Once you have it running, click "edit list" in the top right. Search and add the path to the game executable. Hit okay. Back at the main window check "Force Warp". Set the feature level limit to whatever version of DirectX your card fully supports.
You'll need a pretty decent CPU to do it though, if I recall. I did it with a business class laptop that just didn't have a video card worth a crap.
Good luck. Been a while since I've done it. If it doesn't work then there's no way around it. Or I gave bad directions. Return to pitchforks and torches
you guys really should understand what give support really means.
my gamming pc I still run a win 7, not willing to use a win 10 too much garbage on that "free" system,and will only change if I want really hard to play a new game then won't support win 7(with I can change mod and the hell with it).
but still the problem here is a old game who was running ok with dx10 can't do it anymore for lazyness of the company, but hey if you think eso is so sucessfull they can bleed even more players, go ahead be a prick and defend a company who are just being lazy and kicking they own player base out
LOL It's not lazy, it's moving forward. If you want to stay behind, that is your problem.
If the company had said minimum spec DX9 or DX10 you could bash the company. They didn't they said DX11.
Were they to lazy to make sure that people who couldn't read shouldn't have been able to run the game at all? Pretty well established that people should check the minimum specs so no.
Lazy that they didn't enforce DX11 from day 1 and reaped potential gains earlier to the benefit of all compliant players? Maybe.
(And as far as Windows goes hope you are looing forward to an unsupported Win7 operating system but don't blame MS downstream.)
lol you guys really should stop saying thing like you really understand what you guys are talking, and in case you still are not aware more or less 30% of computer in the world still use win XP.
just curious, how many of those XP machines do you think are used for gaming?
No different then Microsoft cutting support for different OS versions.
People need to keep their PC's updated... DX9 was the XP verision of Direct X...
It is not an opinion that support for DX9 stopped years ago...
I have to agree. It is the curse and the boon of PCs that time marches on and renders your awesome PC eventually incapable. That having been said it would piss me off to no end if a game I loved suddenly had a 300+dollar (?) expansion.
MMORPG players are often like Hobbits: They don't like Adventures
just for reference and I know its not the sum but on Steam its not very popular. The numbers of active players on steam in ESO is often rather low
Right now ESO has 2.4k average players per month,
not sure I follow...7 days to die which is an indie early access titles has more than that many players pretty much all the time.
That's because 7 Days to Die is a better game...
Good publicity for the indie game! As far as ESO goes though maybe - just maybe - it could have something to do with not launching on Steam; still having a sub when it did release on Steam and not being at all pushed on Steam when the game changed to b2p on consoles. And ESO is on consoles as well of course (although Steam is on Android).
I'm in support of this change, especially if support for earlier versions has been hindering performance or other changes.
One of the greatest disservices WOW did to the genre was to establish the precedence for MMORPGs to run on PCs with low performance graphic cards so the "masses" could play.
Prior to that you generally had to buy one of the higher end cards every time a new one came out, just how things were done in the early days.
I remember how this market trend change caught Brad McQuaid by surprise before Vanguards launch.
He said in an interview they coded for the next gen of video hardware, only to be surprised when they launched the playerbase no longer had nor were willing to upgrade to play his game.
The mass market had spoken, and while catering to them proved to make more money, it did not make for better MMORPGs, quite the contrary, its been holding them back ever since.
To play what? UO? EQ?
DAOC? Lineage? Uhhh AO?
No before wow you could run a mmorpg on a 16 meg card with roughly 256 megs of ram.
Facts are mmo's have only ever been "network" dependant and that stuff went away with broadband. I still remember the week i got broadband going from 56k in EQ and UO.
you guys really should understand what give support really means.
my gamming pc I still run a win 7, not willing to use a win 10 too much garbage on that "free" system,and will only change if I want really hard to play a new game then won't support win 7(with I can change mod and the hell with it).
but still the problem here is a old game who was running ok with dx10 can't do it anymore for lazyness of the company, but hey if you think eso is so sucessfull they can bleed even more players, go ahead be a prick and defend a company who are just being lazy and kicking they own player base out
LOL It's not lazy, it's moving forward. If you want to stay behind, that is your problem.
If the company had said minimum spec DX9 or DX10 you could bash the company. They didn't they said DX11.
Were they to lazy to make sure that people who couldn't read shouldn't have been able to run the game at all? Pretty well established that people should check the minimum specs so no.
Lazy that they didn't enforce DX11 from day 1 and reaped potential gains earlier to the benefit of all compliant players? Maybe.
(And as far as Windows goes hope you are looing forward to an unsupported Win7 operating system but don't blame MS downstream.)
lol you guys really should stop saying thing like you really understand what you guys are talking, and in case you still are not aware more or less 30% of computer in the world still use win XP.
just curious, how many of those XP machines do you think are used for gaming?
Not sure how many XP machines are used for gaming, but there are the same number of them as there are Win 10 machines, thing is, in terms of gaming, neither XP nor Win 10 is really all that relevant, which is why ESO now only supports Dx11, which is the version you get with both Win 7 and Win 8, which are currently the most used OS's out there, so perhaps it should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that Win 7/8 are the OS's that ESO now supports by their choice of using Dx11, it is after all, all about the numbers.
I'm in support of this change, especially if support for earlier versions has been hindering performance or other changes.
One of the greatest disservices WOW did to the genre was to establish the precedence for MMORPGs to run on PCs with low performance graphic cards so the "masses" could play.
Prior to that you generally had to buy one of the higher end cards every time a new one came out, just how things were done in the early days.
I remember how this market trend change caught Brad McQuaid by surprise before Vanguards launch.
He said in an interview they coded for the next gen of video hardware, only to be surprised when they launched the playerbase no longer had nor were willing to upgrade to play his game.
The mass market had spoken, and while catering to them proved to make more money, it did not make for better MMORPGs, quite the contrary, its been holding them back ever since.
To play what? UO? EQ?
DAOC? Lineage? Uhhh AO?
No before wow you could run a mmorpg on a 16 meg card with roughly 256 megs of ram.
Facts are mmo's have only ever been "network" dependant and that stuff went away with broadband. I still remember the week i got broadband going from 56k in EQ and UO.
I was a god before the unbroadband masses.
Point is. No.
??? TESO was developed for the mass market in the sense that the minimum spec was years old when the game came out not bleeding edge.
As for graphics not being a factor - today yeah but for games like UO, EQ, AC, AO ... of course a 16Meg graphics card in 1999 was bleeding edge!
Didn't they say that DX9 is now not usable and DX10 is not "supported"? Doesn't that mean you can still play with DX10 but will get no tech support etc? Maybe I am reading too much into that wording.
Hi. No, DX10 is no longer usable.
The confusion, and resultant annoyance for some, appears to have been caused by having the latest patch running ok on the PTS with DX10.
They ran the Thieves Guild patch for some time on the PTS, and of course players tried it - found they could play it - and subsequently bought it.
But when this was ported over to the full servers, it was accompanied by the DX10 removal, which means that players cannot play any part of the game, never mind the latest expansion. For them the game crashes on launch.
Ironically they can still play the game with the latest expansion on the PTS, which really should have reflected what was going live to avoid the resultant player confusion.
People are rightly asking - What is the point of a test server if it doesn't accurately reflect the product before launch?
Got a couple of friends that run linux machines. They simply refuse to install windows. They cant log in either. The emulator used openGL before and now that backdoor have been closed. That's how it was explained to me as far as i recall. Hoping he can figure out how to make it work.
Hardware and Software become outdated and unsupported over time whether you're talking about pc or consoles... no difference.
No, big difference. For one, you're being completely unreasonable - ESO isn't available for the PS3. However, IIRC, FFXIV is available for the PS3 so it's possible to have a console port across platforms and console generations. The developers can do this by utilizing graphics settings and textures that deliver consistent performance...
The PS3 was released in November 2006. The PS4 was released in November 2014.
That's 7 years for one console lifecycle. This is why Consoles are popular. In the time of one console lifecycle, someone playing PC games, even on a casual level will likely have had to do at least 1 full PC upgrade and probably 1 Video Card upgrade on each full PC - assuming the PC was fairly powerful to begin with. The average cost of a decent gaming PC (only decent, say a solid 30FPS @ 1080p with Balanced settings) for modern games is probably twice the cost of a Console or more. The overall cost of PC gaming is simply higher, and given the standardized specs, it's a lot more attractive to people who don't want to waste money. That's why people like them.
How many of us bought games like EQ2, Vanguard, Age of Conan, Warhammer, Aion, whatever etc. only to discover we just spend $39-59 on a game that runs like poop on our PC for whatever reason? How much many have we wasted on junk purchases like that over the years? That's something you never have to worry about with a console. They're very consumer friendly due to their long lifecycle these days, and reliable, predictable performance output.
No, the graphics won't be as great as a tricked out gaming PC, but many players probably don't have that amount of cash to invest in that kind of computer, anyways...
I'm in support of this change, especially if support for earlier versions has been hindering performance or other changes.
One of the greatest disservices WOW did to the genre was to establish the precedence for MMORPGs to run on PCs with low performance graphic cards so the "masses" could play.
Prior to that you generally had to buy one of the higher end cards every time a new one came out, just how things were done in the early days.
I remember how this market trend change caught Brad McQuaid by surprise before Vanguards launch.
He said in an interview they coded for the next gen of video hardware, only to be surprised when they launched the playerbase no longer had nor were willing to upgrade to play his game.
The mass market had spoken, and while catering to them proved to make more money, it did not make for better MMORPGs, quite the contrary, its been holding them back ever since.
To play what? UO? EQ?
DAOC? Lineage? Uhhh AO?
No before wow you could run a mmorpg on a 16 meg card with roughly 256 megs of ram.
Facts are mmo's have only ever been "network" dependant and that stuff went away with broadband. I still remember the week i got broadband going from 56k in EQ and UO.
I was a god before the unbroadband masses.
Point is. No.
??? TESO was developed for the mass market in the sense that the minimum spec was years old when the game came out not bleeding edge.
As for graphics not being a factor - today yeah but for games like UO, EQ, AC, AO ... of course a 16Meg graphics card in 1999 was bleeding edge!
Games like EQ were more CPU bound than GPU bound, because all of the speed gains back then were coming from CPU tech. Clock speeds were increasing like crazy, and we were still using single-core machines. So you didn't actually need a great GPU to play the game - an integrated GPU in a P4 was good enough to play EQ and raid, as long as your had a decent CPU in the machine.
Additionally, EQ2 was the anti-WoW when it came to system requirements. While WoW could run on anything decent back then, EQ2 required massive system requirements to run decently. Look how that turned out? People simply uninstalled EQ2 and went to WoW instead.
You didn't need a great GPU to play EverQuest, period. They wouldn't have gotten to 450k players by 2004 if it required a $3-500 processor upgrade for decent performance. The MMORPG market is fairly casual despite the elitism you may see on these forums. It simply would have been unacceptable.
Accessibility matters.
The graphics engines for EQ and EQ2 were highly tuned to assume single core clock speeds would continue to increase steadily, but around 2004 or so they stagnated and then the market started moving to dual core CPUs. This is why EQ2 has so many performance issues. No matter how great your GPU is, if your CPU cannot handle the load, the game will perform like ass.
WoW is much better optimized, and they have kept their engine up to date. The game supports DirectX 11. They're probably going to move to DX12 in the future. They have a Metal client in the works for OS X (Legion). They are optimized for Multi-Core and 64-Bit.
WoW doesn't run on anything JUST because it has low system requirements. if you want to run the game on Ultra, you aren't going to get close to that on budget equipment an it actually looks really good there. It's also because the client has been well developed and well maintained. The fact that iGPUs have massively improved doesn't matter to EQ or EQ2 because they still overtax the CPU. But, for WoW, this does matter as the game makes better use of that GPU. This allows people to get better performance out of lower specs in that game, compared to some others.
WoW didn't ruin the MMORPG market with low system requirements, Blizzard just developed better software than their competitors. Also, because Blizzard is so big, they didn't have to sell out to Nvidia or ATI/AMD by utilizing tech in their game that would raise the system requirements without good reason, the way many startups do because they are desperate for the funding - resulting in games that won't run on half the systems that run WoW without issues.
??? TESO was developed for the mass market in the sense that the minimum spec was years old when the game came out not bleeding edge.
As for graphics not being a factor - today yeah but for games like UO, EQ, AC, AO ... of course a 16Meg graphics card in 1999 was bleeding edge!
A 16MB graphics card in 2000 was not bleeding edge. It was a cheap upgrade.
Note 1999 not 2000.
One of the "big cards" of the time was the Rage 128; launched in 1998 with either 8Mb or 32Mb. In 1999 they released upgraded versions of the Rage 128 with 16Mb or 32Mb. Needless to say the 32Mb versions were very expensive (and towards the end of 1999 a 64Mb version even more so). Suffice to say those 16Mb cards - in 1999 - were the new kids on the block and were not cheap.
AMD did not release any new cards in 2000 - what you could buy were the cards released in 1999. (Imagine going 16 months today without releasing a new card). Consequently this - very popular card - became cheaper as the price fell. And in early 2001 when AMD released the first Radeon's released shops started to sell them off "cheaply". Although by todays standards it still wasn't a "cheap" upgrade.
Hardware and Software become outdated and unsupported over time whether you're talking about pc or consoles... no difference.
1) " it's a lot more attractive to people who don't want to waste money. That's why people like them."
2) That's something you never have to worry about with a console. They're very consumer friendly due to their long lifecycle these days, and reliable, predictable performance output.
1) Youre assuming its a 'waste'. Many would disagree. 2) OMG. Youre right. Every single game ever made for console has run perfectly, with zero technical issues, fps are rock solid.
??? TESO was developed for the mass market in the sense that the minimum spec was years old when the game came out not bleeding edge.
As for graphics not being a factor - today yeah but for games like UO, EQ, AC, AO ... of course a 16Meg graphics card in 1999 was bleeding edge!
A 16MB graphics card in 2000 was not bleeding edge. It was a cheap upgrade.
Note 1999 not 2000.
One of the "big cards" of the time was the Rage 128; launched in 1998 with either 8Mb or 32Mb. In 1999 they released upgraded versions of the Rage 128 with 16Mb or 32Mb. Needless to say the 32Mb versions were very expensive (and towards the end of 1999 a 64Mb version even more so). Suffice to say those 16Mb cards - in 1999 - were the new kids on the block and were not cheap.
AMD did not release any new cards in 2000 - what you could buy were the cards released in 1999. (Imagine going 16 months today without releasing a new card). Consequently this - very popular card - became cheaper as the price fell. Although by todays standards it still wasn't a "cheap" upgrade.
I edited my post, but it doesn't matter since a 2000 card wasn't massively better than a 1999 card and a lot of games were not optimized for those cards as the APIs were largely proprietary back then, anyways, and the expense involved.
Additionally, no game developers were releasing games with system requirements at that level because it would put the games out of reach for the vast majority of consumers.
Games back then were CPU-limited, not GPU limited. Many of them didn't even allow you to run at higher resolutions. The textures were intentionally low resolution to facilitate this as well.
This is why EQ performs poorly even on newer mid-range machines with good integrated graphics (integrated graphics that would completely embarrass the cards at the top of the market back then) while games like WoW perform fine on the same hardware, despite having clearly better graphics. WoW makes better use of the hardware than EQ did.
EQ - and EQ2 - brute force so much in software. EQ did it because of the market back then. EQ2 did it because the developers were clearly *not* paying attention back then (and and/or clearly not communicating with Processor Vendors like Intel and AMD), while Blizzard clearly was.
Also, there were a lot more GPU vendors out there than there are today... So, yes, you could find a cheap 16MB graphics card.
These days we only have Nvidia and AMD (Intel only makes iGPUs).
Back then there was Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, 3dfx, S3, etc.
But anyways, such a card was completely unnecessary for EQ. I know, from experience.
SOE did update EQ's graphics engine later on (around mid-2004) for DX9, which did raise its system requirements, but by then no one was using those old graphics cards, as they were supplanted by integrated graphics. And by then, budget graphics cards for PCs were already quite cheap, anyways. Processors were probably 4-6x more powerful in 2004 as they were in 2000, anyways.
when it comes to anything that matters in this conversation I dont think 7DTD not being an MMO is going to help ESO much...lol
what are we talking about here? how many players are on ESO? do you think simply saying 7days to die is helpful in any way to the case of ESO or even MMOs in general?
Or are you trying to suggest that MMOs in general are already well known to be marginal which is why its unfair to compare the population to single players because there are much more single players players then MMO players? dosent exactly help ESO much that....lol
besides..given that 7days has a multiplayer aspect which is a persistent world we would have to vet it thru ubisoft but I think it qualifies as an MMO
How many people are buying 7Days outside of steam? That's the bigger question, it's like comparing numbers from Team Fortress to ESO, Steam is their main customer base...
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Its the way ZoS did it that's the problem. They aren't very good at customer service and making sure all customers know what is going on. One thing they could of done the first month the game came out was update the launcher so they could keep people updated on what was going on in and out of game.
Heck they had that whole transfer from PC to Console episode by not informing players of what they had to do. ZoS blamed it on customers for not checking a box when they signed up so they would get an email about it. Yet I even made a thread back then about updating the launcher so we could read any news and be updated about what was going on. That by the way got me a warning and ignored after.
There is other examples I could write about but lets just skip right to the contest they had. It was like pulling teeth to get any comments about the contest after Feb. 1st and then after Feb 22nd. As of now we do know the big winner but nothing about the 1000 people that received the 3000 crowns. We don't really need names but it is strange not one person has posted about getting them.
This has nothing to do with people that do not have a DX11 video card and yes you can say they should have updated a long time ago. It is all about how ZoS keeps the customers base informed. For a good 9 to 12 months that should have been on the launcher to let people have time to update. Yet there is one place ZoS does very well and that is having popup's in game to buy the next big thing in the crown store. That seems to be the only thing they care about when it comes to the customer. Which is also why the game isn't doing the greatest and why a lot of us that held out hope the game and support would get better have finally called it a day.
I have adopted the ZoS style and do not care about them as much as they care about me and the rest of the customers.
AMD did not release any new cards in 2000 - what you could buy were the cards released in 1999. (Imagine going 16 months today without releasing a new card). Consequently this - very popular card - became cheaper as the price fell. And in early 2001 when AMD released the first Radeon's released shops started to sell them off "cheaply". Although by todays standards it still wasn't a "cheap" upgrade.
AMD didn't release any new video cards in 1999 or 2001, either. AMD didn't buy ATI until 2006, which was their entry into the graphics market.
Comments
~~ postlarval ~~
Run dxcpl. If you don't have it, you can download in the windows8 dev sdk here: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/downloads/windows-8-sdk
Once you have it running, click "edit list" in the top right. Search and add the path to the game executable. Hit okay. Back at the main window check "Force Warp". Set the feature level limit to whatever version of DirectX your card fully supports.
You'll need a pretty decent CPU to do it though, if I recall. I did it with a business class laptop that just didn't have a video card worth a crap.
Good luck. Been a while since I've done it. If it doesn't work then there's no way around it. Or I gave bad directions. Return to pitchforks and torches
Hardware and Software become outdated and unsupported over time whether you're talking about pc or consoles... no difference.
Good publicity for the indie game! As far as ESO goes though maybe - just maybe - it could have something to do with not launching on Steam; still having a sub when it did release on Steam and not being at all pushed on Steam when the game changed to b2p on consoles. And ESO is on consoles as well of course (although Steam is on Android).
DAOC? Lineage? Uhhh AO?
No before wow you could run a mmorpg on a 16 meg card with roughly 256 megs of ram.
Facts are mmo's have only ever been "network" dependant and that stuff went away with broadband.
I still remember the week i got broadband going from 56k in EQ and UO.
I was a god before the unbroadband masses.
Point is. No.
TESO was developed for the mass market in the sense that the minimum spec was years old when the game came out not bleeding edge.
As for graphics not being a factor - today yeah but for games like UO, EQ, AC, AO ... of course a 16Meg graphics card in 1999 was bleeding edge!
No, DX10 is no longer usable.
The confusion, and resultant annoyance for some, appears to have been caused by having the latest patch running ok on the PTS with DX10.
They ran the Thieves Guild patch for some time on the PTS, and of course players tried it - found they could play it - and subsequently bought it.
But when this was ported over to the full servers, it was accompanied by the DX10 removal, which means that players cannot play any part of the game, never mind the latest expansion. For them the game crashes on launch.
Ironically they can still play the game with the latest expansion on the PTS, which really should have reflected what was going live to avoid the resultant player confusion.
People are rightly asking - What is the point of a test server if it doesn't accurately reflect the product before launch?
The PS3 was released in November 2006. The PS4 was released in November 2014.
That's 7 years for one console lifecycle. This is why Consoles are popular. In the time of one console lifecycle, someone playing PC games, even on a casual level will likely have had to do at least 1 full PC upgrade and probably 1 Video Card upgrade on each full PC - assuming the PC was fairly powerful to begin with. The average cost of a decent gaming PC (only decent, say a solid 30FPS @ 1080p with Balanced settings) for modern games is probably twice the cost of a Console or more. The overall cost of PC gaming is simply higher, and given the standardized specs, it's a lot more attractive to people who don't want to waste money. That's why people like them.
How many of us bought games like EQ2, Vanguard, Age of Conan, Warhammer, Aion, whatever etc. only to discover we just spend $39-59 on a game that runs like poop on our PC for whatever reason? How much many have we wasted on junk purchases like that over the years? That's something you never have to worry about with a console. They're very consumer friendly due to their long lifecycle these days, and reliable, predictable performance output.
No, the graphics won't be as great as a tricked out gaming PC, but many players probably don't have that amount of cash to invest in that kind of computer, anyways...
Additionally, EQ2 was the anti-WoW when it came to system requirements. While WoW could run on anything decent back then, EQ2 required massive system requirements to run decently. Look how that turned out? People simply uninstalled EQ2 and went to WoW instead.
You didn't need a great GPU to play EverQuest, period. They wouldn't have gotten to 450k players by 2004 if it required a $3-500 processor upgrade for decent performance. The MMORPG market is fairly casual despite the elitism you may see on these forums. It simply would have been unacceptable.
Accessibility matters.
The graphics engines for EQ and EQ2 were highly tuned to assume single core clock speeds would continue to increase steadily, but around 2004 or so they stagnated and then the market started moving to dual core CPUs. This is why EQ2 has so many performance issues. No matter how great your GPU is, if your CPU cannot handle the load, the game will perform like ass.
WoW is much better optimized, and they have kept their engine up to date. The game supports DirectX 11. They're probably going to move to DX12 in the future. They have a Metal client in the works for OS X (Legion). They are optimized for Multi-Core and 64-Bit.
WoW doesn't run on anything JUST because it has low system requirements. if you want to run the game on Ultra, you aren't going to get close to that on budget equipment an it actually looks really good there. It's also because the client has been well developed and well maintained. The fact that iGPUs have massively improved doesn't matter to EQ or EQ2 because they still overtax the CPU. But, for WoW, this does matter as the game makes better use of that GPU. This allows people to get better performance out of lower specs in that game, compared to some others.
WoW didn't ruin the MMORPG market with low system requirements, Blizzard just developed better software than their competitors. Also, because Blizzard is so big, they didn't have to sell out to Nvidia or ATI/AMD by utilizing tech in their game that would raise the system requirements without good reason, the way many startups do because they are desperate for the funding - resulting in games that won't run on half the systems that run WoW without issues.
One of the "big cards" of the time was the Rage 128; launched in 1998 with either 8Mb or 32Mb. In 1999 they released upgraded versions of the Rage 128 with 16Mb or 32Mb. Needless to say the 32Mb versions were very expensive (and towards the end of 1999 a 64Mb version even more so). Suffice to say those 16Mb cards - in 1999 - were the new kids on the block and were not cheap.
AMD did not release any new cards in 2000 - what you could buy were the cards released in 1999. (Imagine going 16 months today without releasing a new card). Consequently this - very popular card - became cheaper as the price fell. And in early 2001 when AMD released the first Radeon's released shops started to sell them off "cheaply". Although by todays standards it still wasn't a "cheap" upgrade.
(I agree with your post though.)
2) OMG. Youre right. Every single game ever made for console has run perfectly, with zero technical issues, fps are rock solid.
Additionally, no game developers were releasing games with system requirements at that level because it would put the games out of reach for the vast majority of consumers.
Games back then were CPU-limited, not GPU limited. Many of them didn't even allow you to run at higher resolutions. The textures were intentionally low resolution to facilitate this as well.
This is why EQ performs poorly even on newer mid-range machines with good integrated graphics (integrated graphics that would completely embarrass the cards at the top of the market back then) while games like WoW perform fine on the same hardware, despite having clearly better graphics. WoW makes better use of the hardware than EQ did.
EQ - and EQ2 - brute force so much in software. EQ did it because of the market back then. EQ2 did it because the developers were clearly *not* paying attention back then (and and/or clearly not communicating with Processor Vendors like Intel and AMD), while Blizzard clearly was.
Also, there were a lot more GPU vendors out there than there are today... So, yes, you could find a cheap 16MB graphics card.
These days we only have Nvidia and AMD (Intel only makes iGPUs).
Back then there was Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, 3dfx, S3, etc.
But anyways, such a card was completely unnecessary for EQ. I know, from experience.
SOE did update EQ's graphics engine later on (around mid-2004) for DX9, which did raise its system requirements, but by then no one was using those old graphics cards, as they were supplanted by integrated graphics. And by then, budget graphics cards for PCs were already quite cheap, anyways. Processors were probably 4-6x more powerful in 2004 as they were in 2000, anyways.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Heck they had that whole transfer from PC to Console episode by not informing players of what they had to do. ZoS blamed it on customers for not checking a box when they signed up so they would get an email about it. Yet I even made a thread back then about updating the launcher so we could read any news and be updated about what was going on. That by the way got me a warning and ignored after.
There is other examples I could write about but lets just skip right to the contest they had. It was like pulling teeth to get any comments about the contest after Feb. 1st and then after Feb 22nd. As of now we do know the big winner but nothing about the 1000 people that received the 3000 crowns. We don't really need names but it is strange not one person has posted about getting them.
This has nothing to do with people that do not have a DX11 video card and yes you can say they should have updated a long time ago. It is all about how ZoS keeps the customers base informed. For a good 9 to 12 months that should have been on the launcher to let people have time to update. Yet there is one place ZoS does very well and that is having popup's in game to buy the next big thing in the crown store. That seems to be the only thing they care about when it comes to the customer. Which is also why the game isn't doing the greatest and why a lot of us that held out hope the game and support would get better have finally called it a day.
I have adopted the ZoS style and do not care about them as much as they care about me and the rest of the customers.
Star Citizen – The Extinction Level Event
4/13/15 > ELE has been updated look for 16-04-13.
http://www.dereksmart.org/2016/04/star-citizen-the-ele/
Enjoy and know the truth always comes to light!