This is the kind of user friendliness the PC excels at!
“The PC”, eh?
Thass right.
Play.com have this for nine hundred and ninety nine worthless Britpence in their sale. I am attracted by the positive coverage, despite the usual amateurishness from Ascaron, but I am seriously put off by this botched patching business.
Also - on sale for so little so soon. Was this a sales disaster?
It wasn’t a disaster, but it came out at a time when there were just far too many huge games for it to sell very well.
That’s really the issue, isn’t it? Even with moronic DRM, Ascaron are making shit up as they go along. It’s going to be funny to see what kind of bugfest they put out for the tree-sitty.
What happened to MS not letting people release games on 360 that didn’t pass MS’s own internal QA?
The exact same thing happened to me. Took me forever to figure out why the patch was telling me I didn’t have the game installed on my machine. Then I did some research and learned I had to install the patches in order.
It gets to about 6% then fails a checksum and tells me my files have changed. This is on a fresh install that I’ve never used.
Then I found that thread on the Sacred 2 site about it. They want me to uninstall, run a custom registry cleaning executable, then reboot after installing the game, then reboot after patch 1, then reboot after patch 2? Installing the game took about 30 minutes, and patch 1 took about another 30. No way am I wasting that much time again, especially if it might not ever work after all of that.
F that. I just gave up at that point. How do you mess up a patch that bad?
“Nice”?
For starters, by not having just one incremental patch - regardless of size.
Yup. Installed Sacred2 - same issue as all the rest.
This is bullshit QA. Just >>bullshit<<
Thanks for the warning. I was considering getting it on Steam with the 5 dollar discount (meh!) but then I noticed this:
3rd-party DRM: SecuROM™
See, I don’t understand why they think they need to check MD5 hashes on the existing files if the patch is just going to overwrite the files with new versions. They’re not doing byte-level revisions to the files like RTPatch, are they?
Well, I didn’t have any securom problems as such. It was the MD5 checksum on the 2.40 patch install that was annoying.
Some other quirks too. Uninstall - which was required to undo the SIN of starting the game even once before patching it up to the latest version was not clean. I used REGEDIT to make sure.
I actually scrolled through the patch notes before starting the game the second time, and noticed there was a problem with Xi-Fi sound cards. I don’t have one - but I do have a Xi-fI HS-1200 wireless headset - and that ALSO causes the game graphics to appear blank. As in - game opens, cutscenes, choose character - start game - another cutscene - then BLACK.
All BLACK. No game viewable at all. Ascaron blames Creative drivers for this issue but has a workaround.
Added the -skipopenal parameter to the sacred2 launch properties and fixed that.
All of this would seem to be a big pain in the ass and damn it - it was. Install on this puppy was 2.5 hours. Assuming I knew what I was doing and had to do it again - it would STILL be 45-50 minutes, assuming I had the patches on hand. And to be clear here - my machine is NOT slow. It’s a 2 month old gaming PC hot rod. (vroom vroom!)
Was it worth it?
Uhm… yeah? Sonofabitch thing is, it might just be. Get past all of that install crap. It’s a shit hot looking game with some extreme Diabloesque coolness. TitanQuest didn’t look this good. Pretty cool so far. Deep too, in terms of game rules. There’s a lot of number crunching and choices going on here. This is not a kid’s game. I may just have to read the manual.
So…boo on Ascaraon for that install crap. But Booyeah on the game so far.
I just picked this up from play.com for £9.99 now i need it to arrive.
Is the game still going through patching or is it just about there?
I really want to get this game but all the install/patching issues are stopping me from buying it. I really hope they clean up this mess.
Cool, great, awesome, killer, etc. Pick one of those if “nice” doesn’t work for you.
Still playing the game, still loving it. After about 20 hours I’ve had it crash on exit maybe 4 or 5 times total, never once in-game.
glyc
Another PC game added to my Do Not Buy list due to its DRM.
Thanks for the heads-up, Aszurom.
So I bought this last Friday based on some good reviews it has been getting from people. I install it Saturday (don’t patch it) and play it for a few minutes just to get a feel for it. I d/l the patches that night and install them Sunday morning. Right after patching I try to run it (version 2.34) and during the loading screen, right when it starts to initialize the AI it dumps me back into Vista, hard drive chugging like an asthmatic. The game is still in the task bar and I can’t interact with anything in Vista for a few minutes. After about 1-2 minutes the game disappears from the task bar and I’m able to interact with Vista again. I try to run it a few more times, adjustt some settings, diable UAC, run as an administrator… all kinds of stuff. I even make sure my firewall has an exception for the game. I go on the forums and see that a few people have the same issue but it seems that there is no fix available. I even see that in the technical FAQ the developers admit that this problem exists and that quote, “there is no easy workaround for this.”
What?
Look, I should be able to play a game I paid for. I had thought getting the “Games for Windows” seal of approval meant the game was supposed to work with, well, Windows. I understand that different computers use diffferent configurations and it’s pretty impossible to anticipate every flaw that can come up when trying to make sure a game operates the way it’s supposed to, but the developers know the problem exists and have yet to fix it. Meanwhile I’m stuck with a $50 brick.
I’m going to Circuit City to attempt to return the game today. I am going to print out the FAQ (the part where the developers admit that it’s broken) and hope that can help my pitiful cause. I doubt they will take it back but I am going to put up a fight for my fifty bucks God help me. If that doesn’t work I am going to contact Ascaron and see what happens.
Sorry for the bitching, and I’m glad that at least some people are having fu with it.
I’ve been wanting to pick this up, but I’m holding out hope that the 360 version will be fun and not have all of these bizarre bugs.