There will always be upgrade advantages in PC gaming. The more you spend and upgrade your machine, the better your performance will be. This generally equates to an improvement over your less-upgraded peers.
Of course, I understand that. But said improvement does not necessarily equates to a "competitive advantage".
In 0.2.0, I used to brawl at 15-20 FPS. The low FPS put me at a slight disadvantage, but nothing game-breaking. Not being epileptic, I could enjoy MWLL even under non ideal conditions
In 0.3.0 however, my first encounter with a SRM Vulture utterly destroyed my mech, my comp, and my eyes. I could swear the FPS drop alone killed me!
The massive advantage I was talking about is not having 3 times your opponent's frame rate with prettier graphics (that's what I'd call comfort), but rather the fact that against a guy who's doing ok despite mediocre hardware, you can just throw missiles in his general direction and watch him seize up. That seems wrong.
Now, I am not requiring nor expecting miracles. You can't have impressive graphics on a demanding engine running smooth on old hardware, however amazing the dev team's work may be. And lowering settings only gets you so far, I also understand that. The point I am trying to make is that, ideally, the transition from playable to unplayable should be quite gradual (depending on people's tolerance toward low FPS), a sum of many little things. But when a single feature destroys the frame rate of an otherwise "playable" game (by my admittedly very low - out of necessity - standards), then something is probably wrong with it.
If for 0.3.0 missiles seemed to be the worst offender, in 0.2.0 Extremity's crystals ruined my fun when I looked at them. Too bad I can't test out the optimised 0.3.2 particles.
In the end, if you are only getting 20fps with LOW settings, your hardware needs some money thrown at it.
I am the unfortunate proud owner of a solahma GPU, who recently died an honourable death in a heated battle against MWLL's overwhelming system requirements.
So yes, I guess I need to throw money at it.
Unfortunately that's money I can't really throw at the moment, so for now I'll enjoy the good weather, and go to bed earlier... I hope to be back before 0.4.0!
But seriously, I would have LOVED a solid 20fps in all circumstances
. So the
need for an upgrade is quite relative.
I would have loved true low settings too, that weren't forced to medium/high. There's a few threads about that, mainly the motion blur but it wasn't the only setting that I couldn't get to stick to low/off.
