It seemed okay, although there was that familiar hiatus at the start, where the textures load in sperately and very slowly, making the whole world look like it's either floating in space or flooded. It often used to do that on the old machine so I'm not reading anything into it.
There were some hitches and stuttering that might have concerned me more had the conection to the East Coast server cluster where I have always played not been so awful. Given Amazon's pre-eminent position in the server rental business, I'm a bit surprised by just how bad it was.
It was even worse today. Then again, I am on Virgin Media Broadband, which isn't all that impressive at the best of times, and recently it's been worse even than usual, so once again I don't think the issues I'm seeing necessarily have anything to do with my new set-up. I might have to swap to an EU server. It looks like you can chop and change at will now.
If you factor out those two elements - poor connectivity and New World's inherent flakiness, the new rig is handling things very well. Once the textures had loaded and whenever my ping was decent everything felt very smooth on High graphic settings. The game looked gorgeous as always and everything behaved just as it should.
First off, a new installation of EQII these days defaults to the streaming system introduced a long time ago, whereby each new area only downloads as and when you enter it. That sounds great in theory but even with a fast connection it's a total pain when you experience it in action.
It's not even zone by zone. It's individual areas within zones. Possibly every separate Point of Interest, of which there are thousands. Imagine the old loading times for zones fifteen years ago. If you liked waiting for those, you'll love how long this takes!
I was fed up of it by the time I'd sat through separate downloads for Character Select, my Mara house and East Freeport. I logged out and googled "EQ2 Full Download", which turned out to be harder to find than you'd expect.
In case anyone is likely to need it, I'll point you right now to the excellent Wiki page on Installation. That was where I learned that to download the whole game before you try to play it you have to open Advanced Tools from the tiny cog icon on the launcher and then click on the "Select Game Version" button. I had already thought of the Advanced Tools part all on my own but once I got there I couldn't see anything that looked like it was relevant. I certainly wasn't thinking of a download as a different version of the game.
When I got that started, I was impressed by how fast it was. The current EQII footprint is surprisingly small at just under 33GB and it took maybe fifteen minutes to get the whole thing onto my external drive via a usb cable.
With everything already there, zoning times were hugely reduced. Very noticeably faster, in fact, than I've been used to on the old system. Big pat on the case for the new computer there.
What was less impressive were the graphics, which looked just awful. Digging into the Options showed me it had defaulted to Extreme Performance. I changed that to High Quality and things looked much better but there was a lot of hitching and juddering, none of which I ever had with the old machines.
Once again, the Installation guide was very helpful. Apparently even now the game is optimized for single-core CPUs and has very limited support for the multiple cores newer games take for granted. My old machine did have multiple cores - four, I think - and the very old one had just two. I never even thought about it in respect to EQII though. The new one has six cores and twelve threads and apparently that's enough to confuse the poor old thing.
The wiki suggests using a "lower core index value" which is a setting in Options I'd never even noticed. Then again, it also says that's for Intel processors. It doesn't mention AMD, which is what mine is. Still, I thought I'd try it, so I shifted the slider back from 31 to 6. I have no idea what that even means but it seemed to make a big difference. The game is now running just as it did on the older machines.
EQII has always been a nightmare to optimize for graphic performance, though. There's a lengthy guide on how to do it stickied on the legacy forums. It goes back a few years - well, to the launch of the game in 2004 in fact, although it was updated in... er... 2014. I don't know how relevant it is any more but I might have a look at it if I run into any more graphic or performance problems.
Once again, it does appear that the main issues I'm likely to experience are going to have more to do with outside factors than any shortcomings of my new PC. Like, for example, the supremely irritating re-discovery that all the UI and character settings I'm used to in EQII are held client side not on the server. I'm going to have to set up my old PC again just to copy the .ini files onto a USB stick so I can transfer them to the new machine. Ah well. It's not like I haven't done that before...
While I was on the EQII website initiating the download, I remembered I hadn't yet gotten around to pre-ordering the new expansion, Rage of Churros Churrath. I have now. It was already very cheap at £25.12 (Nitpickingly accurate currency conversion there, I notice.) but as an All Access member I get a ten per cent discount, so it actually cost me just £22.61. And there's a level 130 Character Boost included, which I will happily use on one of my Level 125s.
Once I had all that sorted out, I went back to New World and played for about forty minutes. I logged in my original character, currently Level 60, and did the quest that gets you your first mount. It was easy and fun and now I have a horse called Moonshadow. My plan this afternoon was to post about that but things seem to have gotten away from me as usual so I'll save it for another day.
What I will say is that just a few minutes back in the world reminded me what an enjoyable game New World is and always was. I know it's often (Usually...) been quite buggy but honestly, if an MMORPG with as much going for it as New World hasn't been able to generate enough consistent and reliable interest among gamers to turn it into a profitable, long-term concern then I'm starting to doubt such a thing is even possible any more.
And that would be a really great lead-in to a rant about what's happening with Ashes of Creation right now. But once again, I'll save that for another post. I'll be pissed if I don't get a free pass into Early Access, though, I'll tell you that for nothing! (Edit: Apparently I do so just ignore me...)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment