taultunleashed

It took me about 12-16 hours to completely download. I first downloaded the game, then ran a patcher, then opened the game and it patched again.

I used an external utility to attempt to change the settings to the lowest possible before I entered the game, but it still took me in with high resolution.

Once I logged in, it took the game at least 10 mins to load the first time. I walked away, came back, and I was logged out due to being inactive. Took me 5 mins the second time.

When I got in, the screen lag was very bad. I turned the settings down all the way, and was getting 60 fps. I then looked at 4 mobs and was getting screen lagged again.

I noticed that you have to actually choose your attacks, there doesn't seem to be an auto attack. This can be beneficial when you want to do more damage, but it makes it so that you have to be paying attention to play - no turning your head, and worse if you get hit with a lag spike as you won't be able fight at all.

This game is HUGE it's 20gb and you need 35gb to install. Partially the problem, is nothing is compressed into a dat file. All the images are Targa and if you know about Targa files, they are pretty much uncompressed bitmap files. I think they chose the wrong image format. Changing to jpg, even a slightly lesser quality, could easily cut the size of the install much smaller.

The game play is mostly smooth, the water animation is awesome. Keeping in mind however, I have a 8800 GTS (640mb). It should also be noted, that this time that I played, I did not turn all my external non needed apps off. And at the time of writing, I only have 1gb of memory (ordered 4gb today).

The other files are all xml or data files. It looks like the game interface is going to be highly customizable, and that at this point if you don't want something to load it's just a matter of changing 1 to 0 in the XML. There is a script directory, so I assume there will be some kind of macros to be allowed in the game, but it remains to be seen what.

Tip: to see your Frame Rate, click ctrl-alt-F. With all the settings turned down, I was getting 60 FPS.

I don't know if this will be a WoW killer, but it is definitely a game to watch. I personally plan to try it out when it comes out.

Any tips or guides I write will be going into the VIP forums. You need to be a subscriber to view these.

Exploits for the most part will probably be useless post beta, but if I find a way to make a dupe bug, I will keep it hidden, so that maybe it will last through beta to the live game.