I'm looking for a game to play on my pc. I'm a big console gamer so I probably already own the multiplatform games on a console. Unfortunately as a dedicated console gamer I don't own a high end rig.

My computer only has:
Intel Core i5-2400S (2.5 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.3 GHz, 6 MB cache)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M (1 GB)
1 TB 7200 rpm Serial ATA
6 GB DDR3 SDRAM
Win 7 64 bit

I really don't know whats out there on the pc front. Although I'm kind of interested in an mmo since I've never really played one.

I have been playing with Tera. It seems to almost work on my pc. Though there is some lag issues. So my character kind of stutters as it moves. Its harder to control and gives me a headache after a while. But I'm not finding the game that interesting anyway, so that doesn't really matter.

Anyone got any recommendations? Is there even anything decent that can run on my system?

for a mmo
these are the requirements for Guild Wars 2
it's not a bad choice if you are new to mmo since is a Buy to Play so no subscription fee is required


Windows® XP Service Pack 2 or better
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Core i3, AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 or better
NVIDIA® GeForce® 7800, ATI Radeon™ X1800, Intel HD 3000 or better (256MB of video RAM and shader model 3.0 or better)
25 GB available HDD space
Broadband Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse

TF2 is where I lived for years. I still jump in occasionally. I have been playing more and more indy titles lately. Bastion is the current one. Super Meat Boy and Renegade Ops before that.

Is there a demo for gw2? Or some kind of pc test?

There is a forum post at guildwars2guru saying my video card won't run the game. But thats from before release.

My wife has a six-core high-end machine with one of the most expensive video cards out there... and Tera still lags. It's just how Tera is. What you describe in your system should run most things just fine - but laggy games will be laggy regardless of what's on your end.

And according to guildwarsinsider my pc would run it. This is what I loath about pc gaming. There are so many options for the pc no one is ever sure you can run something before you buy it.

Highly recommend this site as well.
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/intro.aspx

Yeah, that says I can run it. Although I still want to find a demo. Tera could run on my pc too. But not smoothly enough to count as running to me. I was willing to take a chance on Tera because it was onsale for $8. I'm not gambling $60 on something that might not even work right, let alone might not be any good.

Well, I played the beta and while its no guarantee YOU will like it, I highly recommend GW2. The took all the good bits of the original and most of the good bits of WoW and WAR and made a game out of it while adding a single player plot.

I'll offer my endorsement of Guild Wars 2 also. It's been a great game so far. Even though I got in on the 3 day head start, I still haven't logged a ton of hours but that is due to a hectic schedule with minimal time for gaming. I have however been sucked into playing after I'm done with other stuff and am currently on my third straight day of work with 3 hours or less of sleep as a result.

The event system (replaces quests) is fantastic never requiring you to stop and read huge piles of text that you may not care about. Approach an area, get a quick line about what you need to do with a progress bar. Event rewards are automatically sent to you.

Crafting (something I rarely enjoy in games) is fun and easy to get into, with resource nodes being instanced for each character (though in the same spot for all) and scattered throughout the zones. So as long as you have the tools on you you just run up and grab them while doing your normal adventuring.

Exploring new areas is a significant source of XP early on. Finding "Points of Interest" and getting up to "Vistas" are all that is required. Vistas are nice as they typically require a bit of platforming to get to, then once there you select View and you get a nice panoramic view of the surrounding landscape, the graphics and design of which are quite good.

I also play EVE, I can send you a 21 day invite if you're interested. If you buy a month I get a free month or a load of ingame cash. The game isn't for everyone but I do enjoy it. It is effectively PvP everywhere (though some areas are "almost" safe) and pretty complex and indepth. Personally I enjoy it greatly, but with Guild Wars 2 release (and being subscription free) I will probably let my EVE subscription lapse for a few months at least. EVE is about 15 bucks a month for the subscription (less if you buy multiple months IIRC) and the game itself is like 20 I think if you decide to keep it going after the trial.

Eve sounds really interesting. But in ways I don't think I'd really play with. A real player based economy is cool, but I'm not looking to run my own corporation. And my computer just barely passes the min requirements for it. Still there is a demo so I may give it a whorl.

I'm really tempted to grab guild wars 2. That systemsrequirements site seems to think my computer passes the min requirements by a fair bit. And whats been said about it helps alleviate my biggest concerns about it.

I tried Tera, and played the guild wars 1 demo (very briefly), and both seemed very basic. Nothing to really explore. You basically walked around until someone asked you to kill so many of whatever monster was close by. Then walk down the round down the road a little bit and do the exact same thing again. They quickly bored me.

And yet I really like sandbox games like sykrim, two worlds, even divinity 2. I played them for a really long time. I don't know what was really different about them, except there was a lot of benefits to just wonder around exploring.

I'm just trying to decide what I want to get in to. The triple A console game season is just about to start. Unfortunately the pickings are kind of slim this year. I'm only interested in like 6 of them and I finish playing them a couple day to maybe 2 weeks. So there isn't much there considering their releases are spread from now until new years.

If you want to try EVE just give me an email (post it here or PM me) and I'll send you the 21 day trial. The player run economy is pretty cool, it's not quite 100% because you can still get usable equipment drops off NPC enemies but if you don't want that drop, it's a player who will buy it (or you can reprocess it for raw materials). Personally I don't generally enjoy crafting, so I'm not into that aspect of it, but you can make a killing in speculative buying, or just moving stuff from one region to another in a hauler. After the latest major patch some previously inferior ships were getting reworked to fit a role, I didn't have much time but I managed to scoop up 10. One type sells for 10 times what I bought it for and the others tripled. At least they did last I checked, I bought them because I liked the new stats and figured I could buy them for less and get the full use out of them after the patch.

Honestly, I can't say enough good about Guild Wars 2. There is some bad, I've had to work my last four 12 hour shifts with 3-4 hours of sleep. (Un?)Fortunately my wife is back from visiting family soon so I won't be able to keep doing that to myself. It is a shame that there's no way to demo it, but the feel is much different than the "Kill 15 of these" that has been the standard of MMOs for a while now. Even if the quest itself is basically "Kill this till you fill up your bar" there are usually other options, set captives free, repair defenses, revive injured NPCs, etc.

It's the dynamic events that really shine for me though. I was in one last night (ended up playing it multiple times) where an outpost had been overrun, any players who are in the area who choose to help, fight and retake the outpost which reopened the Waypoint (teleport stone). Not 15 minutes later, the outpost was under attack again and if you don't defeat the waves they'll kill all the NPC fighters eventually and the outpost will go back to enemy hands which is why we had to assault it in the first place. The event came up, and no one responded (or at least not enough) and the outpost fell.

Eventually this are supposed to springboard into map changing occurances, I'm not sure if that's been implemented yet. Essentially, the Nightmare Cult that was attacking the outpost would use it as a beach head if they hold it for long enough. Then they'll start attacking other areas near by where they'll continue to spread over time removing NPCs from the area until they are successfully driven off. That is the bar that will really set GW2 apart from the rest. If they can pull of a fluid changing world based off player actions/reactions...that's the stuff of gaming legends to me.

p.s. don't forget to come back and tell us your choices and feedback!^^

I bought guild wars 2. Frustratingly, it out of stock in store so I'm waiting for it to be shipped. I would just have bought the download version. But its the same price. I prefer having actual disks, so I don't buy digital unless its cheaper (thank you steam sales!).

One thing that concerns me is this review of the game someone posted:

"Great game ruined by poor support
1
Posted by: SadOldGamer from Orlando on 08/31/2012Guild Wars 2 is a great game. One of the best made in many years in my opinion. So why the 1-star? Bad programming on their part led to many bans due to improper pricing on npc items by the game company themselves. I pre-ordered this game and played in the last beta and had a great time. There is a VAST amount of things to do and learn in the game though and I never was able to test it all out after playing it for many, many hours over the beta weekend. I started playing on the 25th of August, during the early access given to players who pre-purchased the game. So in 6 days, I finally hit level 29 today, from 26. Some people in my guild were already level 80, so that kind of explains my knowledge of the game's mechanics and fast leveling abilities. I spent most of my time trying to do all the map objectives, which is a series to finding locations and solving puzzles. I was taking my time and enjoying the game slowly since in pvp areas the game automatically adjusts you to the max level of 80. Today, however, there was an issue with an npc sellling level 60 karma items for very cheap. I didn't know it was very cheap because I had never purchased anything from the karma vendors (karma is a kind of currency earned during pvp. When I heard that a vendor had really cheap prices and they didn't know how long it would last, I mistakenly thought it was special event. I thought they were consumable items that gave you a CHANCE to get a level 80 exotic (game's top tier) so I grabbed a bunch of these lower level 60 weapons and went to the forge in the mist where you combine 4 of them for a chance at one of these higher pieces. I failed time and time again. It was almost like a slot-machine or a lottery ticket type of experience and I quickly became addicted to trying to get this uber weapon. After trying for an hour and failing, I became peeved that I wasn't getting anything good and it just kind of pushed me to keep going until I at least got something decent. These items were nearly 40-50 levels above my current level, so I couldn't use them, but it was like a game trying to get something good. Since I had failed so much, I assumed that either people were lying about their success or they just played it alot more than I did. I kept trying until an update came and we all got kicked while it updated. The price then went from 21 karma per chance to 21,000 karma per chance. I thought the event was over so I kept trying to get that uber piece with the chances I had already got before it ended. Here's the problem: it wasn't an event. It was a mistake that a programmer or GM made on the price. So THOUSANDS of us got banned for exploiting a game loophole. Later I found out they made a similar mistake the day before only the price was 2,000 karma per weapon. Apparently, buying items at 1/10 the cost isn't cheating and 1/1000 is because no one that bought the cheaper weapons the day before got banned. From what I learned after my ban is that some people did know these prices were not right. I, unfortunately, was not one of them since I had never purchased a karma item up to this point. The game company's reaction was hostility toward the players instead of admitting their mistake and just deleting the items or making the offenders start from scratch so the issues didn't matter. Instead they perma-banned thousands of us. This "exploit" was left up for over 8 hours I'm told and I used it the last 2 hours of that so seeing all these people doing it and the fact that no GM stopped the action, I wrongly assumed this was a sanctioned event. If Best Buy listed items in thieir stores for super cheap, they'd honor the price they posted. My local grocery store does buy one, get one all the time just to get people in the store hoping they make up the difference on other items. I thought this was like that, a thank you for people that pre-purchased the game. I would just like to let ArenaNet know that not all of us knew that what we were doing wasn't okay. It never dawned on me to sell the items to vendors for money or to salvage them for parts. I simply wanted to try and "win" a high-end weapon. I never did. I never benefited from this in any way. Now I have to buy the game again. With no monthly fee it's still worth it, but it's a horrible way to treat customers that were just trying to enjoy their game. As you can tell from my silver membership, I spend alot of money on my electronics to enjoy my hobby. I'm not a cheater or a thief. ArenaNet on the other hand, banned me from the game, essentially stealing my purchase price when they could just easily wipe my account or just take the items I got back. For a game that's been out officially for only 2 days, you'd think they'd want to work with us gamers. After all, we didn't complain when their mail system or auction hall remained non-working the last 3 days! Sincerely, Joe K."

http://www.sharkyforums.com/showthread. ... 2012/page3

I saw a discussion about it at the above link. See page three.

I picked it up today and its been a less than promising start.

First the definite problem. I'm experiencing huge graphic error. My screen has constant flashing of blue. Huge irregular patches of the screen. straight beams of it through the air. A whole bunch of different spots that move and change constantly. Just everywhere. And they flash on and off nonstop.

Potentially that might be fixable. According to the forum there is a beta patch for the video card that fixes some graphics problems. But I'm not installing a beta patch unless tech support tells me specifically to.

My other issue is simply the controls. What is with the camera in pc games? Its driving me crazy trying to manage it by holding down and dragging the mouse. Is it always sluggish or is that my pc? And that your character moves straight where ever the camera points means I'm constantly stop and rotating the camera every few secouns. Its feels so terribly awkward compared to the 2 stick controls you get on the console. I had the same issue on tera with the camera speed but at least I could use a controller on Tera so I could use my normal controls.

Anyone know how I could record a video of the game as I play it?

Download FRAPS. Have not used it to record but that is what its for. Also, you should be able to adjust the mouse speed in the game options. Once you get it tweaked, its three times as accurate as a controller (proven by Halo deathmatches years back).

for the graphic issues...

do you have an nvidia?
when u start the game in the launcher appears a line that tells you the drivers are obsolete or similar?
i STRONGLY suggest to update the drivers it really solved all my graphic issues and pumped the average fps by a whole 10



p.s. if you are accostumed to the controller you can download a free program and use an xbox controller to play...

I turned it on again to record it. And although present still the blue issue wasn't nearly as massive. However that just showed me that there are whole bunch of other graphics errors occurring. The skins on some walls glitch and pixel. The little plants and things appear and disappear and move position. Things turn invisible. And others don't, so a lot of times the camera is totally blocked when walking past a tall plant or something. All of these things flash on and off like the blue issue.



I have nvidia GeForce GT 525m. I have received no error messages of any kind. Where do you go to update drivers?

I went to the nvidia website, picked my card and searched for updates. Their system check tool scanned my computer picked an update which I downloaded and ran. The downloaded update scanned my computer and said I have no qualifying hardware. So what am I supposed to do now?



I don't have a wired 360 controller, I use my ps3 controller on the computer.

Do the manual driver download. Could also not hurt to completely uninstall the old graphic drivers. Depending on age, they could be bogging up the newer drivers.
http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

How do I do a manual install? When I ran the driver I found on the site it said I had no supported hardware and shut itself down.

I tried to contact nvidia and their website told me their support is for people who buy a card directly, not for prebuilt pc that come with one of their cards in them. For that I should contact the manufacturer. Dell's website was no help all. I couldn't find drivers. They kept sending to bios.

Still no reply from Guild wars 2 support.

Try these two links for dell driver support (hope it's ok to post these). The first one is a driver support page. The second one is their system for helping you find the right drivers.

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/ ... cs=04&l=en

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/ ... tSelection

Hope that helps!
Melissa

Actually, I think I just found the driver you need for your card. This is the one that comes up in the search results listing for it.

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/ ... s=04&s=bsd

Is that the right one?
Melissa

I don't know. Its the right card, but my pc isn't one of the models listed under compatibility.

My computer is a dell inspiron one 2320 all in one pc.

This might be it. There are two links below - the first is to a Dell board discussion about video card issues with your system (World of Warcraft is mention in the thread, so I thought it might apply). At the bottom a Dell techie offered the link to the correct driver (the second link here).

http://en.community.dell.com/support-fo ... x#20150353

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/ ... Code=False

The driver description lists your video card, and the compatibility lists your system. But I don't think this is an update, because it says "Initial Release" under Fixes & Enhancements. It probably depends on when you bought your system, as this driver was released 8/19/2011.

Melissa

No, my pc is newer than that, May 2012. And there is nothing wrong with the computer running. It doesn't crash or anything like theirs seems to be doing. Even GW2 doesn't crash, it'll play for as long as I'm willing to ignore the glitches.

Whats a good way to post video? And what format? I figure I might as well post the game play video I made.

I hope you can get the issues resolved, personally I'm still loving the game.

Been a while since I could post so I'll just comment briefly about the bans. As was mentioned in the little bit of the thread that was linked above the bans did not come lightly and the players had the option to go for a 72hr ban. Additionally, while I wasn't online at the time of the glitch (or at least not in the right map) a friend was, and people were calling it out on the map wide chat channel announcing it as a "Vendor Glitch" and encouraging people to take advantage before it was fixed. As such I have no problems with ArenaNet dropping the hammer.

On the controls I can see where you're coming from. "W,A,S,D" are pretty familiar to me as even flash games make use of them. First thing I did was change "A" and "D" to strafe instead of turn moving that to "Q" and "E". There is already an option for swim down, but by default nothing is mapped, I put that on "X". That cleared up the bulk of my problems with the controls, though I am going to look next time I'm on to see if you can adjust the sensitivity of the camera panning when holding down the mouse because it is painfully slow.

I could see playing the game with a mix of a Controller with a little bit of keyboard interaction, but as all I own is a 360 with wireless controllers I'd assume I'd have to buy something new. If that's not the case I'd definitely be giving that a shot.

I HATE the keyboard controls. Anyone done that morgans spiral platforming puzzle? I've tried to complete this thing for at least 3 HOURS. And both times I actually made it to the end I didn't make the LAST jump. I wish they'd let me burn down the freaking tree!!!

What is you get for completing the stupid puzzle? Is it even worth getting?


Is that combat in GW2 similar to the combat in most mmo? Because I don't see him its any different from Tera's combat. And Tera was supposed to be special for the way it did combat.

Guild Wars combat is far more active than most MMOs. You can actually dodge and position plays a part as well. Most MMOs, dodging is entirely left to the behind the scenes numbers and it doesn't matter where you are.

This might make you cry, but chances are...you weren't even near the end yet. If you could still see the spiral where the risen assault from then you were...maybe half way? Once you get all the way around to the top of the tree and across the spiral to a cliff face there is a chest with some green items (potential for some good loot. From there you can take a path deeper into the cliff into a foggy area overrun with the Nightmare Court. You'll probably need a group for this, I can't recall the level of the mobs but with scaling you'll need help even if you're well above it. I was...19 when I tried. Once inside and you've climbed down there are a bunch of Nightmare Court with a few Veterans, plus some poison cloud mortar pods. Clear them out and there is another chest of green items. Then it's back to climbing in jumping for one final chest (and I believe and accomplishment, though I haven't made it.

The killer is that if you've made it part way up, the fall will kill you, and if not the respawned mobs will probably finish the job. So that leaves anyone you're in with the crap option of whether or not they come down to revive you. Remember, if you have to waypoint out you'll have to climb the tree again in the spiral. (These do get easier each time though). Good news is other players are pretty helpful and if they see you downed almost all will happily rez you (they get xp afterall). I went in with one friend in a party and ran into a group of 4 or 5 more inside where we all helped each other out as much as possible.

I still haven't managed it, but I plan on trying again soon. It's fun in a frustrating way that is seldom forced upon us any more in video games. On a side note, about burning down the tree. If the even to defend against the waves of the risen is failed, the tree will actually be corrupted and un-climbable until the event to retake it comes up and is successful.

As for the combat, I haven't played a MMO in ages (Everquest was my last point of reference) but I have watched a few gameplay videos and GW2 seems far more dynamic than the competition. In Everquest and the few others I've played you were frequently still hit even if you moved out of range (at least for one other attack) while with GW2 the dodge feature lets you actually time your movement based on the animation of the mob and completely avoid a potentially devastating attack. I watched some gameplay of the Secret Wars demo and it looked like a snorefest compared to all the action in a GW2 fight.