Good afternoon from Florida! As a Pledge in the Alpha Access tier, I was curious if there is currently any plan on releasing a pre-emptive announcement (at least a couple weeks out) for when the Alpha phase will be starting? Assuming I don't upgrade to gain pre alpha access, there will be an ongoing group of pre-alpha testers before alpha phase obviously starts. I am going all out on a new rig for Pantheon and want to wait as long as possible to build it without missing any of alpha. Thank you for your time!
Best Regards
Archaen said: Personally I'd recommend waiting til after alpha maybe even beta. Alpha will be more testing than "play" and it gives you that much longer for a better machine.
This is good advice. You will not be playing the game as you want. You will most likely be given a character at a specific lvl with gear and told to go to a specific zone and do things. Or to craft.
kellindil said:Archaen said: Personally I'd recommend waiting til after alpha maybe even beta. Alpha will be more testing than "play" and it gives you that much longer for a better machine.This is good advice. You will not be playing the game as you want. You will most likely be given a character at a specific lvl with gear and told to go to a specific zone and do things. Or to craft.
Well I not sure it will be this direct in Alpha, but I would say limited zone, creatures, and things to do is very accrucate. What your describing is more likely what the Dev's and Paid Testers will do. Once they get the community involved they will most likely let them go do whatever they can within the game to see what they can break so the team can then turn and fix it before Beta/Release. Still good advice as I would recommend waiting till closing to release as well.
We will certainly give as much notice as possible prior to Alpha and Beta testing, how much time that will be is not known at this point but we will try our best to give a couple of week notice at least. Pre-alpha testing will give us a much better idea once we get into it.
As for building your new rig, I would wait until closer to release if you can hold off for that long as testing won;t be a good example of how your PC will perform for the official end release of Pantheon, there will be lot's of bugs and optimisation passes so it is best to wait as close to release as possible just so you can get the latest parts and best performance possible for when we do release but ultimately it is up to you my friend, whatever suits you best.
Love this community; bunch of great advice here, thank you. I was worried the question might've been a little to specific, but it looks like the clear answer is to hold off on building. Nice to hear it from the horses mouth itself no less (old english idiom Kilsin, though a fine stallion you would be! :D)! Thanks again for the help and have a great weekend all : )
Yeah, even though a top end system built right now will most likely run Pantheon very well, waiting would probably be best. Heck, in another year SSDs will (hopefully) become better in the $$/GB area, that $700 video card will be replaced by a next gen $400 one (thank you GTX1070!) and the tech will improve on MBs and CPUs.
Realistically a motherboard or CPU is a pretty safe investment right now.
The leap in performance in GPUs generation to generation is much larger than CPUs. A 7700k is barely better than a 4790k in terms of performance. The next generation of Intel CPUs will have an even smaller performance leap. A 970 to a 1070 is a huge performance gap, however.
Really it depends on whether or not you currently play any games. I play a lot of pretty hardware intensive games currently so I bought a 1070. I would build a new rig if I needed one today. If you don't need the hardware for anything else, wait until alpha/beta. It's a pretty personal choice.
Hardware is very easy to resell for a large portion of the original retail price. Even a CPU can be easily packaged and safely shipped with the right resources (static-safe foam, bags, shock resistant packaging). This reason alone justifies buying what I want in the moment, because I know I'll make a lot of my money back.