I hate the fact that NWN2’s engine is a pig, but I don’t really get the camera concerns – I just used the mouse wheel to quickly zoom around to any perspective I could possible want. You can also click the F1-F10 keys, or the portrait if you want to grab a character quickly. It would be nice if the game supported RTS-style click/drag box select, like the BG series did, but that’s about the only UI that I miss.
I hate the continued graphics glitches I still sometimes get (popping polygons, mainly). The pigginess of the engine doesn’t bother me, but flakiness really does. It’s better now that I have the NWN2 profile set in my nvidia settings, but it still happens way too often. (Does anyone else get polygon flickering in this game, or is it just me? Mainly on world geometry. Doesn’t happen all the time, but on some levels, especially after playing for a while, it happens waaaay too much. Some texture corruption, too.)
And doorways suck, WHY don’t they make the door arches go transparent? Seems like “object fade” means just that: world objects fade out, but world geometry does not, at least not in any kind of predictable way. Patch THAT, Obsidian! PLEASE!
But I do use the KOTOR-style follow camera and I do use the driving keys, and whenever I’m not going through a doorway I find it quite livable. Looking forward to the third patch, I’ll wait until it’s out of beta though.
I play it the way Ben does, using the default camera style, and move the camera rotation quite a bit. I only angle it differently when the thing I’m trying to target is a little too big (such as dragons and the big foozle).
Sean, I used to have problems too, until I used a combination of Mouse3, WASD, and the Driver Camera.
Basically if you press * until you get to the Drive Cam, then go under options and drop the Camera Lag time down to almost nothing, then use Mouse3 to rotate the view around you whenever you’re not comfortable, it handles and plays just like KOTOR for the Xbox. (I’ve never played the KOTOR series on PC, so I have no idea what the controls were for that).
Wow, thanks for the heads-up. Does it keep them from switching actions during usage of items, such as interrupting it to sing a song or cast a spell? Not to spoilerize anything but towards the end of the game this problem is particularly ANNOYING since you have to baby-sit the person doing a “use” action until it finishes, letting the bad AI take control of your casters.
Also, it tends to cancel Flurry, Parry, etc if you change to a character. I don’t know if that’s an interface bug or what. Maybe 1.03 fixes that ?
I’ve not had camera problems either, except with damage on the dragon (who I finally killed. Take that you big red ass goblin!).
Otherwise, I was too busy swapping between characters to issue commands to watch the game. I wish they had made things turn based, or at least included the option, as I end up pausing all the time anyway.
Arcanum did that. TB, Fast TB, Real time. Plus gunz!
I really wish Troika had survived, I would’ve loved an Arcanum sequel. :)
No you wouldn’t have. You think you would have, but it would be so filled with bugs, you’d be cursing just like everyone else until the community made patches Troika couldn’t/wouldn’t.
I played and beat arcanum three months before its official release date. Yes, it was buggy, but it was totally playable.
I’m with Stusser. In my case, I played ToEE and had great, great fun playing it out of box, while a lot of people were bitching about patches. For the most part, I didn’t have any problems. I’m sorry to see Troika go, and I’m very sorry we didn’t get a ToEE sequel.
Absolutely agree. I would’ve paid $100 for Troika to do Against the Giants with that engine (de-bugged, 'natch).
Blame sierra. I do.
And another. ToEE wasn’t all it could have been but I still had great fun with it out of the box.
Hell, I would have paid $500 for it. It’s one of my biggest gaming disappointments, that we won’t get to play it. I got into computer gaming because I hoped it would be similar to my tabletop Against the Giants D&D campaign.
I always have, and still really do, like TOEE, warts and all. I wish they had the time and resources to have made the entire, polished campaign in one game - Hommlet, Temple of Elemental evil, Giants, Drow, Lolth – it really was too limited in scope.