Oh for fuck's sake, how many patches does NWN2 need?

[DarkUnderlord]

So I finally thought okay, I'm going to install NWN2. I do. After installing, I then get asked if I want to update it. Thinking that's always a good thing to do, I say sure why not. It starts downloading an 89 MB patch. Fine.

When that was finished downloading, it installed the patch and then started downloading a second 50.3 MB patch.

Then a 19.9 MB patch.

A 19.4 MB patch.

... and finally another 77.2 MB patch.

BUT THEN WAIT THERE'S MORE! There's another 27.5 MB...

... and then there's another 26.9 MB on top of that! And so by now, you're probably thinking it's finished and there can't possibly be any more than this, right?

~~BZZT!~~ WRONG!

There's another 24.2 MB of course, which gets NWN2 PC English version from 1.11.11.52 to version 1.11.11.53.

That's a total 334.4 MB for 8 patches. The game takes up about 7 gig on the HDD and you just about download the entire last fucking gig.

How many fucking patches does this thing need? Anyway, after thinking I'd install it and spend an hour and a bit playing it, I've instead spent three fucking hours downloading patches. It'd at least be nice if there was a way to toggle the speed on it, so I could browse the net at a decent speed while it was downloading, instead of having this shit clog up my entire connection. :australian broadband:

So far not enjoying the NWN2 experience.

Also:




According to Vista, it's recommended requirements match Crysis?

 

[Lyric Suite]

Bitching about patches, now that's new. I can see why folks here held Troika to such a high esteem.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, huh?

 

[Hory]

Would you have been happier if it was a single 334MB patch? Anyway, installing MotB would have helped.

 

[King Crispy]

Hehe, wait until you actually try to run it.

 

[Nedrah]

Hehe, wait until you actually try to run it.

Exactly.
"Wait, all those patches... and THAT'S what I'm getting?!"

Anyways, the game has a few good moments, so enjoy it as long as you can. It does get better after the first 2 hours but stales out towards the end.

 

[Lesifoere]

El oh el. What, would you rather they don't support the game at all and stop with the patches at 0.000001 or what?Blizzard releases patches some 300 MB large for WoW. It's nothing special.

Also, why do people keep making themselves go through the NWN2 OC and not skip straight to MotB? You masochists.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

Yeah, they really need to release a 1.0 to 1.whateverthey'reat patch as opposed to making you go through seven or eight. It'd probably make minimal real changes, but at least the "Jesus Christ this has to be the last one" factor would be gone.

 

[Longshanks]

Went through the same thing yesterday.

At least the game's great once it gets started, I particularly enjoyed beating up the bullies with sticks. Apparently I'm the best at the fair since Cormick, bet your not that good.

 

[Gromnir]

Bitching about patches, now that's new. I can see why folks here held Troika to such a high esteem.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, huh?

HA!

as for how nwn2 runs...

even with motb, nwn2 is a resource hog that will make most any gamer rig cry like a bitch (sorta like tim cain facing an inevitably missed deadline) if all graphic options is maximized. however, with motb improvements available, simply turn off shadows and you should be golden. otherwise frame rate may be ridiculous low... depending on your hardware.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[afewhours]

Anyway, installing MotB would have helped.

QFT. It improves things a lot.

I had some horrible experiences with the NWN2 patcher. I preordered the game, and the patch thingy crashed about a million times before it actually worked. It's just as well I get some strange thrill out of installing and uninstalling things on my computer.

I'm not joking. Sometimes I install games for a laugh and then never play them. God knows why.

Either way, the patching system seems to be okay now, fingers crossed.

Anyways, the game has a few good moments, so enjoy it as long as you can. It does get better after the first 2 hours but stales out towards the end.

Yeah, that's a fair appraisal. The end of the game is rubbish, but that's nothing new. It's a good lark once it gets going. It doesn't take itself too seriously and has its moments of charm. I especially liked Sand: the sarcastic-elven mage guy.

 

[Norfleet]

Would you have been happier if it was a single 334MB patch? Anyway, installing MotB would have helped.

It wouldn't have *BEEN* a 334 MB patch if there was just ONE patch. They patch the SAME FILE OVER AND OVER AGAIN, when they could have just made ONE patch that would patch that file ONCE.

 

[Wyrmlord]

So I am not the only one who noticed NWN2 has the same requirements as Crysis.

It's because NWN2 is a poorly optimised game. Obsidian has really bad coders. Their management of the game's programming is so bad, that it takes up a high processing power, despite being ugly and looking no different from NWN1.

I can run Crysis at High with 20 frames per second, while with NWN2, it is 15 frames per second, on the default settings. Turning up the shadow resolution even a notch will make the game unplayable. Atleast Crysis has an excuse, because it's a gorgeous game, but NWN2 looks hideous.

Even Bioshock, I manage at 30+ fps on the highest settings. World In Conflict and CoH at 40 on the highest.

 

[Murk]

The problem with that, I believe, is because some of the patches, despite only being 100 mb in size or so, require about 4 gigs of empty HDD space to actually work.

I had installed the game on my HDD with only 2 gigs remaining and I couldn't patch past a certain point - I ended up manually downloading the patches one by one and using a go-around patcher to do it - either that or uninstall and reinstall onto my larger HDD.

Personally, i prefer to take the hard route in EVERYTHING.

 

[Gragt]

I do not know if it is still actual since MotB release but the first big patch you download do not include some issues that were fixed in a previous patch so you'd end up having issues that were fixed in a skipped incremental patch. The solution is then to download the individual patches up to that point, disable your net connection, run the patcher and tell it to patch with the files you already downloaded... That's not serious.

Anyway you might want to look here if you want to download and install the patches yourself. They even have a homemade patcher. And some homemade fixes too it seems.

I'm not joking. Sometimes I install games for a laugh and then never play them. God knows why.

Damn, I'm not the only one! Sometimes I feel secure just knowing some special game is installed and I can play it in 10 seconds if I feel the urge to do so.

 

[cardtrick]

It's because NWN2 is a poorly optimised game. Obsidian has really bad coders. Their management of the game's programming is so bad, that it takes up a high processing power, despite being ugly and looking no different from NWN1.

You can't entirely blame Obsidian for that, although they undeniably deserve some criticism. But the Aurora engine is very old and was poorly optimized to begin with (for reference, I had roughly the same performance on my old computer with NWN1 and VTMB). Updating a poorly programmed engine to modern graphics was probably harder in some ways than making a new engine from scratch. CDP managed to do a better job than Obsidian, but on the other hand it took them considerably longer and The Witcher still doesn't have great performance.

Oh, and claiming that NWN2 doesn't look any different from NWN1 is just disingenuous and obviously bullshit. It looks much better than NWN1, especially if your machine can handle putting the shadows to High. I think you are simply misremembering how awful NWN1 looks . . . it's just about the ugliest game this side of Vogel's stuff and Prelude to Darkness.

I can run Crysis at High with 20 frames per second, while with NWN2, it is 15 frames per second, on the default settings.

Yeah. My performance isn't quite as bad (same numbers, but mostly high settings for NWN2), but here you definitely have a point. It's a bad engine -- neither Bioware nor Obsidian is hot stuff when it comes to programming or optimization, and having the two of them together evidently doesn't improve matters.

 

[ghostdog]

Damn, I'm not the only one! Sometimes I feel secure just knowing some special game is installed and I can play it in 10 seconds if I feel the urge to do so.

HA! same here

Anyway, NWN2 is so badly coded that even a new and powerful machine can't play it in full detail. It's true about the crysis comparison, I've played Crysis in medium-high settings and the same applies to NWN2. And what is amazing is that NWN2 graphics are rather crappy anyway,,,

 

[Redeye]

...

Also, why do people keep making themselves go through the NWN2 OC and not skip straight to MotB? You masochists.

Maybe they don't know about cheat codes?

I'm not talking about munchkin.

I suggest just leveling to 20, give yourself the items/etc. you would have had at that level, including crafting.

Then import them to MotB.

 

[bgillisp]

Ha, you aren't kidding that NWN2 is poorly optimized. I read an entire book and another half of a book just on the loading times to change areas of that game! Seriously, what was up with that? Any game that I can read over 500+ pages just on loading times needs some help with coding.

Then again, I managed the same feat with Gothic 3, so not an uncommon problem these days it seems...

 

[Lyric Suite]

...

Also, why do people keep making themselves go through the NWN2 OC and not skip straight to MotB? You masochists.

Maybe they don't know about cheat codes?

I'm not talking about munchkin.

I suggest just leveling to 20, give yourself the items/etc. you would have had at that level, including crafting.

Then import them to MotB.

Or maybe simply use one of the character generation modules available.

 

[Annonchinil]

So I am not the only one who noticed NWN2 has the same requirements as Crysis.

It's because NWN2 is a poorly optimised game. Obsidian has really bad coders. Their management of the game's programming is so bad, that it takes up a high processing power, despite being ugly and looking no different from NWN1.

I can run Crysis at High with 20 frames per second, while with NWN2, it is 15 frames per second, on the default settings. Turning up the shadow resolution even a notch will make the game unplayable. Atleast Crysis has an excuse, because it's a gorgeous game, but NWN2 looks hideous.

Even Bioshock, I manage at 30+ fps on the highest settings. World In Conflict and CoH at 40 on the highest.

I am sorry but what kind of computer do you have? If you can max out Crysis on XP at playable frames than you should get way better framerates in games like CoH and there is no way your CoH framerate is equal to WiC, you should be getting way higher frames in older games. As for NWN2 shadows, AA and water are the big killers for me, water is no loss and AA doesn't make a big difference for me, shadows so far are maxed, but I still have to get into a major spell battle.

 

[OSK]

Bitching about patches, now that's new. I can see why folks here held Troika to such a high esteem.

Brilliant.

 

[sabishii]

...

Also, why do people keep making themselves go through the NWN2 OC and not skip straight to MotB? You masochists.

Maybe they don't know about cheat codes?

I'm not talking about munchkin.

I suggest just leveling to 20, give yourself the items/etc. you would have had at that level, including crafting.

Then import them to MotB.

Or maybe simply use one of the character generation modules available.

...Or simply starting the expansion with new character who will be automatically leveled up to the correct level?

As for bitching about the patches...

 

[cardtrick]

Or simply starting the expansion with new character who will be automatically leveled up to the correct level?

Their point is that starting a new character in the expansion only gives you enough experience to level up to 18 (or 17 or 16 for some races), whereas if you actually play through NWN2 you will certainly be level 20 by the end.

Of course, it doesn't matter much either way since the game is so damn easy.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Bitching about patches, now that's new. I can see why folks here held Troika to such a high esteem.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, huh?

There are a couple of issues going on here for me. For starters, I wasn't aware that I was about to download 8 patches and a combined 330 MB. I literally installed the game thinking I've got an hour or two, let's check this out. I didn't at any point think I'd be spending the next 3 hours downloading patches for it instead. Now because I had heard "bad things" about patching NWN2, the last thing I was about to do was cancel the patcher mid-way through the process. There's no "pause" or "resume later" it's just "cancel" and "cancel" scares the shit out of me. Would it resume downloading from where it was or would it start again? Given problems had been mentioned, could I trust it wouldn't just fuck everything up? So as far as I was concerned, I was stuck. if I wanted to play NWN2, I had to let the thing go.

More so, not being aware of how many patches there were (and seemingly, each successive patch led to an even less incremental version number increase than the last), I wasn't sure how long the entire process was going to take. I decided I'd do other stuff on the net at the time and let it run but as it was downloading, it of course was chugging up my net connection. There's no speed option to limit how fast it'll download so that those of us who are on shitty Australian Broadband can at least still surf the net and do other things at the same time without it taking forever (I'd rather patch over 6 hours and still be able to watch stuff on YouTube for example, rather than patch over 3 and have the internets go slow as hell). Something I would've been able to do if they'd just forgone the auto-updater and instead made you download the patches yourself like other games (I'd just installed it so I wasn't aware I actually could do that and when I found out mid-way through, after wondering how much longer there was to go, I wasn't about to stop the auto-updater for reasons already explained).

El oh el. What, would you rather they don't support the game at all and stop with the patches at 0.000001 or what? Blizzard releases patches some 300 MB large for WoW. It's nothing special.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're supporting the game (Mind you I do think if you have to have 8 patches to correct fundamental problems with your game, you've messed up somewhere). It'd just have been nice if the auto-patcher tool was a little more than just a way to download stuff. I mean, if you're going to go the whole hog of creating such a tool in the first place (which means you know you're going to patch your game), they could've at least put some time into it and given it the features of any half decent download manager. And yeah, a number of other games do combine patches and create a version 1.0 > Latest version patch. I would've preferred that because then I'd at least know it's going to take another couple of hours and I could've been prepared for it. Rather than, as Admiral jimbob said, dealing with the "Jesus Christ this has to be the last one" factor. Even if it did a check at the start to get info on all available patches and then, during the process, told you that you were now downloading patch No X of Y and had so far downloaded A MB of a total B MB over all patches. And a little note somewhere saying "You can pause this process at any time and resume later from where you left off".

Also, why do people keep making themselves go through the NWN2 OC and not skip straight to MotB? You masochists.

Don't have MotB. Only reason I have NWN2 was because it came with the graphics card when I got my new PC a few months ago.

Hehe, wait until you actually try to run it.

No, that doesn't happen until this afternoon now.

 

[Gromnir]

Or simply starting the expansion with new character who will be automatically leveled up to the correct level?

Their point is that starting a new character in the expansion only gives you enough experience to level up to 18 (or 17 or 16 for some races), whereas if you actually play through NWN2 you will certainly be level 20 by the end.

even if this were a concern, the console commands allow you to give your character whatever xp and equipment you desire. so why play 20+ hours o' nwn2 simply to get 2 extra levels and better starting loot when simply using console commands will achieve same results in less than 1 minute?

"their point" is ridiculous... if that is their point.

HA! Good Fun!