Preface: The game is great. Here is the story of reality following super anticipation.
Well, I’ve had at it for 5 hours. That 5 hours contains mostly setup, video tweaks, Prelude (finished), and 2 multiplayer surrealistic experiences. After so much freaking hype (I literally woke up at 5am the last two mornings thinking about this game) there was bound to be some let down.
Letdowns:
My computer is struggling with this baby. My frame rates are on the poor side, and my audio card is stuttering all the time. Naturally, this isn’t a complaint about the game, but it does put a damper on the experience.
The multiplayer does remind me an awful lot of Vampire:TM. Mind you, this is the first night, and I was online with strangers. And, after watching a Gold Dragon stomp around in the prelude part following some adventurers (the DM and his friends I guess), I had to get out for fear of being annoyed to death. As plenty of people have said, the game really shines most with a group of well controlled friends. You can’t just join up like an Everquest or a DAoC and expect there to be plenty to do no matter what. If you show up late to the party all you’ll do is follow a swath of dead monsters until you catch up.
The text communication is pretty small, and kind of all over the place (above my dudes head, and the info feeds on the text bar in 2 separate sections). I had a hard time in the multiplayer figuring out who was talking to what. Half the time I didn’t even know who was a pc and who was an npc.
The game rocks. Now, I just gotta break through my imaginings of what the game was going to be, and get comfortable with what it is (which is a lot!).
Really? Color me officially surprised. I had no problems with the beta, and I have, literally, the minimum system requirements. (Well, okay, a little extra RAM and a GeForce 2 Ti card, but other than that, the side of the box seems to be talking about my poor system.)
My only letdown with the game is that I didn’t get my pre-ordered copy today. Hopefully it’ll be here tomorrow.
Hey Murph, sorry it didn’t come yet. Yeah, I usually do ok with my rig, but I guess its getting a little long in the tooth. Its a 2 year old Dell, 600 mhz, TNT2, TBS Montego sound card, with 256 RAM. I just jumped back in and I would guess I’m getting 10-15 fps. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. I played a lot of WW2OL at roughly .3 fps last summer, so this is cake. Its definitely a game that could call for a systems upgrade.
I have a strange question: The solo game is choppy, and the cut scenes skip and stutter, etc. However, when I go online, the game is smooth (on a good server) and the video plays great. Isn’t this a clear indicator that my machine is over matched?
That’s odd. The video cutscenes were always really choppy and stuttered, too. I’ve never been able to sit through one in its entirety.
I’m running a 450 MHz processor, at this point. I’ve got another motherboard/CPU combo, but I’m waiting on compatible RAM to have a working set again, so I’m stuck with my K6-2. I had no problems with the beta (which was, admittedly, online-only…It’s interesting that you’re getting smoother framerates online than in single-player. No offense, but I hope that I don’t have the same problem!), even on this set, so it seems odd to me that you’re having problems. I wonder if the single-player is substantially different behind the scenes. I didn’t think it was, but this makes me wonder…
I’ve mucked around the single player game for about 2 hours. I’m extremely impressed!!! It’s like Baldur’s Gate in 3D, and you only control 1 main character!
The frame-rate is excellent on my machine, no complaints there.
I’m really interested in the Toolset. I’ve fiddled around with it for another two hours. I’m finding it really beautiful, but has some shortfalls, esp internet mp.
The graphics and sounds are wonderful. It’s easy to create a nice looking scene. It’s like those rub-on comic scenery toys I used to play with as a kid, but in 3d! Even creating conversations that branched was a breeze.
I am having a difficult time rotating buildings. Can it be done? Also, to test module, you have to LAUNCH the game. Kind of a drag. Too bad there is not an option to immediatly jump into your world.
ANyway, I guess I need to RTFM. I am glad it’s hefty, I just hope there is good info on the toolset.
So far, it’s EVERYTHING I’ve expected it to be. Of course, I’ve only had it for 4 hours.
Oh… the internet multiplayer SUCKS! :evil: Horrible horrible interface. EVERY game I tried to log on said the password was incorrect! I made sure to hide all password protect servers. I even tried to direct connect with an IP that someone was kind enough to message me. He had 17 currently playing and said he had NO password. We were both running the latest 1.18 patch. Oh well. Hopefully this gets resolved soon. I’m more interested in playing custom modules in the future.
If a building is a tile, you can rotate it to face any of the four ordinal direction by right clicking before you place it (select the building, move your cursor over the map and you’ll see the ghost image of the building you are about to place, right click to get the facing you want, then left click to place). Placeables (in the Placeables menu) can be rotated freely, but tiles have to face NSEW (so that the tiles line up).
I could spend the better part of a lifetime just fooling around with the toolset. It’s really, incredibly cool. Start messing with area properties–colored fog and lighting, ambient sounds (and sound placeables), music… you can take two areas that are otherwise identical and make them feel like completely different places just by messing with all the ambient stuff.
In the beta, we had to have an account registered over at the NWN forums at bioware’s website, and they used that account when we joined a server. If you don’t have an account there, it sounds like that might be the problem, but if you didn’t have a sign-in, you could never make it so far to select the server, so maybe that’s not it at all…
Very strange problem you’re having. Have you e-mailed tech support?
Trying to play this game with a TNT2 is not a great idea. Or a really slow processor (sub-800 MHz). It’s a pretty 3D game with a lot of cool particle effects and, if you elect to use them, really amazingly nice textures. You can zoom WAY in and still have a lot of detail.
But if you’ve got less than a GeForce 2, you’re not going to be able to turn on all the shadows and grass and stuff.
As for the stuttering movies: hmm… that sucks, and it could be a number of things (really fragmented hard drive, low available RAM, sound card drivers, blah blah blah). The first movie isn’t a lot, but the end of Chapter 1 is when the plot starts to get really cool and the intro movie to Chapter 2 is definitely worth sitting through. Same paitings scaling out while some guy reads narration, but man–the things that happen!
Anyway, jumping right into multiplayer is probably not the best way to get a good feel for the game. Particularly not with some dumbass DM who’s just dropping dragons into the Prelude or whatever. The first chapter is a bit chaotic in terms of quests (you have four main parts you can do in any order, and a whole mess of side quests) and it can be hard to keep it straight if the players are scattered all over doing whatever.
Best to play it yourself until you’ve done most of Chapter 1 and have your bearings straight.
Oh yeah, and you can change how much feedback is in the chat/log windows by right-clicking on the top bar of them and enabling/disabling different types of messages.
You can also drag the top bar up and down to resize them.
I haven’t email support yet. I wanna at least flip through the manual a bit first.
I wasn’t the only only having the password problem. I’ll take a look at the official forums as well.
I can see that jumping into the mp so soon could be trouble just by reading some of the text in the chat. I just wanted to see what it was like. I don’t plan to advertise my server or worry about playing there on that mess unless it gets cleaned up and people lose interest in the novelty of hosting a server “just because”. :roll:
Yeah, what Jason said. No game design can compensate for a crappy DM, unfortunately. Find better people to play with (or ideally, get a group of friends together). This game isn’t Everquest–I’m guessing it’s going to be a lot more fun to play with people that you know.
For one, I’ll say that the tools (both the editor and the DM client) are worlds better than what Vampire: the Masquerade offered.
We’ll have to put together Qt3 gaming sessions for the game. Less riff-raff that way.
Rob: If your videocard isn’t integrated you might think about upgrading to a cheap GF2 level card. You can get a GeForce 2 GTS-V (better than the MX cards) from Newegg.com for $50 including shipping. You could get up to a Radeon 8500LE for $108 w/shipping. Either would be a pretty big step up from a TNT.
I agree with both of those – especially about us getting together a server or two or something for those of us here to join together and journey with semi-trusted company. Gotta be better than wandering with some random people, although my experiences in the beta test were unquestionably positive. I didn’t run into a single idiot.
I also get so much audio stutter during the cutscene movies as to make them unplayable. However, when I view them externally using the Bink video tools, they run just fine. Hmmm. That said, you could try viewing the cutscenes that way, assuming that they are standard Bink files as in the beta.
Got my halfling monk to level 4 and am almost passed the prison areas… so far the game is good, but its lacking something, single player wise. I think I miss the party mechanics of the BG games most. Its odd how much flavor npc’s made the BG games so fun… even with IWD.
Anyway, besides that, the games been solid for me. No crashes or weird anomalies. The graphics are GREAT. I dont get how people think the graphics in this game are just okay. The spells look awesome, better than in MW and DS… actually they remind me of console effects from the likes of the Final Fantasy games. I like how the combat plays/feels like table pnp rpging… round for round. and the monk with cleave and flurry of blows is cool. he does his kicks and punches and every once in awhile a roundkick! it looks cool and plays cool.
And the toolset is VERY cool. Making basic maps in NWN is easier than making maps for a blizzard rts (which were already easy!). Solid game. Though looking at the number of tilesets… seems a little small. But im sure theres more to it.
Thanks guys. I guess this weekend just became 'Adventure into the Great White Box" to replace the video card. By integrated I hope you don’t mean ‘straight from Dell’ because that’s where I got it. I up’ed my RAM once on my own though, so I’m feeling like a master techie.
