Originally posted by JustJim
anyone still playing on a 466 with 16 mb ram and 4 mb video ?
I thought not upgrading is a part of the PC evolution, you wanna play the cool stuff ya gotta get cooler stuff.
I hate it as well but it's not only this game requiring better PC's
with every new game there is a new generation of PC's needed to play them, its a conspiracy I tell ya.
Ahhh .... but there you're just plain wrong. You've bought into the "picture perfect neccessity" schlock lock stock and barrel. Tell, me .... does the image on your screen need to be digital quality in every detail for you to attain immersion? If so you must have little, if any, imagination. And truly it'll never be enough until you manage to find a way to teleport back in time and get yourself into one of the service flight schools.
The "gotta have my eye candy" crowd is basically a crowd of duped individuals.
AH ... as is ... has the engine and capability to be much more than it is already. It doesn't take revamping the graphics and causing the entire community to double their sys specs. And three or four years later doing it again. People will naturally upgrade their systems as their previous ones wear out. We don't need a shove to do that.
Instead .... devote the resources to modeling more aircraft. Cover all the theaters of combat more thoroughly. Add some more historical terrain and do what it takes to address whatever glitches arise. Tweak the user interface.
Don't jump on the snowballing software/hardware vicious circle if you don't have to and your community will tend to be more stable in the long-run.
You doubt? Do some checking around. See how many players of various games ... who were perfectly happy with those games ... soon found themselves either forced to move on or spent the money to upgrade time and again for what, in their opinion, was an too little improvement to warrant the constant upgrades. See how many who WERE eye-candy freaks became either disillusioned by it all or were insatiable in their unrealistic goals and moved on to something else they thought fulfilled them ... and moved on again.
That being said, many of us are upgrading to keep up with AH based on our current enjoyment of it. But it's still to be seen if the changes will both benefit the game and the community to such an extent as to enhance it's potential or if putting the cart before the horse will prove a liability.
Hell ... just look at the disappointment some express already at some of the graphics in the beta? I think they're fine. I think it was already fine. But those who are so overcome by their desire for a "picture perfect" world will probably never be happy until they're in the "matrix." Then they'll die of thirst there and we'll be free of them forever.
Sure .... two or three years of all programming resources being devoted to rivets, trees and barns may well cause a season or two of "oooohs and ahhhhhs" .... but the same time devoted to giving the players more planes to fly and fixing any problems with the ones we have will keep the game more of a step ahead of it's competitors than the eye candy will. And if other gamey games keep up the pixel polishing trend ... AH will get players from them instead of what some believe to be the opposite trend.
