Last night, Mythic held a PTS event to test their performance improvements. The goal was to get a whole bunch of people attacking a very well defended keep and see how it holds up. Over 250 players ended up fighting over the keep. How did WAR do?
NOTE: Check out the video of the siege.
NOTE: Part 2 of the Siege Video is up.
I came away from the event extremely impressed. The game was 100% playable even with hundreds of people fighting within a small area. There was little to no lag. At first I started using the Fastest Framerate graphics setting. As that worked great, I switched it over to Balanced. To my surprise it was still very playable.
I know what you're saying, it was only on a test server. While that is true, they have done these performance tests before. I think the last one I attended was for 1.3. Similar numbers were present and the game was very laggy. It was no where near as smooth as last night. They have made significant progress with WAR's performance.
Words can only describe the performance so much, which is why I took some video. Actually, I took a lot of video, 60 gigs worth. Thanks to my new SSD drive (used for Fraps output) and WAR's improvements, I could run fraps without causing the game to stutter at my best resolution. I'm still thinking about how to present the video. I could just post it all, but it would take 3 separate videos. Alternatively, I could edit it down to a single 10 minute video.
Along with performance, WAR's graphics got an upgrade as well. Changes to their texture manager have the game looking better than ever. Yesterdays PvP video shows some of the changes. I plan on doing a separate post about it soon.
Overall it was a fun event. WAR's performance seems to have improved by leaps and bounds. There was still a little lag at times and some small hitching. The feedback during the game and on the forums is surprisingly positive as well. Hopefully these changes will stick and they can devote more time to other areas of WAR.
