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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LrdApoc" data-source="post: 3159147" data-attributes="member: 1882">While I can accept the technical brilliance and expandability building this sort of engine offers for the future there is a problem in planning it into technology for today. I think it's great its per-pixel lit. I think it's gorgeous when running at full spec.. however the average gamer - not the power gamer - will not grok that difference and will only see a game that does not run well. D&D is niche but Power Gamers are even more niche within that group.Tech orgasms are one thing but its not bitching to say "Hey, it doesn't run well on a majority of systems."  Frankly I find it interesting the concept is to adopt advanced hardware to give the system and game longer shelf life at a trade-off of low acceptance in the beginning of the products life cycle.Hey face... screw that nose, just drop it. (sorry if the phrasin' on that is too vague)Atari and Obsidian have released a great product. One I am going to write a very commendable review regarding. The bottom line is that without guidance or newer tech than the mean system sold by HP, Dell and Compaq in the last 2 years the game will underperform or garner bad reactions from casual fans of the genre who have seen games like Guild Wars - with a similar camera system and massively online environment - produce amazing graphics on older technology cards with a suitable boost on newer cards.You can justify the performance and technology requirements all you like but frankly it comes down to having an engine that can be played by the majority of your consumers and will not cause them hours of frustration to tweak settings. Most will just bitch and walk away with a memory of what it was like when the expansion or next game from the publisher is released.The biggest problem is the autodetect function on the graphics not suitably detecting thresholds and warning players to set their expectations properly. The poor quality of NWN graphics did not kill it - it was the gameplay that people wanted and got, eventually the graphics became better and folks accepted that it was never going to be a "knock your socks off graphical RPG". Will this happen for NWN2? Sure but it will take some help setting expectations and calming those who purchase it down after they are initially disappointed int he performance. I can remember having similar disappointment in Doom 3 when it was released - it could look amazing - but it took a few years for the hardware to catch up and dialing back the graphics still left you with a good looking experience and solid FPS gameplay.People don't expect FPS graphics in an RPG - Oblivion notwithstanding - they want a great story and good experience out of the box.  That's my take at least at this point. Now I have tweaked my two systems to play the game well. I simply had to turn off the per-pixel shading, shadows, reflection and Normal Maps to get one working well and the other just lost the shadows but I had to spend time reading and experimenting to find the best settings and Atari/Obsidian/Fanboys on the next complaining about my question of how to optimize for my system didn't help much. Two days after Doom 3 hit there was a guide helping people scale their settings. Two hours after Oblivion came out there was the same thing... why isn't something like this available for NWN2?</blockquote>

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