GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Played the latest beta build. Since they moved electrocute to level 12 (I think? or was it 13?), Witch Doctor has become my new favorite class for the subset of content we have right now. Grasping Hands + Haunt still seems like one of the more awesome early game combos that I've tried so far.
Rules: Each participant will private message me their pick for the date Diablo 3 will be released(Eastern Standard Time), as well their pick for what date Blizzard will ANNOUNCE the release date, as a tie breaker. Dates are on a first come first serve basis. Your entry can't have the same announce and release date as another participant. One or the other is allowed. The dates I have chosen are an exception since I can't win the prize. The release date is the actual day of release in case the date is pushed back from their initial announced release day. The announcement is for the day they announce the release date, even if that release date is not met. Contestants can change their picks up until the registration end date*. Contestants must also have been signed up for the forums before the start date of the contest. Please use same private conversation, it's easier on me.
Registration End Date: Sunday January 15th 11 PM EST
Contest End Date: 3 weeks before the announced release date, or the day of the announcement of the release date(if shorter than 3 weeks). This is in case the release date is pushed back.
So, D3 on consoles. Don't know what to think of this development. If it's just going to be some single-player spin-off or separate realm, then whatever. If it's going to be on full parity with PC, I am not going to be looking forward to decreased numbers of delayed updates due to certification.
It does make sense that they'd want to cash in on the big market though.
Console D3 would be on separate servers. You would only ever play with other console people. It'd be a different game, so PC/Mac patches would be independent. Console versions would have their own, separate updates. If a console version ever happened, that is.
Just sent in my entry. Recently got $100 in Gamestop credit, which I'll probably drop on this, newborn daughter permitting.
Got over your heartbreak at the RMAH, eh?
;-)
That part never really bothered me, since I'll never use it. It's the always online DRM. It still bothers me, and will no doubt infuriate me one day when my internet access goes down and I can't play my single player game, but it's not going to change, so terms are being come to over here in my brain.
If this alleged console Diablo features offline play, I could see myself preferring it (direct control won't hurt either).
This is kind of off topic but with D3 around the corner and because my WoW account was hacked about 8 months ago, it's kind of relevant.
Just downloaded the Battle.net Authenticator app, but I haven't attached it to my bnet account yet because I am a little worried about the account if I lost my phone. I'm not sure if I'm better off buying one of those security key fobs or not.
If I were to attach the app to my account, on a scale of 1 - Fucked, how bad would it be if I were to lose my phone?
3?
You can get Customer Service to unlink them, and it's a bit painful to sit through the call queues and get it done, but it's entirely doable.
Plus, who loses phones?
He might have a problem calling customer service if he loses his phone tho.
As I understand it, both the phone and physical authenticators have a code. As long as you write this down somewhere safe, you should be able to get the authenticator removed from your account if absolutely necessary.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Hell, you can call and reset the authenticator in about 2 minutes. I had to when my phone reset itself back to factory settings.
My WoW account got hacked a long while back and they had slapped an authenticator on it. I called customer service, and granted, I was on hold for 40 minutes before someone picked up the phone, but once they did, they resolved the issue in about 5 minutes with no hassle.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
According to some guy in the comments to get around the "gambling" thing they took out the "cash out" ability of the RMAH. So you can still buy/sell stuff for real money, but you can't get any of that money back out (aka it becomes Battle.net bucks or whatever for use with Blizzard-related stuff like WoW subscription costs).
Rules: Each participant will private message me their pick for the date Diablo 3 will be released(Eastern Standard Time), AS WELL AS their pick for what date Blizzard will ANNOUNCE the release date, as a tie breaker. Dates are on a first come first serve basis. Your entry can't have the same announce and release date as another participant. One or the other is allowed. The dates I have chosen are an exception since I can't win the prize. The release date is the actual day of release in case the date is pushed back from their initial announced release day. The announcement is for the day they announce the release date, even if that release date is not met. Contestants can change their picks up until the registration end date*. Contestants must also have been signed up for the forums before the start date of the contest. *Please use same private conversation, it's easier on me.
Registration End Date: Sunday January 15th 11 PM EST
Contest End Date: 3 weeks before the announced release date, or the day of the announcement of the release date(if shorter than 3 weeks). This is in case the release date is pushed back.
Magus`The fun has been DOUBLED!Registered Userregular
The latest the game can be released and still be in Q1 is the last day of March. Now, of course, there is still a lot of Q2 that counts as 'early' 2012 so.. hrm. We shall see, I guess.
A lot of people seemed to think that South Korea was responsible for the release delay. Could the end be in sight?
Except blues kept saying emphatically that wasn't the case. I'm not sure how much more they could say to make people realize it wasn't s.Korea holding up D3 but just typical Blizzard "wait!...just one more thing" type game creation.
I mean yeah they polish their games all to hell, but as I said about the beta several months ago, D3 was already in a more "finished" and polished state than most other games released in ever.
Honestly it's getting to the point that it feels more like they're scared to pull the trigger in fear of it not living up to expectations, at least sales-wise, than anything about the game itself not being done.
Of course several blue posts recently said things about "added features" so who the fuck knows at this point. Good lord just release the game as is and add in shit as time goes on.
Just sent in my entry. Recently got $100 in Gamestop credit, which I'll probably drop on this, newborn daughter permitting.
Got over your heartbreak at the RMAH, eh?
;-)
That part never really bothered me, since I'll never use it. It's the always online DRM. It still bothers me, and will no doubt infuriate me one day when my internet access goes down and I can't play my single player game, but it's not going to change, so terms are being come to over here in my brain.
If this alleged console Diablo features offline play, I could see myself preferring it (direct control won't hurt either).
Every so often, I'll hit 'escape' in beta, and immediately be reminded that this does not pause the game. Then I'll sigh deeply.
According to some guy in the comments to get around the "gambling" thing they took out the "cash out" ability of the RMAH. So you can still buy/sell stuff for real money, but you can't get any of that money back out (aka it becomes Battle.net bucks or whatever for use with Blizzard-related stuff like WoW subscription costs).
What I heard was that they tried that and it didn't work, so they took the RMAH completely out of the Korean version.
Which then prompted a bunch of people to ask if they could play on the Korean servers...and apparently the answer was yes. It seems that you can only use the RMAH in your native server, but you can create characters on other servers around the world. So the stupidly low ten character limit is a little alleviated by the ability to create ten on each server (though the viability of that depends on your internet connection to those places).
I was playing the beta and I also noticed the fact that I am used to the menus in the game pausing the game. I need to use my WoW mindset when playing D3, because the always-online part ends up with strange side effects such as that.
It would be nice if you could pause private games with only the local player currently playing (private so you don't have to worry about needing to allow someone to join a "paused" game, local player only so you don't have to worry about pausing the other players).
I'm sure this is one of those "put it on the list, we'll get to it eventually, maybe" features, though (as a software dev myself, I understand this completely). There are plenty of other things I would rather they focus on, though, such as releasing the game!
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I don't think they ever will. It's a laundry list of requirements to get there. Private game, only player, nobody else invited to join / joined, not hardcore, etc.
Also, adding any measure of inconsistancy would likely just complicate things. Someone gets too used to that feature then does finally open the game up to friends/strangers and dies repeatedly out of habit of going to the menu and wandering off.
Or acting as another barrier to entry for Hardcore, where players again forget/are too accustomed to the feature and lose characters/items.
What happens if your friends know your password and join the game mid pause?
I think consistancy alone will keep it from ever happening, aside from cracked (some day?) editions that have the functionality crammed in.
Or possibly if the console edition isn't online only. If they're good with players having offline games and include it, that'd be just fine by me.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I assume what's holding them up is basically what they've told us: some of the game systems and mechanics are just not up to snuff. We have been told the game is more or less done, content-wise.
Runes seem to be a major one. The idea of runes is great. They and most the anticipating fans love the idea of each spell really being 5 variant spells depending on the rune. I think that aspect of the rune system might be one of the most unanimously liked features in D3, with even the silly geese being on board. Their problem seems to be how to implement the runes themselves. They have gone through a ton of ideas for them and every time it seems like they're not really satisfied with what they have: e.g., the way the player obtains runes, or the mechanics of "socketing" them into skills, or how reusable they should be, or if they should have stats as well and how that will work. Everything they seem to come up with seems to have some sort of fundamental problem with it that nags them so they keep reworking the rune system.
Just from how much we've been able to observe runeless skills in only the first 13 levels (i.e., beta) changing, I think it's safe to think there are still massive and frequent changes to skills at all levels (and rune combos) still going on internally. Whether they're just trying to make class leveling flow better via the skills that become available at given levels, trying to figure out whether to remove lackluster or problematic skills (and what to replace them with), trying to buff well designed but undertuned skills (and/or specific rune variants), and/or trying to nerf skills that are too good and lead to degenerative gameplay at some given point in the end game, there just still seems to be a lot in flux with the skills themselves.
I'll also bet that they're still working out solutions to various exploits that either players are finding or their internal QA are coming up with, such as the two-or-more-player Lich King switcheroo exploit to farm up rares quickly, that I'm sure was applicable to pretty much any major boss.
Even in beta they were still flip-flopping on how and when a player should be able to switch skills, which is something you would have thought would have been figured out well before then. It's clear that even though the game appears mostly ready and is probably shippable, they seem to think there are a lot of systems that are keeping the game from being as good as it should be.
I have a feeling that most smaller game companies would have just decided to pick how runes and skills work at this point and just decided to ship it. As much as I am sometimes frustrated by Blizzard's decisions, they really do make a great effort to deliver some of the most polished and mechanically sound games out there. I think this is one reason why other companies have had a really hard time delivering good Diablo 2-alikes that felt nearly as good to play. The basic ideas and control scheme are all the same, but somehow Blizzard delivers a better experience (my opinion, of course), despite sometimes having superficial deficiencies, such as dated graphics.
Of course, a great counter-example is my favorite game of the last few months: Skyrim. It has ridiculously breakable game mechanics and tons of bugs, showing a great lack of polish. Clearly there are other factors that make a game good as well, so I'm not trying to say that Blizzard is right and all others are wrong. I think that if Blizzard tried to make Skyrim, it would have released in 2013 rather than 2011, and might not have been a better game for it.
schmads on
Battle.net/SC2: Kwisatz.868 | Steam/XBL/PSN/Gamecenter: schmads | BattleTag/D3: Schmads#1144 | Hero Academy & * With Friends: FallenKwisatz | 3DS: 4356-0128-9671
Blizzard North was primarily responsible for Diablo I&II, which was a small development team and has been dissolved for quite some time. It's kind of ironic, since D2 shipped three and a half years after D1 and was laden with issues and didn't really deliver a solid online experience until the expansion. It's great Blizzard is taking their sweet ass time, because the current fanbase probably wouldn't be able to wait that long in this Internet age.
I can only hope that Diablo 3 runs more efficiently than WoW does. That engine is HEAVILY showing its age.
I have to respond to this with a slightly off topic tangent. I just tried WOW for the first time ever on my Macbook. I'd gotten an e-mail from Blizzard saying it's free up to level 20, so I thought I might as well give it a try. I figured it would run quite nicely, being as old as it is, and the system requirements being as low as they are. Lol...
I cranked the graphics options assuming my Macbook could handle it. I mean, I can play Half Life 2 on full detail in OS X. Why not WOW? I was then greeted with a laggy slide show. Not even a pretty slide show. The graphics were still absolutely horrid. I turned down the graphics until I was averaging about 35fps, and, well... ew. I'm generally not one to complain about graphics these days. Everything made after 2006 or so looks awesome to me. For whatever reason, when I loaded up WOW, I was expecting something better. I used to play Guild Wars, which really isn't all that much newer. It ran just fine on my Macbook, and looked orders of magnitude better in the process. Hell, Starcraft 2 runs and looks better on the same machine.
It isn't just the graphics. It's the visual style as a whole. Diablo II or Starcraft 1 have much worse graphics than WOW, but I find the both much more pleasant to look at, while WOW looks eye-rapingly bad to me.
I can only conclude that the WOW engine is absolutely terrible. So, I very much agree. Diablo 3 had better have a better optimized engine than WOW. Based on what I've been reading on various forums, it sounds like it does. I've seen reports of 13" Macbook Pros and Airs handling it admirably at medium to high settings.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
Everything made after 2006 or so looks awesome to me.
WoW was made in 2004 (technically way before that, 2004 was just the release date). Also, it probably wasn't video lag - it was probably server lag. Did you go to Stormwind or something?
You are are assuming that the engine in WoW has remained the same since 2004. It's an MMO. Half-Life 2 is not an MMO, and hasn't had additional content added since 2007. Meanwhile, WoW has had several expansions that have added new bells and whistles for the graphics. This includes shadows, a revamp to water, cleaned-up textures, new fire effects, and so on. The minimum requirements have gone up, and naturally the recommended have as well.
Basically, you compared a game still actively updating in 2011 with one that pretty much stopped major support a good five years earlier. What were you expecting?
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
You are are assuming that the engine in WoW has remained the same since 2004. It's an MMO. Half-Life 2 is not an MMO, and hasn't had additional content added since 2007. Meanwhile, WoW has had several expansions that have added new bells and whistles for the graphics. This includes shadows, a revamp to water, cleaned-up textures, new fire effects, and so on. The minimum requirements have gone up, and naturally the recommended have as well.
Basically, you compared a game still actively updating in 2011 with one that pretty much stopped major support a good five years earlier. What were you expecting?
Incidentally, the new shadow and water effects are murder on graphics cards. Those are probably the two that would be causing the most issues. Plus in general, the game is so old that you have to expect the graphics engine is probably not the most efficient thing anymore, what with all the tinkering I'm sure they've done to it over the years.
didn't really deliver a solid online experience until the expansion.
?
Well, it didn't help that at the time most people had a dial-up connection. It wasn't until some time after the expansion that broadband took off. I can't really recall my online experience with D2, but I remember there were several items that made the game unfair, like Windforce. Like has been mentioned before, the game wasn't a huge challenge when it was first released. The runewords in 1.10 was what really made the game into an obsession. At least for me.
Chen on
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
You are are assuming that the engine in WoW has remained the same since 2004. It's an MMO. Half-Life 2 is not an MMO, and hasn't had additional content added since 2007. Meanwhile, WoW has had several expansions that have added new bells and whistles for the graphics. This includes shadows, a revamp to water, cleaned-up textures, new fire effects, and so on. The minimum requirements have gone up, and naturally the recommended have as well.
Basically, you compared a game still actively updating in 2011 with one that pretty much stopped major support a good five years earlier. What were you expecting?
This is all true, but WoW is also notorious for being incredibly inefficient. The fact that it's a 7 year old engine really shows in regards to CPUs, and the coding for GPUs is not optimized well.
You are are assuming that the engine in WoW has remained the same since 2004. It's an MMO. Half-Life 2 is not an MMO, and hasn't had additional content added since 2007. Meanwhile, WoW has had several expansions that have added new bells and whistles for the graphics. This includes shadows, a revamp to water, cleaned-up textures, new fire effects, and so on. The minimum requirements have gone up, and naturally the recommended have as well.
Basically, you compared a game still actively updating in 2011 with one that pretty much stopped major support a good five years earlier. What were you expecting?
I wasn't aware of that.
That said, I still stand by my point... if perhaps a bit less vigorously If we're sticking to the HL2 comparison, yeah, it hasn't seen any graphical updates since its release. But, despite not having been updated the same way, it still looks and runs lot better than WoW does in its current, updated state.
I don't think it was server lag either. It definitely "felt" like video lag. More "stuttery" instead of "jumpy", if you know what I mean.
This really just struck me as odd, because Blizzard has usually had a reputation of releasing scaleable, well optimized games. Starcraft II is a great example. It runs quite comfortably somewhere between low and medium settings on my Macbook, and looks great doing it. I remember being similarly impressed back when Diablo II was released. My computer back then wasn't exactly a powerhouse, but I was still able to run Diablo II quite comfortably, if a bit scaled back.
floobie on
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Magus`The fun has been DOUBLED!Registered Userregular
You are are assuming that the engine in WoW has remained the same since 2004. It's an MMO. Half-Life 2 is not an MMO, and hasn't had additional content added since 2007. Meanwhile, WoW has had several expansions that have added new bells and whistles for the graphics. This includes shadows, a revamp to water, cleaned-up textures, new fire effects, and so on. The minimum requirements have gone up, and naturally the recommended have as well.
Basically, you compared a game still actively updating in 2011 with one that pretty much stopped major support a good five years earlier. What were you expecting?
Incidentally, the new shadow and water effects are murder on graphics cards. Those are probably the two that would be causing the most issues. Plus in general, the game is so old that you have to expect the graphics engine is probably not the most efficient thing anymore, what with all the tinkering I'm sure they've done to it over the years.
It's basically to the point where you need a massively higher spec than what it suggest to run it decently. A quad core CPU is essentially required since the game engine can easily choke a dual core one. I'd hate to think what it'd do to a single core CPU! The thing is, they're adding bells and whistles on a base engine that wasn't exactly top notch when it started and they're doing it all while giving the bare minimum of 'modern' improvements to the engine. I can run Bullet Storm at max (not that it's a super-duper high end game, but) with almost dead solid 60 FPS and in some parts in WoW I drop to 5 FPS. On Low. Yeah.
Magus`The fun has been DOUBLED!Registered Userregular
And yeah, the thing is, this is gonna get worse and worse. Yeah, sure, they're working on a 64-bit version that'll improve some stuff.. maybe, but they should really take like 20 million bucks and redo their fucking engine. It doesn't even have to be 'wasted', it can be used on whatever new MMO they'll be making. It's just retarded to expect people to have bleeding edge systems to run your (honestly) fairly ugly and outdated game. Keeping the thing running smoothly is a huge part of the whole ongoing support bit.
"Just take 20 mil and redo their engine." - It doesn't quite work that way.
And come on now, you're exaggerating a bit. WoW does not require bleeding edge technology to run. I realize your experience is shitty and that sucks, but you're talking out of your ass here a bit.
I do tippity top progress raiding in wow on a 5 year old laptop. Until one of my raiding buddies upgraded his system, he was on an even shittier rig. Sure I don't release because in the time it takes me to load to the graveyard the guys with SSD's can get back to my corpse and rez me, but no one dies because my framerate drops to shit.
Battletag BYToady#1454
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Magus`The fun has been DOUBLED!Registered Userregular
It takes bleeding ass hardware to run at anything above shit in 25 man raids (in Dragon Soul) at least. I have a pretty decent computer - dual core, 2.8 Ghz, a 6870, 4 GBs of RAM and the game grinds to a goddamn HALT in certain situations. Even people I know who have 3.6+ Ghz quad cores with whatever the top-end video cards are now still get noticeable dips in their FPS.
Let me repeat what I said earlier: I get as low as sub FIVE FRAME PER SECOND on certain boss fights with the LOWEST SETTINGS POSSIBLE IN THE GAME. I couldn't get that low of FPS in Metro 2033 if I pushed everything to max!
Also yes, I know it takes a bit more than that to make a new engine, but there's no excuse for the game to run as poorly as it does.
Posts
Got over your heartbreak at the RMAH, eh?
;-)
That part never really bothered me, since I'll never use it. It's the always online DRM. It still bothers me, and will no doubt infuriate me one day when my internet access goes down and I can't play my single player game, but it's not going to change, so terms are being come to over here in my brain.
If this alleged console Diablo features offline play, I could see myself preferring it (direct control won't hurt either).
He might have a problem calling customer service if he loses his phone tho.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/13/diablo-3-rated-in-south-korea/
According to some guy in the comments to get around the "gambling" thing they took out the "cash out" ability of the RMAH. So you can still buy/sell stuff for real money, but you can't get any of that money back out (aka it becomes Battle.net bucks or whatever for use with Blizzard-related stuff like WoW subscription costs).
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
(But seriously, that is a good thing you do.)
Except blues kept saying emphatically that wasn't the case. I'm not sure how much more they could say to make people realize it wasn't s.Korea holding up D3 but just typical Blizzard "wait!...just one more thing" type game creation.
I mean yeah they polish their games all to hell, but as I said about the beta several months ago, D3 was already in a more "finished" and polished state than most other games released in ever.
Honestly it's getting to the point that it feels more like they're scared to pull the trigger in fear of it not living up to expectations, at least sales-wise, than anything about the game itself not being done.
Of course several blue posts recently said things about "added features" so who the fuck knows at this point. Good lord just release the game as is and add in shit as time goes on.
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Every so often, I'll hit 'escape' in beta, and immediately be reminded that this does not pause the game. Then I'll sigh deeply.
What I heard was that they tried that and it didn't work, so they took the RMAH completely out of the Korean version.
Which then prompted a bunch of people to ask if they could play on the Korean servers...and apparently the answer was yes. It seems that you can only use the RMAH in your native server, but you can create characters on other servers around the world. So the stupidly low ten character limit is a little alleviated by the ability to create ten on each server (though the viability of that depends on your internet connection to those places).
It would be nice if you could pause private games with only the local player currently playing (private so you don't have to worry about needing to allow someone to join a "paused" game, local player only so you don't have to worry about pausing the other players).
I'm sure this is one of those "put it on the list, we'll get to it eventually, maybe" features, though (as a software dev myself, I understand this completely). There are plenty of other things I would rather they focus on, though, such as releasing the game!
Also, adding any measure of inconsistancy would likely just complicate things. Someone gets too used to that feature then does finally open the game up to friends/strangers and dies repeatedly out of habit of going to the menu and wandering off.
Or acting as another barrier to entry for Hardcore, where players again forget/are too accustomed to the feature and lose characters/items.
What happens if your friends know your password and join the game mid pause?
I think consistancy alone will keep it from ever happening, aside from cracked (some day?) editions that have the functionality crammed in.
Or possibly if the console edition isn't online only. If they're good with players having offline games and include it, that'd be just fine by me.
Runes seem to be a major one. The idea of runes is great. They and most the anticipating fans love the idea of each spell really being 5 variant spells depending on the rune. I think that aspect of the rune system might be one of the most unanimously liked features in D3, with even the silly geese being on board. Their problem seems to be how to implement the runes themselves. They have gone through a ton of ideas for them and every time it seems like they're not really satisfied with what they have: e.g., the way the player obtains runes, or the mechanics of "socketing" them into skills, or how reusable they should be, or if they should have stats as well and how that will work. Everything they seem to come up with seems to have some sort of fundamental problem with it that nags them so they keep reworking the rune system.
Just from how much we've been able to observe runeless skills in only the first 13 levels (i.e., beta) changing, I think it's safe to think there are still massive and frequent changes to skills at all levels (and rune combos) still going on internally. Whether they're just trying to make class leveling flow better via the skills that become available at given levels, trying to figure out whether to remove lackluster or problematic skills (and what to replace them with), trying to buff well designed but undertuned skills (and/or specific rune variants), and/or trying to nerf skills that are too good and lead to degenerative gameplay at some given point in the end game, there just still seems to be a lot in flux with the skills themselves.
I'll also bet that they're still working out solutions to various exploits that either players are finding or their internal QA are coming up with, such as the two-or-more-player Lich King switcheroo exploit to farm up rares quickly, that I'm sure was applicable to pretty much any major boss.
Even in beta they were still flip-flopping on how and when a player should be able to switch skills, which is something you would have thought would have been figured out well before then. It's clear that even though the game appears mostly ready and is probably shippable, they seem to think there are a lot of systems that are keeping the game from being as good as it should be.
Of course, a great counter-example is my favorite game of the last few months: Skyrim. It has ridiculously breakable game mechanics and tons of bugs, showing a great lack of polish. Clearly there are other factors that make a game good as well, so I'm not trying to say that Blizzard is right and all others are wrong. I think that if Blizzard tried to make Skyrim, it would have released in 2013 rather than 2011, and might not have been a better game for it.
I have to respond to this with a slightly off topic tangent. I just tried WOW for the first time ever on my Macbook. I'd gotten an e-mail from Blizzard saying it's free up to level 20, so I thought I might as well give it a try. I figured it would run quite nicely, being as old as it is, and the system requirements being as low as they are. Lol...
I cranked the graphics options assuming my Macbook could handle it. I mean, I can play Half Life 2 on full detail in OS X. Why not WOW? I was then greeted with a laggy slide show. Not even a pretty slide show. The graphics were still absolutely horrid. I turned down the graphics until I was averaging about 35fps, and, well... ew. I'm generally not one to complain about graphics these days. Everything made after 2006 or so looks awesome to me. For whatever reason, when I loaded up WOW, I was expecting something better. I used to play Guild Wars, which really isn't all that much newer. It ran just fine on my Macbook, and looked orders of magnitude better in the process. Hell, Starcraft 2 runs and looks better on the same machine.
It isn't just the graphics. It's the visual style as a whole. Diablo II or Starcraft 1 have much worse graphics than WOW, but I find the both much more pleasant to look at, while WOW looks eye-rapingly bad to me.
I can only conclude that the WOW engine is absolutely terrible. So, I very much agree. Diablo 3 had better have a better optimized engine than WOW. Based on what I've been reading on various forums, it sounds like it does. I've seen reports of 13" Macbook Pros and Airs handling it admirably at medium to high settings.
WoW was made in 2004 (technically way before that, 2004 was just the release date). Also, it probably wasn't video lag - it was probably server lag. Did you go to Stormwind or something?
Basically, you compared a game still actively updating in 2011 with one that pretty much stopped major support a good five years earlier. What were you expecting?
Incidentally, the new shadow and water effects are murder on graphics cards. Those are probably the two that would be causing the most issues. Plus in general, the game is so old that you have to expect the graphics engine is probably not the most efficient thing anymore, what with all the tinkering I'm sure they've done to it over the years.
Well, it didn't help that at the time most people had a dial-up connection. It wasn't until some time after the expansion that broadband took off. I can't really recall my online experience with D2, but I remember there were several items that made the game unfair, like Windforce. Like has been mentioned before, the game wasn't a huge challenge when it was first released. The runewords in 1.10 was what really made the game into an obsession. At least for me.
This is all true, but WoW is also notorious for being incredibly inefficient. The fact that it's a 7 year old engine really shows in regards to CPUs, and the coding for GPUs is not optimized well.
I wasn't aware of that.
That said, I still stand by my point... if perhaps a bit less vigorously
I don't think it was server lag either. It definitely "felt" like video lag. More "stuttery" instead of "jumpy", if you know what I mean.
This really just struck me as odd, because Blizzard has usually had a reputation of releasing scaleable, well optimized games. Starcraft II is a great example. It runs quite comfortably somewhere between low and medium settings on my Macbook, and looks great doing it. I remember being similarly impressed back when Diablo II was released. My computer back then wasn't exactly a powerhouse, but I was still able to run Diablo II quite comfortably, if a bit scaled back.
It's basically to the point where you need a massively higher spec than what it suggest to run it decently. A quad core CPU is essentially required since the game engine can easily choke a dual core one. I'd hate to think what it'd do to a single core CPU! The thing is, they're adding bells and whistles on a base engine that wasn't exactly top notch when it started and they're doing it all while giving the bare minimum of 'modern' improvements to the engine. I can run Bullet Storm at max (not that it's a super-duper high end game, but) with almost dead solid 60 FPS and in some parts in WoW I drop to 5 FPS. On Low. Yeah.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
And come on now, you're exaggerating a bit. WoW does not require bleeding edge technology to run. I realize your experience is shitty and that sucks, but you're talking out of your ass here a bit.
It used to be (TBC era, perhaps WLK) that if you dropped some of the details you could still get WoW running on a properly spec'd out toaster.
Guess bloat and features finally caught up with them. Back in the the day, the game was lauded for its scalability.
Let me repeat what I said earlier: I get as low as sub FIVE FRAME PER SECOND on certain boss fights with the LOWEST SETTINGS POSSIBLE IN THE GAME. I couldn't get that low of FPS in Metro 2033 if I pushed everything to max!
Also yes, I know it takes a bit more than that to make a new engine, but there's no excuse for the game to run as poorly as it does.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass