In final reckoning, the Beast is Slain

Overheal

Thats right, suck it XP! And Suckit DirectX9!

Shattered Horizon is - well its on the Horizon. And Its only $18 (US). And it looks like it might be New and Interesting. And it doesnt support XP or Direct X9 Graphics or Single Core Processors.

Time to 'Grade, n00bs.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/18110/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXOdW5vYDV0

Shattered Horizon is the highly anticipated first game from Futuremark Games Studio that immerses you in the cold reality of combat in space like no other game before.

This multiplayer first-person shooter is played entirely in zero gravity. A catastrophic explosion on the Moon has filled near-Earth space with billions of tons of rocky debris. You and your friends will join intense 32 player battles to control hollowed-out asteroids, huge fragments of Moon rock and the ruined remains of the International Space Station.

With simple and intuitive controls, you have complete freedom of movement in the distinctive zero gravity environments. Not only can you use your rocket pack to fly anywhere but you can also land on any surface to attack your enemies from unexpected angles.

Shattered Horizon challenges you to take your FPS skills to the next level adapting what you have learned on the battlefield to create new tactics in a fully three dimensional battle space. With your rifle at the ready you can handle anything the enemy can throw at you. But if you let go of your gun, chances are you’re already dead.

* Multiplayer first-person shooter set in near-Earth space 40 years from now
* Experience intense zero gravity combat and complete freedom of movement
* Use your rocket pack to fly freely through space and then land on any surface
* Engage enemies in furious firefights, or ambush them from unexpected angles
* Use tactical grenades to disable electronics, block line of sight or push enemies out from cover
* Join your friends in action-packed 32 player battles fighting to control hollowed-out asteroids, huge fragments of Moon rock and the ruined remains of the International Space Station
* Familiar and intuitive FPS controls let you take full advantage of the zero gravity environments
* Astonishing graphics and advanced lighting effects immerse you in the cold reality of combat in space
* Evocative soundtrack by Markus “Captain” Kaarlonen from Poets of the Fall
* Online leaderboards and extensive personal stats tracking

System Requirements

Minimum:
o OS: Windows Vista/7 (Does not support Windows XP)
o Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 / AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+
o Memory: 2GB
o Graphics: 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT / ATI Radeon HD 3870
o DirectX®: 10 (Does not support DirectX 9)
o Hard Drive: 1.5 GB
o Sound: Windows Vista compatible sound card

Recommended:
o OS: Windows Vista/7 (Does not support Windows XP)
o Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 / AMD Phenom II X4 940
o Memory: 2GB
o Graphics: 512MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 / ATI Radeon HD 4870
o DirectX®: 10 (Does not support DirectX 9)
o Hard Drive: 1.5GB
o Sound: Windows Vista compatible sound card

I fall just below mins. Ill probably stab at it anyway and see what happens.

PogMoThoin

Overheal wrote: »

And it doesnt support XP or Direct X10 Graphics or Single Core Processors.

Typo dude, it does support directx10, no support for 9

BTW, reports from the beta are that this is amazing, I preordered my copy for €14.71
http://www.shatteredhorizon.com/buynow/

dreamers75

So they moving from benchmarks that dont run on your pc for 2 years to games that do the same.


Any actual game footage?

PogMoThoin

dreamers75 wrote: »

So they moving from benchmarks that dont run on your pc for 2 years to games that do the same.


Any actual game footage?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFhrAqYzIfc

Shattered Horizon will be released on November 4 at the suggested
retail price of €19.95 / $19.95 / £14.95. We are also confirming our
commitment to dedicated servers and announcing that Shattered Horizon
will be supported with free content expansions after launch.

As I say, I pre-ordered mine for €14.71 which to me is great value

Burgo

Sounds Interesting,but yeah some gameplay footage would be nice.

PogMoThoin

^^ Above, posted while u were typing

Burgo

Yeah yeah :pac: looks good ! hope my pc will be up for it!

Overheal

If I pre-order now, Im gonna bust my budget to preorder l4d

But I am getting a few hours of overtime this week

which I already spent

And theres the 53rd ladson fair to go to this weekend

which i need money for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_pqnsKWlpc

So no l4d2 or SH this week but I will definitely preorder SH shortly - fecks sake there isnt even a release date on it yet!

mrgreen70

Burgo wrote: »

Yeah yeah :pac: looks good ! hope my pc will be up for it!

I hope it also:)

dreamers75

Looks decent Super Mario Galaxy vs Unreal vs Crytek engine.

PogMoThoin

Overheal wrote: »

So no l4d2 or SH this week but I will definitely preorder SH shortly - fecks sake there isnt even a release date on it yet!

November 4th, next Wed

Kiith

Arent they not seriously limiting their user base by not supporting XP?

Sweet jesus, i just watched those trailers and now i dont care if they lose some customers cause they arent supporting XP. I'll buy Windows 7 just for this. It look amazing.

PogMoThoin

Kiith wrote: »

Arent they not seriously limiting their user base by not supporting XP?

Sweet jesus, i just watched those trailers and now i dont care if they lose some customers cause they arent supporting XP. I'll buy Windows 7 just for this. It look amazing.

I'm glad its not, it'd be reduced to playing on some mid-end directX9 cards then with reduced settings. Let the 8 year old OS die (and dx9 with it), pity more developers wouldn't follow suit

BlitzKrieg

reminds me alot of descent with the ships removed and replaced with puny spacesuits. same 360 fps gameplay with enclosed spaces mixed with open spaces.

Overheal

Kiith wrote: »

Arent they not seriously limiting their user base by not supporting XP?

Yes, but XP is well past its sell-by date. Its now been surpassed by not One, but Two Operating Systems.

Windows XP
Release date RTM: August 24, 2001
Retail: October 25, 2001 (info) Current version 5.1.2600.5512 Service Pack 3 (x86 SP3) (2008-4-21; 17 months ago) (info)

Notice how it just celebrated its 8th birthday. And its already been a year and a half since SP3. Vista's about to celebrate its 3rd birthday.

Frankly thats been plenty of time to move on. Developers can not afford to support 3 (or more) OSs.

jonny72

The game looks like a budget multiplayer game.. fly around in space suits and shoot each other.. eh nothing very spectacular..

When you walk through the jungle in Crysis on high detail, thats impressive.. this just looks, eh..

In fact, making this game dx10, non-XP is most likely a marketing gimmick to sell the game, not a bad idea though, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it now.

Comment about developers not affording to support 3 platforms.. you mean this developer can't afford to support the largest platform? that doesn't make any sense.

Granted this may be a gimmick, but it will take years before any serious games developers start ignoring XP.

5uspect

Arent they not seriously limiting their user base by not supporting XP?

Looking at the Steam hardware survey it certainly seems so:

Month|Windows XP 32 bit|Windows Vista 32 bit|Windows Vista 64 bit|Windows 7 64 bit|Windows 7|Windows 2003 64 bit|Windows XP 64 bit
May|59.38%|24.82%|9.99%| 2.61%|1.76%|0.81%|0.36%
Jun|57.71%|25.10%|10.46%|3.17%|2.02%|0.83%|0.41%
Jul|55.04%|25.14%|11.68%|4.20%|2.35%|0.85%|0.45%
Aug|53.48%|24.77%|11.74%|5.41%|2.96%|0.85%|0.50%
Sep|52.10%|24.67%|11.71%|6.46%|3.50%|0.80%| 0.50%
Change|-1.38%|-0.10%|-0.03%|1.05%|0.54%|-0.05%|0.00%

Then again 45% or so are using Vista or 7.

pixelburp

Overheal wrote: »

Yes, but XP is well past its sell-by date. Its now been surpassed by not One, but Two Operating Systems.

Windows XP
Release date RTM: August 24, 2001
Retail: October 25, 2001 (info) Current version 5.1.2600.5512 Service Pack 3 (x86 SP3) (2008-4-21; 17 months ago) (info)

Notice how it just celebrated its 8th birthday. And its already been a year and a half since SP3. Vista's about to celebrate its 3rd birthday.

Frankly thats been plenty of time to move on. Developers can not afford to support 3 (or more) OSs.

XP may be past it's sell by date, but there's a good reason why gamers and users alike still use it, XP was relatively stable and decent by the time Vista came along (unlike, say, Millennium when XP arrived). It's doubly worth remembering that Windows intend replacing Windows7 in - what? - 2, 3 years so I don't feel like chasing OS'es

Plus to be honest, I draw the line at upgrading my OS to play a game. I mean come on! I know gaming on the PC can be a fickle mistress, but having to change my entire operating system's a bit much.

Overheal

pixelburp wrote: »

XP may be past it's sell by date, but there's a good reason why gamers and users alike still use it, XP was relatively stable and decent by the time Vista came along (unlike, say, Millennium when XP arrived). It's doubly worth remembering that Windows intend replacing Windows7 in - what? - 2, 3 years so I don't feel like chasing OS'es

Plus to be honest, I draw the line at upgrading my OS to play a game. I mean come on! I know gaming on the PC can be a fickle mistress, but having to change my entire operating system's a bit much.

Well frankly my dear this is the exact same scenario being discussed in 2006. One of the largest single points of compatibility between older games vista was vista's Kernel was re-engineered to be able to handle emerging standards. One of which was precisely Direct X 10. You were going to need to jump off XP sooner or later anyway. How the **** else did you expect to play Starcraft 2?

Also youd have to cite where they plan a new OS for 2012. I know XP was a bit of an enigma and all that. We had 95/98/ME/2k/and of course XP practical rode in right on 2k's coat tails. Vista took longer because it was much more ambitious and re-did alot of NT's core functionality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista Again this is why it took 5 years VS's Microsoft's typical 1 or 2 years to release a new build. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Microsoft_Windows And given the success laid down by XP they may just do right by the old girl to give windows 7 the same love and attention for a similar length of time before offering up a new PC OS, instead focusing again on a new major Server or Mobile OS release.

After all youd hardly make the same idle complaints about swapping out a GPU costing anywhere from 100 euro to 400 euro coupled with a PSU to play the latest games; why should switching OS (at a cost anywhere from "Free" to $30 to $50 to the very high end of $300-ish for Ultimate Retail) be a big fuss?

Of course, I reformat Seasonally. Like changing the oil in a car. When you do it often enough you can streamline the whole process into an overnight backup and a quiet sunday morning with Coffee and a copy of the latest Popular Science. Decidedly longer than swapping out cards but oh well.

Gamers are strangely afraid of change at this point. They had to accept that sooner or later emerging standards would require them to do away with their old 'ware. Facts of life. Remember Pixel Shader 2.0? I spent $200 because of that little fecker. Bringing home as many as 5 new games before I copped on why they werent running.

If it makes you feel any better you can get any Business edition (Enterprise Ultimate etc.) and get access to the integrated XP Emulation Mode.

Overheal

jonny72 wrote: »

The game looks like a budget multiplayer game.. fly around in space suits and shoot each other.. eh nothing very spectacular..

When you walk through the jungle in Crysis on high detail, thats impressive.. this just looks, eh..

If youre judging by looks alone, then its going to be hard to size up the lush jungles presented in Crysis to the cold higher orbit of moon debris.

In fact, making this game dx10, non-XP is most likely a marketing gimmick to sell the game, not a bad idea though, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it now.

Actually I am still about investigating its Zero-G gameplay. But im sure on the developer side they are all finding fewer reasons to support Dx9 and older. Market penetration is creeping always closer to a phase out of older cards. The last of the 7s and 8s are always on the way out, and few developers have supported those formats officialy in donkey years. That doesnt make them inaccessible. I can think of a few fanm-inspired tweaks for the Source engine to run TF2 on dx7 and such.

Comment about developers not affording to support 3 platforms.. you mean this developer can't afford to support the largest platform? that doesn't make any sense.

Largest and rapidly dwindling. Come january expect that number to drop at least 5-10 points. By this time next year I also wager it will be closer to 15%.

Im sure its a gamble dont get me wrong. But you can at least appreciate the logic. Its gutsy. I like it.

That also applies to supporting older graphics formats, like dx9. The 2 formats are surely very different. You only need to see the early adoptions of dx10 to attest to how awful they were. Im thinking FSX. Developers were always going to need to make that dynamic shift into developing primarily for the dx10 platform.

Granted this may be a gimmick, but it will take years before any serious games developers start ignoring XP.

I doubt it. You only need to stare Pog' here in the face before he shows you his decked out dx10 machine. Not that he doesnt dualboot - he is a puritan after all.

For dx9 you wont beat XP granted. However I thought the World in Conflict results were interesting: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_7_gaming_performance/page6.asp

And Far Cry 2: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_7_gaming_performance/page8.asp

and FC2 Dx10: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_7_gaming_performance/page9.asp

CoDWAW:http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_7_gaming_performance/page11.asp

Its a bit swing and miss. It does piss out in more areas than it succeeds right now. You can draw your own conclusions. As far as im concerned though in places where it misses out by the odd 2-4 frames im not going to lose sleep over it. I think id rather stay current. Speaking of current if you look at the med vs. high specs (new vs old hardware) the new OS's seem a smidge more capable on average of making the best of the new hotnesses like the i7.

Right now, Windows 7 is kind of a mixed bag. While it was able to beat both Vista and XP in certain applications, it also got beat in others. 3DMark06 gave a clear advantage to XP on both of our test beds, while Vantage favored Vista by about 10%. However, real world performance brought our numbers to a much narrower margin, with Windows 7 performing admirably in both DX9 and DX10 modes. Crysis still favors Vista pretty heavily as it officially trounced Windows 7 by 16 frames per second on average on our high-end test bed. The margin was closed when we take a look at our mid-range setup, when that gap shrunk to a one frame difference.

In all other applications though, the margin was much smaller as Windows 7 appears poised to be a serious contender as far as performance goes. USB transfer rates saw a decent increase while CPU utilization saw a small decrease, giving some credence to Microsoft’s claim that they have reworked the USB subsystem. Boot times are also worth mentioning not only because Windows 7 was faster, but more importantly, because Windows 7 felt more ready to go once the desktop loaded up. Both XP and Vista took at least an extra minute after the desktop loaded to be ready to run applications, while Windows 7 ran Firefox without stuttering or hesitation. Overall, we would say that Windows 7 was just snappier and more responsive when it came to general usage.

For a beta, Windows 7 is surprisingly ready to compete in the big leagues. During our week long testing period we experienced no crashes or system halts and system performance was a lot better than we would have expected from the first public beta. We weren’t totally without incident however, as an attempt to update our ATI drivers was repeatedly met with failures. While attempting to update the drivers through Windows Update, we kept getting an archaic failure code that we had to Google to explain as the Windows Help program gave 0 results (ATI has issued a Catalyst 8.12 hotfix to address this issue under Vista).

It’s going to be interesting to see how Windows 7 shapes up in the coming months, as the public beta is scheduled to continue until August of this year. Microsoft is releasing both system and driver updates on a fairly frequent basis, but even running stock, Windows 7 is surprisingly complete. The new dock system for the task bar takes some getting used, but once you do, you find yourself missing it once you go back to Vista or XP. We still prefer the start menu from Windows XP, but everywhere else is much improved in regard to usability. Most of all however, performance is where it needs to be if it hopes to compete with the well-regarded Windows XP. As the OS and drivers mature, Windows 7 could finally drive many of those XP hold-outs to upgrade to Microsoft’s newest operating system.

Of course one of the few places i disagree with that conclusion is the XP start bar: who in God's name could possibly still love that hatespawn??

cherryghost

I couldnt be arsed talking about the whole OS thing.

That game looks great! I had doubts that a benchmarking company could release something that looks so unbelieveably good. Will definately be getting this. My PC meets 'recommended' requirements!!!


(Gah my PC suddenly feels old now )

pixelburp

I have no trouble with eventually upgrading my OS, but when Windows themselves openly admit that there'll be yet another version of Windows on its way in the near future, I am reluctant to switch OS on a whim when chances are I'll be doing it again in another 2 / 3 years.

Besides, I likes me' old games, so am satisfied that XP runs the oldie goldies

L31mr0d

The gameplay doesn't look that appealing tbh, although the price is right imo. If initial reviews and opinions are glowing I'll pick it up when the L4D2 dust has settled.

In regards to XP. Futuremark not choosing to support it is not even a chink in XP's armour. XP is going nowhere fast. Not only is it still largely used by desktop gamers looking for stability but it's also the poster boy OS for the boom in netbooks.

Plus, and most importantly for gamers, there is no carrot. I adopted Vista early on because of Crysis. I will not be bothering to move to Windows 7 or DX11 unless a sizable carrot is hung in front of me, and I don't see any on the horizon tbh. My system has gone without an OS reinstall or any clock tweaks in over a year and I've gotten used to the stability. There will have to be something pretty amazing to get me to break out of my comfort zone atm, and I'm sure the case is true for a lot of other gamers.

Overheal

pixelburp wrote: »

I have no trouble with eventually upgrading my OS, but when Windows themselves openly admit that there'll be yet another version of Windows on its way in the near future, I am reluctant to switch OS on a whim when chances are I'll be doing it again in another 2 / 3 years.

By all means stick with XP for 12 years then. Its hard to argue youll be doing it again in 2/3 years though when Vista vs. XP proved well that nobody is going to force you into anything that quickly. It took 3 years after Vista came out for a game to no longer support XP. Similarly im sure Windows 7 will be fully supported for at least the next 5/6 years.

Shiminay

That game looks rather sweet to me, I can forsee me clicking "buy now" on Steam when I get home later!

IgsTer

Looks good and at a nice price too :P

But still on XP here and doubt ill be upgrading just for this, bit silly not supporting XP though. Will pick it up when I do switch over

PogMoThoin

Kharn wrote: »

That game looks rather sweet to me, I can forsee me clicking "buy now" on Steam when I get home later!

Don't, its €17.99 on steam, click here and buy through Futuremark for €14.71, they will then send You the product key and tell You download through Steam

Overheal

Preorder also gets you free access to future DLC or some jargon like that.

Theyre model is based on 32 player play. Theyre trying to get players in the game in the dozens.

Pre-Purchase Shattered Horizon save 10% and help test new level packs before they become available to everyone!

PogMoThoin

Overheal wrote: »

Preorder also gets you free access to future DLC or some jargon like that.

Theyre model is based on 32 player play. Theyre trying to get players in the game in the dozens.

They've promised that DLC is going to be free, You get early access to beta test the DLC when You pre-order

Shattered Horizon will be released on November 4 at the suggested
retail price of €19.95 / $19.95 / £14.95. We are also confirming our
commitment to dedicated servers and announcing that Shattered Horizon
will be supported with free content expansions after launch.

They are pushing all the right buttons in todays climate IMO, right price, dedi servers, free dlc, pc only. The dropping of XP support had to start sometime.

Overheal

Itll surely affect the playerbase the game will likely need (XP). but then again i think they adressed that with the low asking price.

I really want to sink my teeth into this Zero-G though! Wether its going to be a little n00bish or wether theyre going to go Pure with it: eg. when you shoot a bullet, it shoves you backward, etc.

If youre bored this weekend you can get in the space mood with that HL2 mod: Eternal Silence, which is pretty good once you get in click with it.

PogMoThoin

Slightly OT >>>>> AMD dumps DirectX 9 card support under Windows 7

Edit: You can still use older Vista drivers, just no new Catalysts from now on will support these cards