Please please PLEASE. Give us more than 4 group missions for coins. Remember how great The Broken Mirror and The Darkened Sea were because they offered many options for group tasks???
To be fair, the persona thing is new for EQ. And once we know just what it will be, we can talk about it's value.
More options would be very welcome. What are you referring to as copy/paste? Based on the producer's letter this is not based on on Luclin pt3 or PoP pt2 or 3. From the data mined zone names and maps it appears to be almost all new.
Every single expansion Spell/Equipment wise is the same but more stats more dmg, more healing, more everything.
"DirectX 11 API port goes live" - What is the net result of this for game play and the overall user experience? I continue to wonder why tech jargon like this is presented as though everyone reading such things understands it and somehow knows what the implications are. Why can't it be something like "DirectX 11 API port goes live and what this means for game play is ..."? How hard could it be to find a subject matter expert on the team that can expound on that?
The net result is they move to a DirextX version that is not being removed as a supported version on various graphics cards and cpus. The big issue is that DirectX 9 is really old and vendors are starting to drop support for it and it is being run with virtual support instead.
Essentially DirectX is system level software made by Microsoft that sits between games and hardware, on Microsoft Windows. Think of it as a standard to make things work together, like screwdrivers and screws. If you want your game to work on Windows, you need to work with DirectX. DirectX 9 is going away, it was made in 2002 with support for Windows 98, ME, XP and 2000. DirectX 10 was pretty much for Windows Vista and Vista did not do well. DirectX 11 released with Windows 7. DirectX 12 is the latest but it is very different from 11. In the early PC era you had to make your game work on whatever hardware you wanted it to work on, more difficult as more hardware becomes available and more quickly. When 3D graphics became more important, the complexity of the problem increased even more which usually leads to standards being created. In comes OpenGL then DirectX. For gameplay for EQ, you probably are not going to see much difference up front. The biggest thing is the shift to a different era of software support and cadence of updates. Hardware manufacturers are dropping support for DirectX 9. Microsoft has already dropped support for Windows 7, 8 was so disliked they skipped 9 and made 10. They are on to Windows 11 and Windows 10 reaches end of support in October 2025. Companies like Darkpaw do not have much influence in how software and hardware support works, they either follow along or get left behind so they had to choose a path to continue supporting EQ on modern computers. Basically, you may find it difficult to run EQ if you are not on Windows 10 and keep it up to date. As far as gameplay, we will have to wait and see how it goes as DirectX 11 does open new possibilities. Edit: This is old but interesting summary of how you get to Microsoft/Windows/DirectX being dominate in gaming. https://softwareengineering.stackex...do-game-developers-prefer-windows/88055#88055
Someone posted that Windows 10 only has 3 years left in its life (it will no longer be supported in 2025) so what happens then? I don't see the devs keeping up with each windows update.
Will this persona be available to check out on beta or is it a feature that’s going to be released months later?
Only intel though, but they never had complete and stable drivers for it and gave up when they launched their dedicated gpu to rely on the built in Windows DX9->DX12 emulation (though iirc they moved to the dx9 to vulkan emulation that the steam deck basically does cause it's much better performance) they are so far behind on drivers they don't have the time to do this for the handful of dx9 games still popular so had to cut it Would be surprised if AMD or nVidia drop dx9 since theirs are basically complete, at least to rely on emulation like intel did Will be interesting to see if Microsoft extends it since like 3/4 of Windows PC's are still on 10 and 11 uptake is stagnant, they still list Win 7 as viable for EQ though even with dx11
Thank you so much Darkpaw team, This has been a long time, I have not expecting a new expansion with such a strong interest . Again thanks! Very glad you are back to business !
Sure only Intel has started doing it but others will be following in that move over time as they have no reason to support it anymore. Since steam will no longer be supporting anything but windows 10/11 soon people have even less reason to support the older DirectX versions.
From a support perspective, the jump from DX9 to DX11 is the harder thing to do. Supporting a newer OS from here on out (ie Win10 to Win11) should be less work overall. JChan's leadership on the engineering side of things is palpable given the changes we've seen thus far in DevOps, backend I/O, database, moving the client to x64, and now the move to DX11. Honestly, I am not sure any leader in Darkpaw's storied history would have been able to pull all of this off in three years with minimal impact to the game's uptime and to the playerbase. We're in good hands.
From what I have seen in the past they have only dropped support for an OS when changes required it. Unless they make some sort of change that requires dropping of an unsupported OS they won't drop support for it.
