Star Wars: The Old Republic Game Play Video

Posted by Wolfen in SWTOR

Bioware has finally released a game play video of Star Wars: The Old Republic that shows what low-level grouping looks like and I have a few complaints. See the video for your self (you must enter your date of birth before you can view it):

My first reaction was that the graphics do not look that great. For a brand new Grade-A title, it seems they have lowered the bar a tad too low. Sure, you want your game to play on as many machines as possible, but not at the expense of looking dated on day one. In my opinion, it looks too much like Star Wars: Galaxies, which as been out for years.

Another complaint I have is how the user interface looks. I do not like the design aesthetics at all. Just as I mentioned above with the graphics, the UI looks dated, and to put it bluntly, ugly. They have a long way to go to match the quality of World of Warcraft’s UI.

A third complaint is with the Jedi Consular in the player group. The Consular is the healer for the group, so for the entire video, she heals her group mates and never uses the light saber in her hand. Is the light saber just for show on this class? That would be terribly disappointing if it turns out that way.

There are a few things I liked in the video. The sound effects are very good, especially the sound of the Trooper’s gun when he fired it. The “spell” effects were not bad, either. The flames that erupted around the large droid were nice and I liked the way the ground cracked underneath it when it hit the ground after jumping at the Trooper.

The group dynamics were interesting to see. The Jedi took on the “adds” that appeared during the main fight. I am not sure what to think about that. The Jedi reminded me of how an Everquest Ranger played back during its initial launch. The Ranger could tank decently for a time, and was excellent at handling adds. I would have thought that a Jedi would be reserved for taking on the meanest of the bunch, but it may not be that way.

I am not sure what the Smuggler was supposed to be doing. The narrator said that she was supposed to be doing damage from the sidelines. Well, from what I could tell, she didn’t do anything for half the battle. It is possible she was doing other range damage that did not involve firing her gun, but if she was, I could not see it.

I was most impressed with the Trooper. He obviously carried a big weapon and stood toe-to-toe with the large droid. What worries me is that the Consular focused almost all her attention on healing the Trooper. That can only mean that this game relies heavily on the “must haves” in a group. The old “can’t do anything without a tank and healer” argument seems to be valid here. The narrator even said that if the Consular makes a mistake then the group is done for. Those players looking for new game play dynamics may be disappointed.

I know that I am being fairly harsh on a three minute video that shows off low-level grouping, but it does worry me how the group play is turning out. I certainly hope that there will be more than one way to “skin a cat.” I look forward to seeing more of the upcoming game play videos.

Alienware M17 vs Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Posted by Wolfen in General, Hardware, Vanguard

As earlier mentioned, I bought an Alienware M17 gaming laptop.  A quick listing of the specs shows a 2.5ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb of RAM, and most importantly, two ATI 3870 graphics cards in SLI Crossfire mode.  I was interested to find out how this beast of a machine handles Vanguard.  To be honest, I am a little disappointed in the performance it gives in this game.  Turns out, there is a good reason why.

First, I don’t want to give the impression that the M17 is not a good gaming machine.  It is a great one.  The 3DMark ’06 score is well over 12,000 and it plows through World of Warcraft at max settings while running at 1920×1200 resolution.  WoW has a very refined graphics engine, however, while Vanguard falls far short in this cateogry.  It also plays Crysis and other games extremely well.

I expected to be able to run Vanguard at Very High settings while keeping to my screens native resolution of 1920×1200.  In reality, the best I could do and still get a smooth experience was set it to High and tweaking it from there.  One of the biggest performance killers are shadows, and I had to set them to low quality.  I wanted to use full drawing distance but I had to set it at around 70%.  Turning on HDR made the game flicker like crazy, so I had to keep that turned off.  I also had to lower tree detail at long range.

I am not a FPS numbers kind of guy, so I don’t have that for you.  What I find important is how the game feels and flows as I play it.  If it hitches or stutters, that is all I need to know that the game isn’t running well at the current settings.  With the above modifications to the High graphical settings, the game runs very well while I am out in the field adventuring.  Things get much worse when I go into a town.  The game struggles to load NPC’s and buildings, which causes major stuttering until all the objects are loaded.

I had read that Sony had made some improvements to the graphics engine that they claimed would improve performance and reduce the “chunking” effect.  The Vanguard world is cut into many squares of land, or chunks, and when you pass from one chunk of land to another, the game freezes and churns away while it loads the contents of the new land area.  My experience since returning to the game is that there has been no improvement whatsoever.  My character still freezes in mid-stride and I have to wait a few seconds before he moves again.  Many times my character will start moving again but his legs are stuck in place, which makes him float over the terrain instead of running over it.

Keep in mind that all of this is happing at a high screen resolution.  Sure, I could lower it down to 1650×1080 or even lower, but I bought this computer in order to run games at high rez.  Other games are not a problem, but it is painfully obvious that Vanguard still has a long way to go before it will run well, even on high-end computers.

Now here is the kicker.  After being disappointed in the performance of this game on the M17, I did some research and discovered that SLI in Vanguard is not supported if you are using two separate video cards.  Bingo.  This is the reason for my troubles.  It boggles my mind that it doesn’t.  Here we have a game with extremely high hardware requirements and yet it doesn’t support SLI.  Fah!

So, the fault isn’t with the M17, it is with the game itself.  With this information in mind, the M17 plays Vanguard amazingly well.  I am not so disappointed after all.