The beauty of a 20 year old game is that it will run on a 15 year old video card. This patch does not.
OctoWow does not need to use Vulkan drivers which my video card does not have and never will. I investigated Vulkan while developing in Unity and the advantages are non existent (*in my opinion) and it only introduces compatibility problems.
If I was one of those people I'd have an Nvidia 5090 RTX and be playing fortnite or some shit... But I am not one of those people.
Just like a literary author, game developers must write for their audience. Please, please, please completely revert this patch so we can all play octowow again. (We can't afford to lose players.)
This is not good. I wish I had downloaded the old client zip so I could still play. I'm sad.
EDIT: I think my girlfriend may not have patched yet and I will try and copy her client files over to my machine and see if I can still login on the old client (she was able to last night...). I will try that and post the result.
EDIT2: Back in on the old client files copied from my girlfriend's unpatched install. Yay!
(I may have some time to help with octowow this winter - I've been here since the beginning. I used archie and gopher from a VAX/VMS SSH session on an AT client machine in 1990. If you know what that means, contact me if it gets really bad. I have fixed abandonware games multiplayer networking before.)