Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
User Rating:
  Log in to rate this game!
ESRB:
Blood and Gore,Intense Violence,Language - Mild,Nudity,Sexual Themes
Publisher: Funcom Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.ageofconan.com/
Ooh, ShinyAs you can see from the trailer on the first page, if Tortage looked good, some of the first areas outside it look even prettier. There are some minor rough bits, but the sense of awe you get when visiting Old Tarantia for the first time is impressive. It's like a CGI movie set - both in good and bad. While you can snap pretty pictures from many spots, if you really want to go exploring, you suddenly run into all kinds of impassable barriers.
Character art, animation and spell effects are even more detailed than the scenery, and while there is some visible "skating" and "rubberbanding" when other players move around you, animation and movement is far more realistic than in Lord of the Rings Online. It can't quite touch World of Warcraft, but what it loses in animation quality and smoothness, it takes back in the amount of detail and texture quality. When you venture beyond the mid-level zones, things get slightly more uneven and at times there are fairly annoying visual bugs in the scenery - floating objects, missing or misplaced textures and visible polygon seams. They are not a game-breaking issue, but they betray the rush to get the visuals done in time for launch, and in a way they stand out more than they really should simply because the scenery is otherwise so beautiful. Performance?YouGamers already covered the performance of Age of Conan in a separate article, but to quickly summarize; the hardware requirements are pretty stiff, and 2GB RAM is pretty much required. The recommended system specifications are realistic, but the minimum is a joke. Realistically you need a dual core CPU, 2GB RAM and at Medium settings a mid-range videocard such as GeForce 9600GT 256MB or Radeon HD3850 256MB is a practical minimum to play. Systems with older video cards are not recommended, unless you are happy to downgrade the settings down to the ugly land - and even then 2GB RAM is effectively the minimum. As bit of a "first", Age of Conan definitely benefits from more than 2GB RAM, and on Vista, it's almost a requirement.
DX10 performance is still a mystery, as the feature got cut before launch - to be patched in later. The box still claims DX10 support, but it also claims optimizations for multi core as well - both pretty much untrue. On a quad core system, the game tends to load one core close to maximum while another hovers around 30-40%, leaving two cores idling. I guess if you consider basic offloading of non-graphics related code to the second core as "multi-core support", Age of Conan delivers that. In any case, the performance is mostly graphics card and memory limited, so when in doubt - first add RAM, then upgrade your video card.
Related StuffTags |
 
 
 
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Games: 
