Active Blockig & Why I love The Combat mechanics: Read if you have a Low end machine

Let me start out by saying that if you have a low end machine, you absolutely need 2 gigs of ram to run this game, no if ands or buts.

I first started the PVP weekend with: 1 gig of ram, a single core 3.2 g cpu and an old x800 pro, The game was playable on the island for the intro questing, but in PVP as soon as another player approached me my fps went minus 70.

On sunday morning, while my brother was at work i decided to borrow the gig of ram he had in his computer. After putting the mismatch ram into my computer, Load screens become fast as hell, and the performance was great, i was even able to turn the settings on HIGH and keep 15-25 fps!

I am going to be using the barbarian as my main example for why i love the combat so far.

Overall the PVP did feel a bit a clunky and it definatly needs more work, but at the same time it was fun as hell and I truly love what funcom have done to melee mechanics with their MMO.

The barbarian was hands down the funnest melee class i have ever played.
The class had enough instant moves to mix with your combos to always give you an offensive option.

The barbarian relies on switching weapons during the heat of battle, Two handed swords unlock your INSTANT stun and knock back moves, while duel wielding unlocks a couple high DPS combos, and your main DPS combos are shared between your two weapon sets. With this design, as long as the player toggles his equipped weapons and stays alive it's possible to have an endless barrage of effective attacks.

This Brings me to the Combo system.

At first the combo system struck me as nothing more than button mashing, but i was wrong. There is a lot of strategy that is accessible, its just a lot more fast paced than what any of us are used to, so the masses tend to button mash.

When you start a combo, you have about 3-5 seconds before you have to push the next button in the combo chain and you can toggle your targets all the while before executing the combo.

You do NOT have to finish the combo on the same person you started with and you DO NOT have to franticly mash the buttons in perfect rhythmical timing like your doing a hadoken in the game Street Fighter 2. The combo system in this game is the complete opposite, it is The player who decides when it is the correct time to advance to the next step in the overall sequence of the combo. I was able to start my combo on one target, choose a different target, and left slash them while taking evasive maneuvers and waiting a few more seconds for an opening, if an opening arrived on even yet another target, i could switch to them and UP slash who ever i chose to complete the combo and trigger the effects of it on them.

In one situation, i was coming up a ramp taking fire from a ranger and in front of me was an enemy demonologist. I was able to instantly send the mage flying through the air with my clobber attack, and sprinted to the ranger where i started my butcher combo, after i pushed the first attack button in the sequence the ranger had already leaped backwards to evade the combo and was out of my attack range, by this time an enemy assassin with low heath was already unleashing an attack on me. Still targeted on the ranger and in the middle of my butcher combo sequence, I was able to ACTIVELY block the assassins attacks before i switched my targeting to him and pushed the last button needed to trigger high a DPS attack, severing the assassins head.

Thats right, not only can you move around and toggle targets at any point in a combo, but you can actively block at any point and it wont break the combo either. And there is noticeable difference in your defense when you actively block. 1v1 fights with other melee felt closer to a real sword fight and was more action and fast paced than any other MMO game i have played.

^ above is a prime example of people complaining about other players just simply "running away" from their combos and wasting them....well its your fault for not attacking effectively...no one is forcing anyone to trigger the combos, yes there is a time limit to the sequences but the time limit keeps you in the rhythm of the battle all you gotta do is use your head and don't panic! Also instant moves don't get used if your target goes out of range, so if the move doesn't actually get used like it was intended then it doesn't get spent and is till there for you to use when the time is right, (not counting a resist of course)

Edit: More clarification on the whole "combo" thing, The combo is not the move you are doing, the combo is the sequence of buttons it takes to unlock that move, and the second you unlock that move by hitting the last button of the sequence,(players choice) the effect is instant, they are animated, but they are animated to flow with the heat of battle. No one is standing around doing "Combo's" to the thin air, shadow boxing... unless they are retarded. (or trapped inside the PVP lobby all weekend)

Spell casting on the other hand seemed weak, i don't know if just because the casting is standard fair and the melee is so strong that it makes the magic seem worse than it is, but something just didnt feel right about casting and it needs some major polish from mechanics to animation IMO.

Ranged combat was very well done so far too i thought, I played the ranger after the nerf, so far the feeling of taking and holding higher ground for your survival is fun, and it all felt all felt pretty realistic.

Over all not its perfect by any means, PVP is clunky and needs lots of ironing but its by far the funnest i have played in an MMO.

I dont understand why people are calling this a skilless buton mashing system,sometimes there is no way around button mashing in any game well i guess if you are a skilless button mashing player, then its only natural you get out of it what you put into it.

I really hope Funcom keeps the pace up with the quality in this game, its going to get better and better and i cant wait,



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Detailed AoC hardware and performance analysis.

Hello all. There are quite a few questions here about performance and hardware. Hopefully this thread will help answer them.

After finding out that I got into the PvP beta, I quickly called my friends to tell them to check their e-mails. After finding out that we ALL got into the beta, we hightailed it to a remote cabin for some fishing, drinking and AoC.
Here are the rigs used in these tests.

Rig I – Me
Q6600 @ 3.6 GHz.
GeForce 9800 GX2 @ stock. (Later OC’d to 675 to compare to the Dual Core, then taken back down to 600 because I don’t want to use my computer as a heater.)
8GB RAM.
Vista 64 bit.

Rig 2 – Mike
E8400 @ 4.0 GHz
GeForce 9800 GX2 @ 675 MHz
8GB RAM.
Vista 64 bit.

Rig 3 – Stev-o
Pentium 4 @ 3.6 GHz
GeForce 6600 XT @350 MHz
4GB RAM.
XP

Rig 4 – Meng
Phenom 9850 @ 3.0 GHz
8GB RAM.
Radeon HD 3870 @ 900 MHz
Vista 64 bit

Rig 5 (Laptop) Stev-o
T9300 @ 2.8GHz
4GB RAM
GeForce 8600M @ stock.
XP

First. There IS no DX 10 support at the moment. None whatsoever! You are looking at DX 9 results!

Let’s start with the install.
The Q6600 finished first, followed closely by the E8400, the 9850 a bit later, followed by the T9300 and finally the mighty Pentium 4!
All in all, the install went smoothly on all machines.

Settings (in the beginning tutorial jungle area.)
Mike and I ran the game at 1600 by 1200 with EVERYTHING maxed. (Filtering, Shadows, Bloom). The game ran flawlessly and never dropped below 60 FPS! If we would up the resolution a bit but keep the settings as they were we would both experience some stiffness (character movement was a bit off, seemed like commands took a second to respond, and FPS drops). Toning down Bloom and Shadows we were able to max the resolution and still have FPS in the 60+ area. The game looks and plays beautifully. Since we wanted to play at above 60 FPS, with everything cranked up that is the resolution we stayed at.

Meng had some really weird problems with Shadows. Whenever he would have them on, he would get weird stretch marks across the screen and some weird shapes would pop up all over the screen in yellowish and or green colors. The fix was to turn the Shadows completely. After he did that, the game ran great. He was also running it at 1600 by 1200, although on average at around 52 ish FPS. Never dropped below 50, never went above 55.
We spoke to a few Phenom and 3870 users that said they were having the same problems with shadows. So heads up. If you have a Phenom and a 3870, you might be in for a nasty surprise. When we swapped his 3870 for my GX2, the problem went away. When we plopped his 3870 into my rig, I did not have the problem either. Seems it is a combination of the Phenom and the 3870 that causes this. Hopefully Funcom fixes this soon… Of course it could also be a driver issue…

Steve’s laptop did a great job running the game as well. He ran it at 1680 by 1050 with everything maxed but the shadows! His FPS hovered around the same mark as Meng’s.

Now here is where we all got a nice surprise! Steve’s P4 machine managed to handle the game incredibly well! At 1024 by 768 without Bloom and with low-medium settings he never went below 40 FPS! However Bloom and higher quality shadows really killed the system, making the game virtually unplayable.
But we decided to turn that stuff off and see what we can do (Shadows at low, Bloom off completely. AA at first setting). We managed to get it playable at 1280 by 800 and at 40+ FPS (without any of that “eye candy” very cool considering the system is ancient.) With further tweaking and turning things off we saw pretty awesome potential in this engine. You could probably get it to play at even higher settings if you want to go into the 30 or so FPS range… We didn’t feel like it, since this machine was here just so we can see how it plays on old hardware.
But if you disable shadows completely you will have a HUGE FPS gain, especially on older machines. Turn off Bloom and you can up the resolution to some crazy number… Filtering should remain on as the game has some jaggies without it, although they are much less noticeable at higher resolutions.

Settings (in PvP).
Currently there is no large scale PvP… Disappointing, I know. There is no AV type map where you have hundreds of people clashing into each other with a ton of spells going off at the same time. As it is, the FPS in PvP seems to be close to the PvE portion of the game. However like I sad, at the moment PvP is limited to just a few groups so I don’t know how this will hold up in sieges. Surprisingly even with multiple people throwing spells at us; our FPS stayed the same as it did during the “single player” portion. Very good job Funcom.
So as you can see the engine is very scalable. Able to play on low and high end systems.

Dual Core VS. Quad core.

The Phenom is disqualified from this because it performed sub par to my Q6600, even when we swapped videocards... My Q6600 spanked it silly (10+ fps at the same settings, using the same videocard. The performance gain of my Q6600 increased as we upped the resolution, filtering and quality. In the end the Q6600 took the lead by 17 FPS in the starter area at max settings and high resolution.)
So let’s begin!

In the left corner is the mighty Q6600 overclocked to 3.6 GHz, in the right corner is the E8400 clocked at a beefy 4.0GHz.

At resolutions prior to and including 1600 by 1200 there is no difference whatsoever. We had the same fps. Taking it to higher resolutions, I was hovering closer to 54 ish FPS where as Mike was really close to 60. So I OC’d my video card to match his and voila! The FPS was once again the same! This is where we said “To hell with it. Time to crank up the resolution to the max setting possible and go wade into the jungle! 1920 by 1200 here we come!” and so we did.
Finally his E8400 showed its strength. On average at this resolution he would constantly beat me by a good 5-8 FPS. We were both still above 30 but you could notice the difference in playing at 60+ and then dropping down to 40ish. However if we had not seen the game at 60 FPS, than 40, and even 30 FPS would have been more then enough to satisfy us.

It looks like MHz mean more to the game than multiple cores (if you have at least 2). My guess is that it is NOT in fact optimized for Quad Core machines. My 3’rd and 4’th cores were NEVER used above 20%. Honestly this is a big disappointment. The game IS made for multi core computing, but it seems to be optimized for Dual Cores at this point and time.

64 BIT OS VS. 32 BIT OS.

Since the Phenom and the T9300 performed so close to each other, we decided to do some torture tests. We lowered the Phenom to a lower clock speed than the T9300 (because Phenom is a Quad, we clocked it 300 MHz lower then the T9300 to do a good comparison) and dug up an old GeForce 8600 GT. (Although this had more RAM and a slightly higher clock speed then the M version. So we messed with the bios of the GT to make it identical to the M version and then flashed it. Tada!)

Now we took the game to a neutral resolution of 1024 by 768 and then upped it as we saw fit. Surprisingly the extra RAM and the 64 bit version of Windows did not do anything. Once we reached the higher resolutions, the FPS started to steadily drop on both machines, at pretty much equal increments! (1-2 FPS differences at most).
So all in all, the game does NOT take advantage of more then 4GB of RAM and 64bit computing.

So there you have it. 2 Funcom myths debunked. The game does NOT run faster on 64 bit machines, and the game does NOT run faster on Quad Cores then on Dual Cores.
On the plus side surprisingly the game does an excellent job of running on low end hardware and still looks great.

If you have any requests on resolutions and rigs you want us to try, post here and I will try to oblige. We all do have work tomorrow so we will be calling it quits in a few hours.

For now we are going back for more PvP. I will be writing up a review of the game some time this week as well. So far it looks great. Yes I am disappointed in a few things (no soul corruption or spell weaving, no bounty hunting and you can’t move while comboing… Making you a sitting duck for ranged classes… Etc, etc.) But the game is still just plain fun. Hopefully a few patches will make it even better. I mean hell they fixed class balance in pretty much 1 day! So I’m sure they can pull this off. Expect a full review some time this week.

P.S.
Beta Testers, please list your rig and the settings you used and I will also update this post to match your findings. This way we have a 1 stop shop for hardware info.



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