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

GAMEPLAY & CONCLUSION

All of our test games actually did run OK on 56K dial-up. If I had to list them as ‘most friendly’ to the ‘least friendly’, I would put Lord of the Rings first, World of Warcraft second, and Age of Conan third. And of course, in all three games you do not want to go player versus player (PvP) unless they are also 56K. However you can join up with small bands – in LotRO especially – and I was pleasantly surprised to also note that the voice over Internet protocol worked really well with one or two other people chatting as we fought monsters together. The only issues i got were when we tried to talk at exactly the same time.

If you are a single player adventurer, then you will really like playing these games over dial-up. Except for Age of Conan, there is very little lag. Even in AoC you will not be disadvantaged unless you are being beset by huge mobs. One thing that is slightly annoying, is that you will sometimes have to wait for dialogue to load. You make your right-click on the character to initiate a conversation and just wait and wait. More than once, my character started to walk away at the point when I was brought back into the conversation cut scene.

At any rate, for the few days that I explored each of these games I would have to give them each a thumbs-up on 56K dial-up for single player. Age of Conan impressed me greatly. The atmosphere is incredible and I like the mature and sometimes bloody swordplay. You sometimes forget that it is online at all and immersion is excellent. Unfortunately I’m pretty busy and my only time playing games is for reviewing them – just as for this article and so I sadly uninstalled AoC and I reclaimed 36GB of my HD space as token compensation. I can see the addictive qualities of World of Warcraft also. You can see right from the opening cut scene, that you are destined to become a god and interact with other gods. However, the other players you may team up with may well be juvenile and I did not like it very much. The 56K dial-up experience may include a few fellow adventurers – but you will never be able to capture the excitement of playing huge 25-person raids and coordinating perfectly to take down major bosses as you can with broadband. Age of Conan has also copied this WoW formula right in my opinion and also improved on it. Lord of the Rings appeals, I guess, to the more detail-oriented and those who especially enjoy the fellowship aspect of this type of game.

–One note: If you are playing World of Warcraft with a HD4870x2 or a crossfired ATi graphics system you may have issues. The devs recently changed WoW a lot – the view distance is greatly increased and many graphical improvements have been made to the games’ engine. My VisionTek 4870×2 was plagued by flashing textures that were very annoying. ATi told us they are aware of these issues and they should be resolved in the next driver release in December – Cat 8-12.

In conclusion, I would say to the 56K-ers that would like to experience these MMORPG games – just go for it! But make sure you realize it will take many days and nights to download updates and patches for them and that you will never be part of huge raiding parties. You may also need to download updates over broadband or be prepared to spend some time with tech support as these games were not created with dial-up in mind. Yet, for the solo single player experience, or playing with just a few friends, 56K dial-up is an alternate way to play MMORPGs and ultimately was very satisfying for me!

Are you brave enough to play Age of Conan on 56K dial-up? Or foolish enough? It has its potential rewards; recommended if you have no other choice but 56K.

Mark Poppin
ABT editor