'minimum spec but unwilling to turn down any of the detail levels'
Well, what about far above minimum spec with all detail levels and video card/in game options completely minimal, a DSL connection and yet still being completely unable to enter a city without your whole computer crashing and rebooting over and over again until you finally give up?
Behind the Anarchy Article
Gamesdomain put up an article called "Behind the Anarchy" with interviews with AO's U.S. staff. It is pretty interesting reading, although definitely one sided in its presentation. Here's an example:
It appeared to be a consensus amongst the support team that harsh claims online concerning Anarchy "not working" or "not being ready" is unfair. While the message boards are filled with posts of complaints, they say you'll also see many cheerleaders - some are players with level 40 or 50 characters who have never experienced any major problems.
"It's important that people get perspective on this," said Sean. Because of the hardware inconsistencies from one person to the next, it's apparently very difficult sorting through the real issues that the dev team needs to work on and the problems that are down to individual configurations. The support team says they get many people complaining that the game runs slowly, usually caused by them running on a machine barely at the minimum spec but unwilling to turn down any of the detail levels. And while these are standard issues with any modern PC release, you have to add in troubleshooting the online connection and they hope people will understand why it's such a monumental task helping everyone.
You can read the entire article at this link.
Tags: AnarchyOnline, News