Age of Conan, LotRO & WoW . . . MMORPG on 56K Dial-up!?!

This short article is going to examine three popular MMORPGS – Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games – but with a real twist. We are going to be playing Age of Conan (AoC), World of Warcraft (WoW), and Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) – on 56K dial-up! This editor is one of the unlucky ones who has had to live on 56K dial-up for the past nine years – No cable and no DSL are available. I have missed out on a lot of online gaming. Of course, I live in a desert paradise near a major resort, so I would not give up my rural home with acreage for an apartment and a T-3 line in any major city, including Honolulu and La Jolla where I had already lived. However, over the years, I desperately searched for other Internet connection solutions besides 56K. For a few months I had wireless Internet broadband and I was able to play online including Hellgate: London (Hg:L) and I was even a beta tester for it. Unfortunately the company that set up the wireless broadband for my rural area provided terrible service, constant disconnects and unacceptable down times and with no service – so that ended in a couple of months – and back to 56K dialup I sadly went. Afterward, I actually did try to play Hellgate: London on 56K dial-up but it was impossible to play and the multiplayer game was pretty buggy anyway. It is sad to see them go out of business and I got the notice that the Hg:L content was now free and their last server is closing in January. Still, I kept looking for a faster connection, including getting wireless broadband by AT&T. Again no luck in my area; the ping was awful and the reception was marginal with constant disconnects and in my area it was only a few times faster than 56K dial-up, anyway.

I am not moving to get cable or DSL!!

So, I learned to live with dial-up. And I even started to play some MMORPGs on 56k dial-up. Guild Wars went okay and I was able to play through the beginning of it without annoying the other players that I teamed up with, but I soon lost interest and I went looking for the latest popular MMORPG games. Fast paced multiplayer games like CounterStrike and Unreal Tourmanent are out of the question for us 56K’ers. l first got hooked into Lord of the Rings Online by a friend who first encouraged me and then himself soon dropped out right after I started to play. It was unfortunate for me, as I believe Lord of the Rings is all about fellowship and teaming up to complete quests. So I had a subscription for a few months although I rarely play it because it bores me with all the crafting and all the attention to little details it apparently requires; after months, my avatar is still only Level 14. So that subscription ends soon.

I also ran into the Eidos reps at NVISION08 in San Jose and I asked them, half in jest, if Age of Conan would run on 56K dial-up. They took me seriously, I guess, and they said they didn’t know as they didn’t test it; but evidently playing on 56K dial-up had crossed their minds. After I introduced myself as the editor of Alien Babel Tech, they gave me the game DVDs and asked me if I wouldn’t mind trying it. So here is my report. I also decided to add the venerable World of Warcraft to this short review also as I recently received a free 14-day trial with my ASUS 4870 from NewEgg. So here we are. I am comparing World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and Age of Conan -all on 56K dial-up! We are not looking for hardware comparisons or frame rates; but rather “playability” of the mostly the single-player online experience over 56K dial-up. It is very subjective and it largely depends on my personal experience which may differ from yours. To that end for playing all three games, I chose an ASUS 4870-1GB as my test card and I ran every game with every detail that was possible to max, maxed out – including 4x AntiAlising and 16x Anisotropic filtering whenever possible. General performance was excellent and there were no slowdowns due to the graphics card that was used. My PC’s CPU is e8600 at 3.99Ghz and 4GB PC8500; with Vista32. DX10 was used in LotRO while WoW and AoC ran on DX9c.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 (3.99 GHz ).
• ASUS P5E Deluxe (Intel X48 chipset, latest BIOS).
• 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM (4×1 GB, dual-channel).
• ATi Radeon EAH4870 (1 GB, reference clocks) by ASUS
• ATi Radeon HD4870x2 (2 GB, reference clocks) by VisionTek
• SoundMax Integrated HD audio
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Hard Drive
• 850 watt OCZ power supply

Test Configuration – Software

• ATi Catalyst 8.11, highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver.
• Windows Vista 32-bit, SP1; very latest updates
• DirectX10 November 2008.
• All games patched to their latest versions automatically.

Test Configuration – Settings

• vsync off in the driver to “application decide” and never in game.
• 4AA only enabled in-game; all settings at maximum, 16xAF applied
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Vista32, DX10 title was run under DX10 render paths; DX9c titles using DX9c.

THE GAMES

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (LotRO) is set in a fantasy universe based upon J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings. It takes place during the time period of The Lord of the Rings. It was developed by Turbine and launched on April 24, 2007. The first expansion pack, Mines of Moria, was released on November 17, 2008. Lord of the Rings Online features DirectX 10 but the landscapes are nowhere near as detailed as what you see in Age of Conan which is still DirectX9 although the game box says it is DX10. LotRO’s main storyline is set up as a series of “Books” with quests called “Chapters” and it uses magic a little differently than the other MMORPGs reviewed here. LotRO uses active skills which require “power” like healing or throwing fire at an enemy but are based on “lore” and objects and artifacts are used to create similar effects to magic.

From looking at World of Warcraft, we see the least details although the game engine got a major “makeover” very recently where the landscape draw distance was nearly doubled at maximum and dynamic shadows were introduced. It is the oldest of our three MMORPGs but it is quite impressive now for an online game that is 4 years old! WoW was released on November 23, 2004, which celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Warcraft franchise. Its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, was released on January 16, 2007 and the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was released on November 13, 2008. With over 11 million monthly subscribers, World of Warcraft is currently the world’s most popular MMORPG and it is estimated to hold over 60% of the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) market.

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a fantasy-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by the Norwegian computer video game developer company Funcom for PCs. It launched May, 2008 and it is the first installment in the planned Age of Conan series which takes place within the continent of the Hyborian kingdoms, one year after the events depicted in Robert E. Howard’s Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon.

All of our images are at 1920 x 1200 resolution with settings completely maxed out in-game.

All 56K is Not Equal!

First of all, anyone who has 56K dial-up had better choose a good one. I picked NetZero after years of trying and using many others. They had a few stumbles a few years back, but it is the best bang for buck I have found for less than $10 a month with unlimited usage. It also means that your ‘ping’ needs to be low. My Wildblue satellite connection is often well over 1000 ms; its very best is ~800 ms. On the other hand, my NetZero ping is usually below 100 ms (average) to just over 300 ms (worst case). So I do not get that horrible delay over 56K that I get with satellite. MMORPG is generally a better experience over 56K than with satellite. Satellite also has severely restricted download caps that average out to 500MB a day so you have to “budget” or plan for large downloads. Also, when my phone line is completely dedicated to the Internet, I can get around 3 GB downloaded every week. This means us 56K’ers have to be patient. Except for World of Warcraft, you must wait for the games to be completely patched before you can play them. And most of the full patches are over 3 GB even if you have the game DVD!! Finally, as something of interest to note, satellite and 56K will work together – paired – as Vista will manage multiple networks simultaneously without an aggregator although it plays havoc with ping and sometimes slows down or kills the faster connection completely.

Before I got Wildblue satellite Internet, I downloaded Lord of the Rngs Online over 56K and it took me nearly 10 days, mostly for 24 hours a day. It also took a few emails to Turbine, the publishers of Lord of the Rings Online, to get me the time credited for the one third of the month that I lost by just downloading it. Of course, now that I have Wildblue, 1.5 MB a second download and 256K/s up, I cheated. I downloaded all of the patches for World of Warcraft and Age of Conan in just a (p)few hours. AoC’s patches are quite large and you must finish updating before creating your chartacter, but WoW will allow you to start playing even before you are completely finished downloading all of the patches.