Last night I downloaded the AC2 free trial and got up and running, and for some reason it just did not appeal to me at all. I got my controls setup in a configuration I was half-satisfied with, then I created a character. I was not very impressed with the character creation as it seemed to lack alot of customization. You can create a character from one of 3 races and it can be either male or female. You can change your height and build, a few face types, hair styles, beard styles, skin tone, and clothing colors, which is not a short list, but that was not really the area I felt was lacking. There are no classes starting out as far as I can tell, and no attributes such as Strenght, Dexterity, Constitution, etc. Coming from D&D games and MMO's such as EQ, DAOC, and Shadowbane, the lack of a starting class and starting stats was a shock to me, but I proceeded without taking it too seriously.
The next thing I noticed was that on my system (Athlon XP 1800+, 512mb DDR ram, Geforce4 Ti4600, and a cable connection) I was getting probably 10-15 fps. This really dissappointed me since UT2k3, BF1942, Neverwinter Nights, and basically any other game I have played recently has given me at least 60-100 fps on average. I was impressed with the quality of the graphics, but the fps were just horrible. I did not change a single setting from the automatically detected settings the game picked for my system and this was the kind of performance I got. My system well exceeds the requirements for the game:
Requirements:
Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
733 MHz processor
256 MB RAM
2 GB Hard Drive space
32 MB 3D graphics card
My System:
Win 98
Athlon XP 1800+ running at 1666 mhz
512 MB RAM
~40 GB free space
128 MB Geforce4 Ti4600
Ignoring the performance and the character creation, I tried to play the game to give it the benefit of the doubt. I noticed first off that for some reason I could not use mouse look, even with the mouse button that the controls indicated would toggle mouse look on/off. After giving up on assigning a mouse button to do this, I set a key for it and had to use it each time I wanted to be able to look around with the mouse.
I played for a few minutes, starting by equipping the sword I had in my inventory and exploring the starting area. The starting area is very self-explanatory and the starting quests and monsters were easy to follow and easy to complete. You can be level 3 in probably less than 2 minutes if you know the quests and the area before hand, but still it only took me about 15 minutes reading every single bit of text and taking time to look at all of the skills available to me for training.
After looking at the skills I had to work with, I decided to put a few points in Melee and a few points in Magic. I could not tell that the points I spent actually did anything, but it may be because I was such a low level that the increases would not be very noticable. Moving on to the game, it seems that it is more oriented towards quests than it is combat (the opposite of most MMO's). This is not a bad thing, but I guess for someone that is not familiar with the backstory of AC, the cutscenes did nothing for me, and the quests were basically -go kill this thing and take this item to this person and you will level-
When I left the starting area I was placed up on top of a big hill looking down over a road and some mountain and assumed that I was supposed to follow the road. I also tried jumping just for fun and ended up taking damage just from the distance I fell from jumping....that was strange, but I guess I just would avoid jumping too much. I proceeded down the road until I found a person with a ? over his head and I logged out to get some sleep.
I guess what I want to know is, what are the good things about this game? I have lowered the graphics quality and the viewing distance but the game still runs terrible. Is there any magic setting in the game that greatly improves performance, even at a quality loss? Also, does anyone play and if so what are the server populations like at peak times? When I played at about 4:30 am there were a total of around 800 players combined from all 4 servers.
Sorry for this being so lengthy, I just wanted to see if I did something wrong or if this is similar to other people's experiences with it.
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