What is it about BioWare...

[Monte Carlo]

Tri, as it happens, I don't have a favourite company.

I have had favourite boards to hang out on. Until recently, the BIS forums were easily the most tolerant with some good Developer feedback. Since the Jefferson fuck-up I've not been posting there as much (I think my count is down to 1 a day!1!).

Hmmmm. :: Thinks ::

I suppose SirTech possibly stirs my heart as much as Troika does for some others here. BIS have had some goodies. So I'm not going out of my way to piss off the people who like Troika, but asking them to actually deliver something.

I know we've had this argument before, but the fact is people really are blinded by affection for Messrs. Cain and Co. It's actually quite sweet, except when it manifests itself in rather strange ways like that portrait thing Eldar highlighted.

AS for my attitude to the Bloodlines game, well I'm pretty unrepentant. If anybody else were making it.....well I'll not bang that drum again.

If ToEE is as good as many here predict then I'll (happily) eat my hat. But I've seen too much front and not enough substance from the CRPG industry recently to give anybody the benefit of the doubt.

Cheers
MC

 

[triCritical]

If ToEE is as good as many here predict then I'll (happily) eat my hat. But I've seen too much front and not enough substance from the CRPG industry recently to give anybody the benefit of the doubt.

I think if you are expecting too much from ToEE you will be dissapointed. This is not to say that it will not be entertaining but it will probably not be a masterpiece either. Fallout took over 3 years to make, and it was probably about 1/4 as complex a game as Arcanum, both technical and design wise. Given that the ToEE engine had largely already been built it is still ludicrous to expect something along the lines of FO in 18 months. Nevertheless, I expect a short game with a lot of replayability. I expect tactical combat and I expect some non-linearity/open-endedness with good dialogue. Expecting more then this from a 1E hack and slash module is like asking for wine from water.

I have had favourite boards to hang out on. Until recently, the BIS forums were easily the most tolerant with some good Developer feedback. Since the Jefferson fuck-up I've not been posting there as much (I think my count is down to 1 a day!1!).

I have actually picked up with the whole FO3 thing. Somebody needs to be there to teach the canon.

 

[Elwro]

NWN made my Athlon 1400 behave like an overfed snail and the graphics were just ugly on moderate settings. (I don't care that I don't have a high-end machine - Morrowind is pretty and runs smoothly on it, so it's just that Bioware screwed up the code).

Your machine must suck. It runs at 20fps + most of the time for me on my Cel 488. I've also seen it run on an Athlon 1 ghz with GF2MX with no frame rate problems what so ever.

Whoops, seems that I have some serious problems with the setup of my machine. I don't know why. I have W98, 768 MBs of RAM and GF2MX (up-to-date Detonators). Morrowind plays veeery nicely, so I can't understand why does my machine 'suck' in your opinion. When I play NWN and enter e.g. the main city zone in the 1st chapter, everyone but my character begins to move in leaps (I mean no continous walking, just if I were playing Unreal on a P120, which I had done). When I try to rotate the camera, it is slow and goes in steps.
So maybe I have too much RAM for NWN (I've heard something like that)? Can anyone help me with this? I still have a desire to run NWN on my computer occasionally to test some mods. So are there any configuration tricks?

 

[Zetor]

Speaking as one who managed to get Morrowind to run at ~10-15 fps on a p2-celeron 400 with a TNT-2 and 384M ram, yes, there are. There always are.

First, you have to set the detail sliders down to 'minimal', but that's kinda obvious. The thing that helped me most was disabling ALL sound [there's a checkbox for it somewhere] and looking on the ground when many other people were online. (for some unfathomable reason, any lag from the engine translates 1:1 into NETWORK lag, often crashing the game / resulting in huge glitches... wtf?!) From there on it should be relatively painless. If you're not playing online, the same thing can happen when you directly look at a lot of [10+] baddies, so be careful and employ all the tricks that greek dude used when he faced the Medusa.
Also, when playing online, make sure that the module has small areas [64x64 I think], otherwise it'll probably be unplayable for players with low-spec computers, thanks to the aforementioned engine lag -> network lag translation. It IS possible to create areas with this in mind, and many designers do.
Try the camera hack out, as well -- the 100% top-down view will substantially reduce lag, but it'll be hell to navigate unless you know the area beforehand.
Upgrading to win2k can help as well; it won't make the game run faster, but it'll be a lot more stable and when it does crash, you won't have to reboot.

Sorry I can't help more -- last time I played NWN was 10 months ago. sigh.

-- Z.

 

[Eldar]

NWN made my Athlon 1400 behave like an overfed snail and the graphics were just ugly on moderate settings. (I don't care that I don't have a high-end machine - Morrowind is pretty and runs smoothly on it, so it's just that Bioware screwed up the code).

Your machine must suck. It runs at 20fps + most of the time for me on my Cel 488. I've also seen it run on an Athlon 1 ghz with GF2MX with no frame rate problems what so ever.

Whoops, seems that I have some serious problems with the setup of my machine. I don't know why. I have W98, 768 MBs of RAM and GF2MX (up-to-date Detonators). Morrowind plays veeery nicely, so I can't understand why does my machine 'suck' in your opinion. When I play NWN and enter e.g. the main city zone in the 1st chapter, everyone but my character begins to move in leaps (I mean no continous walking, just if I were playing Unreal on a P120, which I had done). When I try to rotate the camera, it is slow and goes in steps.
So maybe I have too much RAM for NWN (I've heard something like that)? Can anyone help me with this? I still have a desire to run NWN on my computer occasionally to test some mods. So are there any configuration tricks?

Your computer is trying to save you. Pay heed to your computer for it is wise unto the NWN.

 

[Elwro]

Well, I knew about all that, but thanks anyway for your help. I just thought that you were implying that NWN should run well on my machine with at least medium settings, which Morrowind does. So, in the end, NWN achieves 20 FPS looking shitty, and Morrowind achieves 20 FPS looking pretty. That's imho a good reason to say that people from Bioware screwed up the code.
When saying 'configuration trick' I meant something like "Put a "nwn_whole_ram=disabled" line in system.ini" , ie sthg more sophisticated than disabling sound, turning detail sliders or changing the view.

Actually, I also came to think that my computer has remembered NWN as a very painful experience and tries to discourage me from playing it. Perhaps it will succeed. Right now I'm playing Exult and I'm having approximately 7.5 times more fun with it than I had with NWN. And than I'll move to Geneforge...

 

[EEVIAC]

Whoops, seems that I have some serious problems with the setup of my machine. I don't know why. I have W98, 768 MBs of RAM and GF2MX (up-to-date Detonators). Morrowind plays veeery nicely, so I can't understand why does my machine 'suck' in your opinion. When I play NWN and enter e.g. the main city zone in the 1st chapter, everyone but my character begins to move in leaps (I mean no continous walking, just if I were playing Unreal on a P120, which I had done). When I try to rotate the camera, it is slow and goes in steps.
So maybe I have too much RAM for NWN (I've heard something like that)? Can anyone help me with this? I still have a desire to run NWN on my computer occasionally to test some mods. So are there any configuration tricks?

I have two suggestions :

*Use 30.82 dets - newer dets have optimisations for GF4 and FX class cards - 30.82's were always the fastest for my MX card.

*I'm not sure Win98 is meant to run with greater than 512Mb of RAM. I've heard of elaborate problems resulting from too much ram on w98 systems (I'll have a search around later and see what I can find.) I'm guessing you have a 512 Mb stick and a 256 Mb stick - if you're confident with the inards of your computer, take out the stick in the second DIMM slot and benchmark it.

 

[Spazmo]

Windows 98 won't even use anything above 128 MB. That may be 256, but I'm not sure. Regardless, a machine running WIn98 with 512 or more megs of RAM won't use most of that.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

As far as I'm concerned VtM:BL is a FPS action/RPG hybrid. The developers have admitted as such. It uses a FPS engine (and a superlative one at that), and it is clearly aimed at being a cross-over hit trying a bit of ingenious genre-blending.

It's an action RPG with a first person perspective, but then again, so was Ultima Underworld, Morrowind, and so on.

Using valve's source engine doesn't automatically make it a first person shooter, though especially if it allows you the freedom to go where you want, when you want without following a missions structure a la Deus Ex. That's the big difference that you've failed to grasp between Deus Ex and Bloodlines.

I find the entire Vampire thing tragic, adolescent and lame. So, admittedly, this title holds little for me. If I redact from the verbiage by developers I've read (and I think I'm entitled to given the veracity of games developers in pre-release interviews) then I think it's fair to say that we are looking at a FPS game with a dose of RP'ing. Nothing much more.

So far, you may be right. We haven't really seen much other than the trailer itself, which doesn't really show off much of the dialogue at all. Then again, I haven't seen too many RPG trailers that show off more than combat. Lionheart's trailer was nothing but combat, but we know that game will have speech skills and disciplines, stealth mechanics as an option, and so on.

Please, throw all the insults you care. The fact of the matter is that some of you are operating a double-standard because of your affection for Troika and the faded glory of Fallout.

I fail to see how Fallout's glory is faded because it still hasn't been topped yet in terms of providing a role playing experience beyond the "role" of being the guy or group of guys who kills everything evil in their path, a path predetermined by the linear design of the game.

Arcanum had a number of faults, like the character system and the linear story. We've covered the problems of BioWare's games already. PlaneScape: Torment was nice, but it was also very linear.

As for Troika, Nightblade pointed out that the portraits in ToEE look "cartoonish." Someone else points out that the IE portraits were just as cartoonish. Nightblade demonstrates that, even taking into account the enlarged ToEE portrait, that the BGII portrait is superior.

They both look cartoony, one just has a different style than the other, more shading.

Personally, I don't care much for portraits in games, since there's no good way to handle them correctly. I really find it rather odd that in games like BG/BG2 that you can't really pick your attributes, you have to roll them, but then you can pick your face. That's never made any sense to me.

But even when you can pick your attributes, it's still hard to match up faces with your attributes, especially in a fantasy setting game that has races, genders, and classes because there's just so damned many constraints on looking for something that fits your character versus the time it takes to produce them. It gets even worse when you have hair color and other things you have to deal with in creating a character and then picking a portrait. This often results in players bitching there aren't enough of them. Of course there aren't, there's just way too many of those possibilities to deal with. So, in the end, portraits just become something for people to piss and moan about - and they have no role playing aspect at all.

Chosing a face does nothing in terms of mechanics. Not a damned thing. It's just an icon on the screen. Yet, by having them, you open the door for several complaints about how there's not enough choices for half-ling paladins with green hair.

I suppose SirTech possibly stirs my heart as much as Troika does for some others here.

I still want another JA game.

If ToEE is as good as many here predict then I'll (happily) eat my hat. But I've seen too much front and not enough substance from the CRPG industry recently to give anybody the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not really that fond of the CRPG industry as of late, either. That's why I've been playing independent CRPGs with the occational "professional" one thrown in just to see what's up with it.

 

[Eldar]

I liked the Jefferson idea where we could create the character, use the model that we had ourselves created (going into great detail from what we've heard), and then use that model as our portrait. In all, I couldn't care less about portraits, though. I was just using portraits as part of the larger discussion.

 

[Ibbz]

Windows 98 won't even use anything above 128 MB. That may be 256, but I'm not sure. Regardless, a machine running WIn98 with 512 or more megs of RAM won't use most of that.

Windows 98 uses all the ram it can get. The belief that it doesnt see/work with more than 256 is nothing more than an old wives tale.

Well, I knew about all that, but thanks anyway for your help. I just thought that you were implying that NWN should run well on my machine with at least medium settings, which Morrowind does. So, in the end, NWN achieves 20 FPS looking shitty, and Morrowind achieves 20 FPS looking pretty. That's imho a good reason to say that people from Bioware screwed up the code.
When saying 'configuration trick' I meant something like "Put a "nwn_whole_ram=disabled" line in system.ini" , ie sthg more sophisticated than disabling sound, turning detail sliders or changing the view.

Try turning down the number of dynamic lights or messing with the other graphical options. You should be able to keep most of them up relatively high though while maintaining high fps. {To see your exact FPS press the "`" key and type in "fps".}

*Use 30.82 dets - newer dets have optimisations for GF4 and FX class cards - 30.82's were always the fastest for my MX card.

Unless you dont play many new games, you'll have to use 4*.** drivers else you'll get weird graphical errors. Dont use the newest FX drivers for NWN though, you get some odd graphics problems.

First, you have to set the detail sliders down to 'minimal', but that's kinda obvious. The thing that helped me most was disabling ALL sound [there's a checkbox for it somewhere] and looking on the ground when many other people were online. (for some unfathomable reason, any lag from the engine translates 1:1 into NETWORK lag, often crashing the game / resulting in huge glitches... wtf?!) From there on it should be relatively painless. If you're not playing online, the same thing can happen when you directly look at a lot of [10+] baddies, so be careful and employ all the tricks that greek dude used when he faced the Medusa.
Also, when playing online, make sure that the module has small areas [64x64 I think], otherwise it'll probably be unplayable for players with low-spec computers, thanks to the aforementioned engine lag -> network lag translation. It IS possible to create areas with this in mind, and many designers do.

I'm not sure what your really getting at here, but i only ever noticed lag in online worlds where - there were a LARGE number of players {20+} in the one area or the size of the area was huge or the server was on a bad connection. In fact, considering i was on 56k at the time, there was hardly any lag at all.

During single player, the only time it should lag is if your computer cant handle all the scripts and fancy graphics, in which case it stops running some of the unimportant scripts to be able to get the speed back up.

 

[Zetor]

@Elwro:
Sorry I couldn't help more, it's been quite some time since I last played -- I remember that turning sounds off completely (from the setup program) was what made NWN (marginally) playable for me. Getting MW to work (and Deus Ex, way back then) was much more tricky, using that camera hack thing to reduce the draw distance beyond the minimum but it worked.

@Ibbz:
No, it wasn't net lag -- I'm on a pretty good DSL connection and the host was using DSL as well. Now, DSL isn't known for OMG UBER speed, but it's stable when compared to cable. (and indeed, there were no disconnections etc) This was definitely an engine problem, because the slowdown / crash happened in single-player as well, not to mention that there were other players with better computers from roughly the same area as me, some of them even using dialup (!), but it never happened to them, even if we were in the same party... I'd crash / get the "portrait bug" and they'd continue normally.
The bug was basically: whenever I was fighting a large number of enemies (around 10), my computer would slow to a crawl and I'd eventually lose sync with the server.
This resulted in all kinds of funky glitches in MP, like "possessing" random monsters in sight (getting their portrait and HP readouts, but nothing else), but not being able to control them, appearing in limbo randomly, flat-out crashing the client... and I had to close down the client / restart it in every single case. Heck, when I was using W98, I had to reboot in case of a crash because NWN's huge memory footprint wouldn't go away when it crashed.

Perhaps this bug (these bugs?) was / were fixed later on (the last patch I've seen was the one that fixed the AC bug introduced by 1.26 ), but after I got burnt out on NWN, I didn't care to go back to it again. My current system (p4, gf4, blah blah) should be able to handle it, but ... eh. I've ranted enough about the faults in NWN's multiplayer already.

-- Z.

 

[Azael]

I still want another JA game.

Who doesn't? A Jagged Alliance 3 could kick some serious ass. Too bad that it's unlikely to happen.

 

[Elwro]

First, thanks for all advice and tips on dets versions, it will come in handy for sure.

Windows 98 won't even use anything above 128 MB. That may be 256, but I'm not sure. Regardless, a machine running WIn98 with 512 or more megs of RAM won't use most of that.

Well, as Ibbz said, this is not true. It's just that when you have 512+ MB, you have to mess with system.ini in order to get the MS-DOS prompt to work.

 

[Jed]

I'm not really that fond of the CRPG industry as of late, either. That's why I've been playing independent CRPGs with the occational "professional" one thrown in just to see what's up with it.

I'm feelin' the CRPG blues, too, Saint. What are you playing? Pity my foolish stubborness, I'm still chipping away at PoR2...

 

[Vault Dweller]

I still want another JA game.

Who doesn't? A Jagged Alliance 3 could kick some serious ass. Too bad that it's unlikely to happen.

Well, apparently it's not as unlikely as we all thought.

RPGDot: How are chances to see Jagged Alliance 3 one day?
Robert Sirotek: Chances are excellent.

Read the whole thing here http://www.rpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10053&ID=598

 

[Ibbz]

This resulted in all kinds of funky glitches in MP, like "possessing" random monsters in sight (getting their portrait and HP readouts, but nothing else), but not being able to control them, appearing in limbo randomly, flat-out crashing the client... and I had to close down the client / restart it in every single case. Heck, when I was using W98, I had to reboot in case of a crash because NWN's huge memory footprint wouldn't go away when it crashed.

Perhaps this bug (these bugs?) was / were fixed later on (the last patch I've seen was the one that fixed the AC bug introduced by 1.26 ), but after I got burnt out on NWN, I didn't care to go back to it again. My current system (p4, gf4, blah blah) should be able to handle it, but ... eh. I've ranted enough about the faults in NWN's multiplayer already.

I've had the random monster possesions - by that stage though it was pretty obvious the lag was too much. Only way i found to get out of it was to log out and log back in.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I'm feelin' the CRPG blues, too, Saint. What are you playing? Pity my foolish stubborness, I'm still chipping away at PoR2...

I've been playing Geneforge again.

I didn't think PoR2 was nearly as bad as people said it was. It's biggest problems, IMHO, were the dungeon levels were too large to navigate back through once you cleared them and they were filled with too many monsters.

If the game had navigation allowed on the minimap, and the number of monsters were cut by a third to a half, the game would have been much better.

 

[Jed]

I've been playing Geneforge again.
I didn't think PoR2 was nearly as bad as people said it was. It's biggest problems, IMHO, were the dungeon levels were too large to navigate back through once you cleared them and they were filled with too many monsters.
If the game had navigation allowed on the minimap, and the number of monsters were cut by a third to a half, the game would have been much better.

You're spot-on in regards to PoR's failings. I do find it fun, though...in small doses. I liked Geneforge a lot, but I'm not really one to play through games more than once. Can't wait for the sequel, though. I've started Avernum no less than 3 times, but I just can't stand the combat. I'd really like to find some nice, fun indie game to tide me over until Bloodmoon or Lionheart. No new gems out there? Anyone?

 

[Walks with the Snails]

Yeah, I'm trying to finish PoR2, too. It's really not as bad as everyone said, though it does have some pretty glaring mistakes. Movement is a pain, and there are too many combats. Some of the combats can be pretty fun, like I just fought some drow under the cover of a darkness spell, and then I got ambushed later on. There's just too many of them. They really should have waited another 6 months to polish it, then people probably wouldn't have hated it so much.

Just how long is this game? I cleared out the first 4 level dungeon, did all there was to do on the surface, and am on the first level of the catacombs, and I just found a note mentioning the 4th level.

Don't know about other games. There really is a disappointing lack of RPG's out there. I've mostly been getting strategy games from the bargain bin lately. Some of my favorites have been Shogun Total War, Kohan and its expansion, Age of Wonders 2, and Civilization: Call to Power 2.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Somehow I've managed to dodge PoR2 and been successfully avoiding it all these years , but I can't take it anymore. I've replayed Fallout, Arcanum, Geneforge, and even half of IWD2, but ToEE and Lionheart are still far, far away. So is it worth getting PoR2 now? Can somebody summarize it for me?

 

[Walks with the Snails]

Well, a new menace arises in Myth Drannor, and a capable party is sent to dispatch it. Your party of 1st level grunts was told to guard some portal while they did the heroics. Something gets screwed up, and they get butchered and you get sucked through the portal. With no way back, you've got to finish the job and find a way back. This of course entails killing monsters. Tons and tons of monsters. Tons and tons and tons of monsters.

It's really not so bad. There are some interesting characters, and the combat can actually be pretty good sometimes. Since it's turn-based, stuff like initiative, surprise, and attacks of opportunity are in, and you have a little more control over spells (like individually targetted magic missiles and an overlay to show who exactly your fireball will end up toasting). The game doesn't let you pick feats and skills, but that oversight is easily rectified with a character editor. It has a nice atmosphere and background graphics, too. I haven't seen any bugs at all with the last patch, either.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Thanks, WwtS. That was very informative. You did manage to fit a lot of info into two paragraphs including even game intro, mentioned small issues AND a way to bypass them, and hooked me on the combat. I don't know what you do for a living, but you should definitely try writing game reviews and recommendations making sure that you get a cut from all the games sold through your links. :D

 

[Jed]

Yeah, the game has some nice atmosphere; I really like the music, even if it is Moog-a-licious. There's some really creative ideas as well, and some interesting characters. Some of the art is really nice, too. The combat is ubiquitous, and sometimes really slow, especially early on when you're missing 3 times in a row. It's the most PnP-like DnD game I've played, and while this is a cool feeling, sometimes it makes you realize why a lot of things are fudged for the transition to CRPG. I just hit the surface, which maybe means I'm halfway done, and I'm a little burnt out, but I will definitely try to finish the game.

 

[triCritical]

As for PoR2, I think it was a game with tremendous potential, that was left to waste by poor management and shift in the development time. I think if the DnD rules alone had been closer to canon it would have been recieved a whole lot better. But the fact remains they got very little right. I enjoyed the TB combat but I did not enjoy the timer which cause me screw up more often then not because of a lag that my mouse always had with this game. The dungeons were too big, it took me 20 hours to clear just 2 floors of the dwarven ruins. Furthermore, St says reduce the monsters by a third, I say by three fourths. Its obvious your fighting too many monsters when you are only getting about 5% of the XP for them. Not to mention they did not have a timer like FO to speed up the mundane battles and thre were way too many of them. I just didn't have the time to finish a game like PoR2. Like NWN, I thought I was wasting my time on them and stiopped about 25 hours in. Of course in NWN I spend about 80% of that time bashing chest and resting.

Anyhow what am I playing right now, Medieval total war. I think its better then all the other games like it because its empire building and hence faction strategy element is turnbase. That way during battles finger speed and empire management is no longer an issue. I think this is the evolution of historical strategy games, with many units. I have also played a little galactic civliizations and Civ3 this year. Unfortunately there has been no RPG's at all this year that have peaked my interest, and I just don't jave the time to replay games anymore.