by Jeff Woleslagle on Nov 30, 2009
Loading... is the premier daily MMORPG news, coverage, and
commentary newsletter, only from Ten Ton Hammer.
The compact size, battery life, and an extremely efficient and well-rounded Windows 7 Starter Edition running environment have increasingly made netbooks a full-size laptop replacement for frequent travellers. A number of iconic casual games run perfectly on the latest generation of netbooks, and the recently released action RPG Torchlight released with a special "Netbook Mode." But how do netbooks deal with asset heavy PC games, including some of our favorite MMORPGs? We'll try out 4 Pulse Top Ten MMOGs and share the surprising results, plus share links to a great new Star Trek Online interview and more in today's Loading... Four MMOGs and a Netbook.
The ONE Power UP Game Card works as currency in 21 games. Click here for your chance to win one $10 ONE Card, a winner drawn daily through Dec. 4th. No purchase necessary.
You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the
result is the Ten Ton Pulse (
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/thepulse/" target="_blank">What
is The Pulse?).
Here are today's top 5 Pulse results:
target="_blank">World of Warcraft EverQuest 2 (UP 1) AgeBiggest movers today:
Alganon (UP 6 to #14) Lord of the Rings Online (UP 1 to #7) Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (down 1 to #8) Recent ReleasesAfter hearing more than one person laud the many virtues of Windows 7 Starter, an OEM-only streamlined edition not available at retail (at least in the US), I put my well-travelled, well-loved Fujitsu tablet ultracompact on eBay and purchased a Toshiba NB 205 with the proceeds. The NB 205 is a sensible $400 middle-of-the-roader with a 1 x 1.66 Intel Atom processor, 1 gig of RAM, 140 GB hard drive, and a 6-cell battery tied to a power-sipping integrated display adapter that easily lasts 6-8 hours even when watching movies or playing games. The NB205 also has some nice extras like a sturdy-feeling aluminum keyboard, a Cat5E port in addition to Wireless-N, hard drive shock protection, and a USB port that charges my gadgets even when the computer is off and not plugged in.
Netbooks made their name off of making routine PC tasks purse-sized and portable. I knew I could easily check email, browse the web, and do HTML editing and word-processing, and watch some Hulu (some netbook users report stuttering with Hulu and YouTube, but I haven't found this to be the case), but I certainly wasn't sold on its gaming merits at purchase. I loaded up my spate of airplane and train boredom-reducing casual games - World of Goo, Plants vs. Zombies, Osmos, Civ4 and, yes, Peggle - and to my surprise all except Civilization 4 (see below) worked to perfection. That got me to wondering whether I could up the gaming ante and try out some MMOs too.
First, some caveats. To allow space for a decently sized keyboard, most netbooks have a native resolution of somewhere around 1024x600. That and the downshifted resolution (800x600) aren't supported by every game, and unfortunately the no-fly list includes current builds of games like Civilization 4 and Eufloria in my experience. The game runs fine, but critical elements go off-screen at default resolutions and using different compatibility settings and editing config files hasn't been helpful. I'll post a fix in the forums if I happen across one.
Note also that a netbook's performance bottleneck is clearly at it's extremely efficient and chilly (but slooow) CPU, so netbooks can chug a bit when confronted with heavily compressed files (such as during the install process, which is one reason why it took most of the weekend to gather data for this Loading...). Also, windowed games and elements of games, such as login screens for MMOs, typically stretch 600 pixels tall. That wouldn't be a problem except for the 50 px tall, "submit button"-masking taskbar, so you might want to consider auto-hiding it.
One other thing that's important to consider when buying a netbook is that none of these pint-sized powerhouses have CD / DVD-ROM drives. You can pick up a external USB optical drive for around $100, or just do what I did, ensure that everything you need can be installed via download or by USB key or hard drive. Fortunately all the MMOs I tested out for this round are on the cutting edge of the digital distribution movement. EVE Online, the once and future all-time beauty-per-megabyte champion, was a simple <1 GB client download from the official site. Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Unlimited offered a fantastic "tiered download" option which got me in the game within an hour despite some slow loading screens while content was streamed on demand. The WoW trial version worked the same way. Unfortunately I had to stick to vanilla WoW since my computer surprisingly didn't meet the minimum RAM requirements for Wrath of the Lich King. I'll install it anyway and deliver the results with Part 2 on Friday.
A word on framerate expectations here, too. On a fully 3D game, you'll get about 15 FPS tops with a netbook like mine, and with graphics quality somewhere between Quake and UT 2004. We're looking at basic 10 FPS-ish playability here, not our next LAN gaming rig showpiece. With that in mind, on to the results:
EVE Online was probably my biggest surprise, and it's good news to the game's many multi-boxers that the game works so well on low spec machines. With graphics dialed back as far as they could go and with resource caching enabled, I could pull a respectable and steady 8-11 FPS in heavily trafficked systems like Jita and Rens. The graphics take on their own pleasingly reductionist, almost cell-shaded style at low settings too. Since combat bottomed out at about 5 FPS, I wouldn't want to risk any kind of serious engagement with a netbook, it worked fine for mission running and deadspace encounters and certainly for skill swapping, trading, and ferrying goods through mid- to high-security space. World of Warcraft (played on a pre-TBC trial account, see above for why) did well, ranging from 5-15 FPS as I made my way through Dun Morogh and Ironforge. My only gripe was that I had to do a fair amount of healthbar watching, since it was hard to tell when my newbie weapon connected with a mob. Given Machail's Windows 7 results and the fact that Age of Conan surprisingly performed just about as well as Wrath of the Lich King, it seems like WoW has made something of a departure from its minspec-friendly roots. I'm anxious to try out these two MMOs in the next installment. Dungeons and Dragons Online had the highest framerate peak (17 FPS) of all four MMOs I tested, and for me made the best use of UI and viewing space. I was concerned that the game's trademark active combat might trip me up on a netbook, so I rolled a melee-heavy monk. But though the 8-16 FPS range necessarily cut out some frames, they were the least necessary and combat still felt fluid. All in all, throughout my scanty half-hour of play, DDO probably offered the best netbook experience of the four MMOs I tested. Lord of the Rings Online, even with the standard graphics build's settings dialed as low as possible, tested worst of the four MMOs, ranging from a paltry 3-8 FPS (heavy on the 3-4). At such low framerates, combat and movement felt completely unresponsive. On top of that, many UI elements were entirely out of place at my lowly resolution on login. LotRO is one MMO I wouldn't recommend on a netbook for anything more than chat, and given this it's a bit surprising that LotRO and DDO share much of the same core technology.So DDO Unlimited wins round one of our four MMOs and a Netbook faceoff, with EVE Online a close second. I'll be back on Friday of this week with part 2, where we'll test out Aion, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, and WoW: Wrath of the Lich King. In the meantime, you're welcome to share your thoughts on netbook gaming and MMO minspecs in the Loading... forums!
Shayalyn's Epic Thread of
the Day
From our Tavern of the Ten Ton Hammer forum
APB - All Points Bulletin
Beerkeg
is getting excited about APB, the MMO he refers to as, "Shaping up to
be a fantastic GTA / Planetside style clone with massive multiplayer
gun battles and gangsters!" For some reason, Ten Ton Hammer's APB coverage hasn't registered much of a hit on our Pulse
radar, currently coming in at #64. But perhaps beta, and today's epic
thread, will begin to turn that around. Are you interested in APB? Want
to learn more or discuss the game? Head on over!
==============================
Awesome Quotes from the
Epic Thread
"Yeah, supposedly the character
creator is so advanced that you will be able to create your own face in
the game. There was a picture in the latest PC Gamer magazine where the
developers only went by a photo of one of the staff, and created him in
game PERFECTLY! Even being able to custome a kevlar vest with the PC
Gamer logo."
- Beerkeg
==============================
Have you spotted an Epic Thread on our forums? Tell
us!
6 new Ten Ton Hammer MMOG
features today! 111 in November! 3,085
in
2009!
New Exclusives and Guides today at Ten Ton
Hammer
Today's Hottest Content
Thanks for visiting the Ten Ton Hammer
network!
- Jeff "Woleslagle" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team