or death situations but the principle is the same, nothing gets changed for the better if everyone just sits quietly saying nothing. by the way im sure we would have less pissed off posts here if FC wasnt CENCORING its players on aoc fourms. but thats another pissed off arguement entirely.

Originally posted by Gameloading

I'm sorry, but I don't see any proof at all.

Age of Conan is not build for the Xbox, it's build for the PC and dumbed down for the Xbox360 later on in the form of a port. If Age of Conan was build with the 360 in mind it would

- Be released prior or simultaneously with the PC version

- The client would be much, much smaller.Age of Conan is 30gb, the vast majority of Xbox360 owners have a 20gb hard drive.

Actually the game was designed from the ground up for Xbox.  Hence the reason for the so called revolutionary combat....it's simply a way for Xbox users to interface with an MMO combat system without the need for as many buttons as a keyboard - biggest lie in MMO history.

Also the PC version was dumbed down for Xbox from the start not later, allowing for a simple port.

Of note, I don't blame Funcom for anything beyond ignoring a few class bugs. I expected more from the way they'd spoken about the state of the game up to launch, but it's not really suprising that it's in the state it is in or that it will take so long to feature-complete it.

After all, every other MMO company has taken us for a ride, and Funcom don't exactly had the pedigree of producing quality at launch.

Life sucks, get over it.

i am sooo tired of people blaming cross platforming for games being terrible. So what this game was developed for both PC and 360. BIG DEAL. Did everyone forget that one of the most popular and longest lasting MMOs was developed for PC and PS2 (FFXI anyone?) later they even added 360 to that list. that game has always run great, and while it may not be a graphical marvel anymore, its still a good looking game. Maybe its just because Square knows what they are doing. I haven't played Vanguard, dont plan on playing, but the OP needs to find a different reason for its woes. FFXI proves to us that the cross-platforming thing isn't it.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by neya

So yes you may be a fan, yes you may hate the game.  The truth is; your beta testing a game so that it can launch to Xbox.

 

 

Here are the facts.  Get used to it, the lure of easy money has a very strong appeal.  Making an MMORPG that is popular cross-platform is the dream of every Game development house out there today, (yes even Blizzard) and companies will continue to experiment to try and pull it off.

Trouble with experiments is there always are a lot more failures than successes.

 

 

So far there has only been one cross platform MMO...FFXI. It was highly successful and continues to be.

AoC isn't cross platform yet.

AoC is a victim of poor design, surprise - Funcom. Honestly, what did you expect? The last MMO these guys launched made Vanguard look polished and bugfree

Originally posted by quaiky

First if you did really read the valve document then you would have found out that the memory troubles are usually happening on the console in the cross platform developement. for a pc you can easily set a min requirement of 1 gb ram, and recommended  of 2gb, but on a console you only have limited ram with no way of upgrade (512 mb combined system&gfx ram for xbox 360). also if pc runs out of ram the os starts swapping data from ram to harddisk so the pc doesn't crash, while a console will just crash.

Yes on pc's aoc still crash with out of memory error, but mostly thats happening on stadard 32bit windows, where windows limits every program to utilise a maximum of 2gb ram, you can change that with a bootoption to a