It's become much more noticeable since (I think) the sprite update, but this game is starting to chug like an 18-wheeler climbing a mountain. Any time someone in a party (or even an enemy) first uses a weapon effect like a charge attack, it creates a noticeable half-second stutter in my gameplay. For the life of me I don't understand why these things aren't pre-loaded properly, or even retained in memory in the first place, since it happens every level consecutively in a run. Any level with widespread environmental effects, like say Ghosts in the Machine, brings my framerate to its knees and makes moving around all the more difficult. I've seen other people mention this, but it's great when opening a game menu for the first time hangs things for a few seconds...you know, to render a flat graphical surface. And just for kicks, there are those moments when the game decides, "Oh hey, I'm just gonna completely hang for three or four seconds for no good reason; hope you have fun being dead halfway across the room when I come back!" Can't tell you how many sparks I've burned on that nonsense.

My ancient P4 system is not exactly a powerhouse, but it's still a Prescott 3.0 GHz w/HT chip, and I have a Radeon HD4670 1GB card and 3GB of RAM, so I'm well clear of the minimum specs. To repeat the old mantra, there are plenty of more graphically-demanding games that my machine can run much more smoothly. (inb4 "lol java") I have effects turned off and transients culled, for all the good that seems to do, but even with the graphics quality set to low, I'm still getting substantially worse performance than I'd ever expect to see. I'm just running the game at 1280x960, too (woo CRTs!)...it's not like I'm shooting for a full HD experience.

And on top of all of that, I think a lot of us are getting the crazy-unstable connections on the network side of things...nothing like watching your meter jump from four bars to two and back again in the course of a few seconds. Taken as a whole, the game's getting nigh-unplayable at this point. I'd gladly forgo new content updates for a solid year if OOO would focus their energies into improving the fundamental gameplay experience.

(Honestly for all I know at least some of the first paragraph may be due to issues on my end, but there's no way to tell without throwing it out there and seeing if I'm alone or not.)