I'm just going to say that first. If your smartphone's data plan in limited like mine, then you need to watch how much data you use per month. AQ3D is a real-time MMO which means it requires an internet connection to play and every word you type, every sword swing, every new item and even every moment or jump is throwing data at our servers and that uses bandwidth. It uses data.
Any chance you get, jump onto wifi. As long as you are on a wifi connection then you're not using up your data plan.
Before we talk about how much data you might use, let me explain a little more about how AQ3D works.
Everything is in an Asset Bundle. These are basically packs of models, textures and other necessaries all grouped together so that you have everything you need for a certain area all in one compressed package.
EXAMPLE: Greenguard's asset bundle contains the Greenguard tree models and textures, the bright sky texture and skydome mesh, the grass texture, the stone models and textures, the nav mesh for the entire zone, the baked light map... the entire zone in a box. But Doomwood's has completely different asset bundles that contain the darker sky texture, creepy leafless trees, gray stones, blue/green grass texture, darker stone textures, etc. This applies to items, monsters and everything else that makes up the world in which you adventure.
Most of these asset bundles hover around 10 Megs in size (That's compressed. Uncompressed on your device they swell about three times that size) so each one is a pretty big download. No game wants to take a super long time to download and install (it's very annoying) so instead of barfing the entire game onto your phone at once, AQ3D cleverly downloads asset bundles as it needs them.
Once you have downloaded these asset bundles, they are saved in your cache so you don't need to download them again (until you clear your cache or until we implement the game's self clean-up feature which will automatically delete older, unused content to keep the file size down on your device). Areas are the largest downloads in the game so even if you to play using data, you'll want to download these asset bundles while on Wifi. Just visit the areas once and they are in your cache.
Right now, the entire game is approximately an amazingly small 300 Megs, but this will continue to grow as we continue to add more events, areas, dungeons, items, monsters, travel forms, functionalities, etc.
It's a common question.
Unfortunately, we don't have enough hard numbers yet (since the Android closed beta just began) to know how much data the average player uses. It also wildly varies depending on your situation. The more people that are in your area, the more data the servers need to receive and deliver to everyone's devices. You may encounter someone with a weapon type that you've never seen and need to download that weapon model's asset bundle on the fly.
There are so many variables that we can't even estimate, but you will probably be using less than when you watch a youtube video, assuming that you have most of the area asset bundles saved in your cache.
A lot of you guys know this already but there's always someone who has never even thought of it.
You guys are paying your phone company for data but none of that goes to us (of course). We have our own bandwidth bills. Right now the game is very small and the bandwidth flowing to and from our servers is blessedly small. Once we go into Open Beta, everything changes. We hope a lot more new players will jump in. That means our servers will be sending and receiving TONS more information, which means our bandwidth bill goes up and it can cost TENS of thousands of dollars a month or more (depending on the number of people playing).
When you buy Guardian or Dragon Crystals, this is where a large portion of that money goes. Just paying to keep the game servers awake and running.
Neat, huh?
Of course, all of this is only relevant to mobile users since the ANDROID CLOSED BETA began on Wednesday. If you're playing on Steam then it shouldn't even be a concern.
If you have an Android device and Early Access and want to try out the mobile version of AQ3D, then CLICK HERE.
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