General Release Date

Man the troops!

 

It's all about the graphics card.

I had to rebuild my living room PC recently (it was so old that I think the chipset heatsinks stopped working right), and got the lowest Celeron chip for the new motherboard I could get, with intent to upgrade later. With the old Radeon card it played no better than my "potato" laptop. (3yr old i5 Inspirion with Nvidia 4200M/2GB graphics, still good performance for a biz laptop!) Then I got a GTX 750Ti/1.5GB (followed quickly by a beefier power supply!) and it plays quite decently now.

 

Should be pointed out too, the game has not been optimized yet either. It was addressed in the recent Telethon and during the Q1 2016 schedule that the developers would be focusing towards the game's performance as they move forward with releases. Right now, the game does suffer some serious performance issues on older machines, but I'm hoping they find a good middle ground.

 

Well yeah, they have at least 6 months of bug fixing ALONE, never mind polish, optimization, pledge lot placement space (800+), custom family crest mechanic implementation, make your own NPC implementation, story line, combat UI, animations, particle effects, models, textures, pathfinding, lighting, avatar customization, tuning/balance of glyphs / innates / advancement / enchantment, crafting recipes for equipment + all other items, to say nothing of simply continuing to finish existing systems, plus add new ones continuously.
About the only thing possibly ready for release might be housing, because it's the only thing they've worked on in ~every build for 2+ years.
Oh yeah, and depending on how crazy they are, simply allowing sufficient time not to tick off over half of the pledgers, it may take weeks or months to just permit pledge lot placement to proceed, all the while preventing lot placement to the non-pledgers in NPC owned towns. Good times ahead!

 

I found very interesting the answer that Chris gave regarding when the final wipe would occur. He stated that he got asked it a lot during an AMA on IRC and that he gave the same answer to everyone: he now knows the date of the final wipe. RG thought it was a great answer (and it is, from developer standpoint).

 

Anyway, about the game performance. It plays well with my GTX660. I've got an i5 with 32GB of Ram. In few weeks I'll have a 960 so I'll tell you later the difference I'll find in frames.

 

The sooner they release the better. The game still needs work, but they have 4 more episodes. Software is never complete. As soon as the final wipe comes, people will start playing. That alone will drive sales. They can and will keep working on it beyond the release date.

 

I rather they work on Combat and sound effects, and not push it to release till at least they fix this,,,, COMBAT as is, is boring .... and far from fun .... Sound effects needs to be put in ...Can't enjoy a game where combat puts me to sleep ....