Ok ok.. I gotta say there's one thing that has surprised me so far more than anything, and I have only played for a scant 1 minute...
APPARENTLY THIS GAME CAN RUN QUITE DECENTLY WELL ON MY LAPTOP WITH FAIRLY HIGH SETTINGS!
Wow.. I gotta say who would have thought such a feat possible.. 800x600, 32 bits, on a 2.2 P4 -M with a geforce 5600 FX Go.... it apparently *CAN* RUN. The only "advanced" settings I am missing here is the "water reflects everything" (game recommends the most simple reflections) any antialiasing + any kind of anisotropic filtering.
Maybe my standards have lowered but frankly, considering the game defaulted everything else to high from models to pixel shaders, I am pretty impressed. Allright, I have only played a scant 1 minute but I remember the Doom 3 experience: 8-12 fps from the get go at 640x480.
I grew weak and bought Everquest 2 yesterday. It looks pretty amazing, but I have to turn off all the goodies to get it to run on my GF4 Ti4200. The character models still look OK, but I have to turn off the second-tier pixel shader stuff (which looks amazing), as well as light bloom and all the shadows, and run it with medium-res world textures. I'll bet it's just mind-boggling on a newer card.
Also needs scads of RAM too. Remember when 512MB used to be a lot?
Posted by: Bman | November 17, 2004 at 03:06 AM
Just picked up my copy, I'm dying to start it up tonight.
BTW, been playing Halo2 the last couple of days. It's nice enough, but compared to, say, Doom3, it just doesn't hold up, graphically. Easier to play, though, and very engrossing (more at http://www.carlosmorales.com/journal).
Posted by: carlosmorales | November 17, 2004 at 03:27 PM
Ok. Just had to complain SOMEWHERE.
I've been installing HL2 for 40 minutes now. Windows XP would be done by now.
Valve install is complete a$$.
The game better be that much better. >:(
Posted by: carlosmorales | November 17, 2004 at 09:41 PM
@Bman - yup. So how much is the recommended for EverQuest II???? 1 gig?
@Carlos - Yes, the install is bad. If you bought the standard edition *you have to* install coutnerstrike or the install will fail. I had the excitement of doing this wrongly twice... verified it's a known bug in the first batch of CD's... ironically the collector's fine.
But what truly *bugged me* was today when I was trying to show my boyfriend the game and guess what: if you don't have a net connection the game won't start!
I mean, I can understand internet activation, but I have to be connected to the net to play the game? That's bull!
Posted by: Raist3d | November 17, 2004 at 09:51 PM
Yes, 1 to 1.5GB is recommended. Yowza. I'm going to see if I can weasel a newer video card or some more RAM out of my parents for Christmas this year. (If I haven't already gotten bored of the game by then.)
As far as HL2 not running w/o a net connection is concerned, I'm pretty sure I saw a way around that on one of the shacknews comment threads today or yesterday. I think it involves having a net connection, then physically disconnecting it while it's trying to authenticate. Maybe Google will turn something up.
Or else you could probably procure a crack to fix said problem, if you did a bit of looking around.
(Not that I'd EVER suggest such a flagrant disregard for Valve's wonderful DRM-strangled intellectual property. *rolleyes*)
Posted by: Bman | November 17, 2004 at 10:08 PM
I guess more than anything I ask "why?" I mean I can understand internet activation, but activation every time you want to run the game? I can see a backlash coming...
Posted by: Raist3d | November 17, 2004 at 10:13 PM
Oh yeah, and about Halo2, I sure as f**k wish they hadn't brought back everything I hated about the first game. (See: first level in which the flood return.) I stopped last night after that level, but I really hope they don't make a habit of that for the rest of the game.
And naturally, I have one of the HDTVs on which Halo2 doesn't render properly (See http://bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=autoupdateh2 ), and no Xbox Live service to get the update. Thanks, Bungie.
Posted by: Bman | November 17, 2004 at 10:13 PM
Re Valve: they can suck my &genitalia.
Re HL2: It was actually pretty nice, good first few levels (in terms of story). Not as visceral as Doom3. Lots of attention payed to rendering faces. Level design a tad bland.
Re Halo2: If you think redoing the flood is bad, and redoing all the baddies is bad (though getting to play them is good), wait till you see where Master Chief winds up... The only thing I really like about the game is the squad system, they really worked hard on making your buddies act like real people.
Posted by: carlosmorales | November 18, 2004 at 10:31 AM
It turns out there's a way to run in "steam offline mode" so you can play Half Life 2 without the net connection. I wonder why it didn't seem to work before.
Posted by: Raist3d | November 18, 2004 at 11:58 PM