{"id":1651,"date":"2008-12-03T03:10:14","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T03:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/?p=1651"},"modified":"2008-12-03T15:49:44","modified_gmt":"2008-12-03T15:49:44","slug":"age-of-conan-lotro-wow-mmorpg-on-56k-dial-up-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/age-of-conan-lotro-wow-mmorpg-on-56k-dial-up-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Age of Conan, LotRO & WoW . . . MMORPG on 56K Dial-up!?!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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),<\/em> and Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO)<\/em> – 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)<\/em> 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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

I am not moving to get cable or DSL!!<\/p><\/div>\n

So, I learned to live with dial-up. And I even started to play some MMORPGs on 56k dial-up. Guild Wars<\/em> 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<\/em> and Unreal Tourmanent<\/em> are out of the question for us 56K’ers. l first got hooked into Lord of the Rings Online<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

I also ran into the Eidos reps at NVISION08 in San Jose and I asked them, half in jest, if Age of Conan<\/em> 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, <\/em>and Age of Conan<\/em> -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<\/em> while WoW<\/em> and AoC<\/em> ran on DX9c.<\/span><\/p>\n

Test Configuration \u2013 Hardware<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/dt>\n
HD4870\/1GB was used for all 3 games<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n