seriously, all people concerned about the system specs should really pack up a few bucks and upgrade or quit playing games. Everyone wants a higher player base, but we all know this is not possible with dated graphics. The new gamer generations want lots of eye candy and you can be sure they have the hardware to run it. Noone will ever buy a game that looks like 1998 and has a quad core processor and at least a 9 series geforce or 4xxx ati card, they need to feed those monsters with state of the art graphics.
Ofc nobody wants a game that runs like crap, but seriously there's a minimum level of hardware that a gamer must meet...ffs even winblows has system requirements higher than most peoples systems it seems.
If they decided to stick with aoc engine, that's fine, but if all they upgrade is the physics and lighting/shadows and the textures remain the same, we can safely say all this effort is in vain. All this engine upgrade issue has to be a vast and full improvement. Starting with the actual engine, to the meshes, polycount, textures, animations and last but not least, a very important component of the gameplay is SOUND.
Currently the immersion feeling that the game should have is totally missing.
Let me give you an example:
cool sounds
As you can observe, beyond the actual gameplay and graphics, the sound of weapons clashing with the armor, the toon being hit gasping, the sound effects of specials and the crisp sound of critical strikes gives you that edge that AO in it's current state will never deliver.