Neverwinter Hate

[Pielorinho]

I think you may need to have your PC/PCs checked out. I and many others I know have ran all those games and we never experienced a quarter of the bugs you mentioned. PC games have to run on thousands of different configurations. Sometimes they don't run on certain setups.

If you have that many problems with that many games, your PC is probably the culprit.

Xar, these were definitely not my machine's issues. I'll be a little more specific:

-In System Shock 2, there's a boss monster surrounded by three floaty things. You have to shoot and kill the floaters before the boss becomes killable. However, because of clipping bugs (I think) in the game, one of the floaters could become trapped behind a wall; since walls weren't killable, that floater became invulnerable. If this was going to happen in your game, it would happen as soon as you entered the boss monster's level; there was about an hour's worth of gameplay on the level before you'd find out whether it had happened. I played through the entire level twice, and it happened both times. The company patched the game to fix this error, but it didn't fix it in savegames where it had already occured; I gave up in disgust.

-In Chapter 1 of NWN, there was a bug such that bard characters who switched out spells on leveling up were considered invalid characters and couldn't proceed to the chapter 1 finale. There was a workaround to this, and they did patch it a week after I encountered the bug, but I had a couple of days in which I couldn't proceed in the game.

-In Chapter 2 of NWN, the barracks are completely deserted. The barracks is well-rendered; it's just that the software somehow dropped that NPC, due to some play trick I did. I've not found anyone else with this specific problem (that Aribeth is AWOL), but plenty of people have said that the game has dropped vital NPCs for them. It's extremely unlikely that this is due to a conflict with, say, Windows 2000: much likelier is that it's due to some action I took in the game. Maybe I walked out of the barracks while a conversation window with Aribeth was open, or maybe I used my teleport stone while in the barracks, or something like that. Some unusual action caused a blip in the game.

And NWN may be more complicated than Warcraft III, but I'm not sure that it's significantly more complicated than BGII or PS:T. And I didn't encounter anything like this kind of bugginess in either of those games.

Yeah, I probably shoulda waited six months before buying the games. I'm too much of a fanboy for my own good sometimes.

Daniel

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

And NWN may be more complicated than Warcraft III, but I'm not sure that it's significantly more complicated than BGII or PS:T. And I didn't encounter anything like this kind of bugginess in either of those games.

Actually, it's a 3D engine that is modular for building and scripting by non-programmers. It's almost definitively more complicated than the Infinity Engine.

I agree with you that the bugs are irritating, but look at WarCraft III. The play hours of beta for that were astronomically high compared to NWN, and they still hadn't accounted for some very basic issues (see my earlier post). Bugs come with the territory, unfortunately. And I'd rather have the game in my hands than have to continue to listen to the smugness of the elitist, lucky-punk beta testers.

Oh, how I loathe them....

 

[David Newton]

Complaining that Neverwinter Nights expects internet access is just plain silly. Probably the main feature of the game is its multiplayer aspect, and unless there is a LAN handy (something that I have, but not a lot of people have), playing multiplayer NWN requires the internet.

So far as other gaming software expecting internet access is concerned, in most western countries this is also not silly. It has reached the point where the internet has achieved mass market penetration, with substantial proportions of the population having internet access (indeed large majorities of some parts of that population). Since gamers have to own a computer in the first place, and almost everybody who gets on the net does it through a PC, expecting a gamer to have internet access is even more reasonable. Expecting someone to have a broadband connection would be silly, since only a tiny minority of people have them, but dialup connections to the internet are now very common.

The limit for dialup downloads is somewhere around 3 or 4 megabytes, any more than that and the phone line is simply tied up for too long, and the phone bill is too big, if the call has to be payed for. Therefore, putting out 20Mb patches for a game is ridiculous, but from what I have seen the patches for NWN so far have been smaller than the limit for dialup downloads I defined above.

It is a sad fact of life that software is so complicated these days that bugs occur. It is also annoying that final QA is often done on Joe Public, but it is the way things are. Unless sustained pressure is brought to bear on many companies by lots of people, that fact of life will not change.

 

[Darklone]

Which feats, specifically?

Point Blank Shot e.g.

If they put several feats together in one, you could as well join Ambidexterity and Twoweaponfighting...

And I miss Whirlwind!

Probably one of the things I hated most was that multiclassing is only possible with a mere 3 classes

 

[Bagpuss]

Yeah but I can see why they have put together the ranged feats togther due to the limited 45 degree angle of the camera you can't see much beyond 30ft ahead. Therefore you only get about one shot off before you end up in melee combat. Therefore the value of ranged feats is much reduced.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

Complaining that Neverwinter Nights expects internet access is just plain silly.

Thanks!

Probably the main feature of the game is its multiplayer aspect, and unless there is a LAN handy (something that I have, but not a lot of people have), playing multiplayer NWN requires the internet.

Multiplayer doesn't enter into it. Some people... er... possibly, a lot of people, cannot proceed on the Single Player unless they can download a patch from the internet to fix it. Come to think of it, the system requirements on the side of the box don't say anything about needing a modem to play single player. Which *I* was very interested in playing. (Currently I have issues that need to be patched for me to proceed any further in the Single Player.)

So far as other gaming software expecting internet access is concerned, in most western countries this is also not silly.

I realize that most people (supposedly) have internet connections of some sort. I also know, personally, quite a few people who don't have any internet connection or don't have a clue how to do anything other than surf the web and send emails. I guess they are just SOL when it comes to buying software.

On top of which, some countries charge for local phone calls and thus the consumer is not only paying for the product but the patch they have to download via the internet. Heck, it takes the updater in NWN around 4-5 minutes just for it to realize that the patch file is not at ftp.infogames.com, but kept over at bioware. Dang thing acts like it's crashed. Only by going "Hmmpph, I'll let it sit and see what happens." did I finally realize that the thing just takes a very long time to figure out where the file is that needs to be downloaded so it can update my game.

I don't think it's right. I think it stinks. But I know the reality of the situation makes it necessary. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

 

[Furn_Darkside]

I don't think it's right. I think it stinks. But I know the reality of the situation makes it necessary. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

I agree and I don't like it either, but until the consumer base puts a demand on better versions of releases by not buying buggy products.. well.. I don't see it changing.

You may want to consider sticking with console games for a while- due to their nature they have to put out a product as bug-free as possible. With the X-box, it seems they are getting a lot of pc games ported to them, Morrowind coming to mind.

FD

 

[Henry]

Doc Klueless:

I'm fascinated by this, because where I live, EVERYONE I know who has a computer at all, has internet access - and roughly 25% of those have broadband access. If you don't have internet access, it's usually because you are running an older PC - one that would have NO chance of running neverwinter Nights.

Approximately two to three years ago, the internet reached a saturation point such that it was assumed that anyone buying current programs for a PC were going to have i-net access. If you don't, the market can no longer support you. Sad, but true.

And not to mean this in an insulting way, but even with the circumstances you described, I found it humerously ironic that this criticism was made on an internet message board.

 

[Xar666]

I found it humerously ironic that this criticism was made on an internet message board.

You rule.

 

[Draconis Imperium]

Doc Klueless:

And not to mean this in an insulting way, but even with the circumstances you described, I found it humerously ironic that this criticism was made on an internet message board.

Good Catch,

It didn't even occur to me!