Are You Worried About Bugs In KOTOR II?

[zer"0"]

Atari is awesome.

 

You made me laugh.

[GhostofAnakin]

I'm not sure about that. Game sales always reach a peak in Christmas season. It's like if you buy a SW game now, It's ok if you buy another one on March or May, because last one was a 'Christmas gift'. However I don't know many people that can afford/are willing to buy a SW game each month.

 

What I do know is that if they had K2 and Republic Commando competing directly with the EP3 game, sales wouldn't be as good. International sales on those games are going to be hurt, you will see. Unless they pull off another non-simultaneous international release, that is.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I don't think I phrased my comment how I was actually intending. What I meant was that someone who intended to buy KOTOR2 all along, would end up buying it regardless of which month it was released. I suppose you're correct that the "marginal" consumer who is just out to buy a Christmas gift for someone might not make that purchase at any other time, but in terms of people who intend (such as myself and many others on this forum) to buy the game since it was announced, the "Christmas rush" has no effect on me.

 

And thus my second point, that those additional "marginal consumers". Is that additional revenue from those types worth the potential bad goodwill and public relations among actual fans that are loyal to the company? I think they shot themselves in the foot on two accounts. 1)They pissed off the "loyal" consumers who were anticipating this game and 2)These "marginal" consumers probably won't buy another Lucasarts product if they assume that all products are as buggy and incomplete as this one is.

 

I guess it's my business and marketing background that kicks in whenever business decisions are made and seem to have failed, but from everything I've learned, been taught, and applied in my career, it would seem that Lucasarts took the short-term gain over the long-term prosperity choice. But then again, I suppose the current CEO (or whoever made the decision) only cares about THIS year's revenue, since his job could be on the line at any moment after a bad year or two of sales.

[Naso]

"I think NWN only gets support because they're trying to milk it to death with their little online module store. If you took that away, buggyware wouldn't give a ****..... "

 

That's hilarious consideirng that they were rleasing patches way before DD even entered the equation.

 

Buggyware? Hahaha. The pun. BIO's games are usually the least buggy of any PC developer. WOWSERS!

 

Then again, you are the one who seems to maintian that all of BIO's release don't work after 5 minutes so your opinion is moot.

 

 

"Overall Atari is a crap publisher."

 

No.

 

They are still patching NWN because they are still trying to get money out of it. They WERE still patching it because they WERE still hoping to get money out of it as they worked on expansions. If it were an unexpandable game that didn't have the potential to sell more after the initial purchase, I think things would have been far different.

 

I never said NWN killed my computer or that it didn't work. I've had some glitches, nothing game-stopping. I'm somewhat amazed to see all of the basic things fixe and re-broken throughout it's various patches though.

 

KotOR does not work properly on many allegedly supported computers. My buddy got it for a gift and it's past the time he can return it, and it doesn't work at all for him. He can't play 10 minutes without it completely locking up his computer. Tech support doesn't care. The new drivers finally make it work for me, and you can say it was ATI's fault, but considering their past track-record with fixing things quickly, I cannot believe it is nearly so cut and dried and that they would ignore such a high-profile product. When we see the performance issues bioware has with engines, I'm guessing ATI had to do some funny stuff to work around it because bioware wouldn't. That's not proven, but that's my interpretation.

 

NWN was my first bioware game, so I can't really say about before then, but judged on what they're doing now, it's quite buggy.

 

[insert arbitrary statement here] and therefore your opinion is moot.

[Volourn]

"I'm guessing ATI had to do some funny stuff to work around it because bioware wouldn't. That's not proven, but that's my interpretation."

 

My ATI card works perfectly with KOTOR once I updated it. If you remember correctly, there was a very clear reason why certain ATI cards didn't work as well as they could - that's because when BIo was tetsing them were tetsing on the most updated drivers hence the problems - not because of buggy code.

 

NWN works find. It has its ahre of bugs; but that's most likely because it's probably one of the most 'complex' games ever made. That doesn't exuse the bugs outright; but the fact that NWN has so few - if any - outright 'game enders' says a lot. Most of NWN's bugginess has to do with rules stuff. And, this stuff is fixed all the time; and I doubt it's simply because of moneysince its paid out of BIO's own pocket. And, their DD stuff probably sales enough just to cover patches and the mods thesmlves. I seriosuly doubt BIo's gonna make a lot of money on DD. Heck, I don't even buy them and I'm supposedly a BIo 'fanboy'. R00fles!

 

As for KOTOR, well, consideirng the fact that BIO hasn't even ruled out another patch for it (even though 99% of people outside of you and your brother) have very stable copies now that says a lot.

 

My point is that BIo's games are bug free 'cause theya ren't). It's that comapred to other devs; they are much closer to the Promised Land of No Bugs. And, unlike others, when bugs do occur, it's not 'Blame the publisher; but blame the Developer'. BIo seems to take a lot of blame for their bugs and they don't hide from it and they usually try to fix it. Obsidian seems to be a lot more quiet since KOTOR's release.

 

P.S. I like Obsidian, and sure *some* slack should go their way since they are new; but only so much. Not to many new devs get the oppurtunity to work on such sure fire hits like KOTOR2 and NWN2.

[Naso]

I somehow doubt that KotOR was developed using the Catalyst 4.12 code...... What is this mystery function that they used that was pulled from the lineup? Why didn't they simply say what it was? Why did they deny well documented memory leaks? Why didn't they simply say something aside from "the game is perfect. get off my lawn"?

 

I'm willing to make allowances for rule-set breaks in NWN, just the frequency of it, and how they repeatedly break the same things, ruin things that are working, etc, is a bit funny and indicative of their rather addled coding and bad qa.

[Althernai]

"Infogrammes is Atari"

 

They are fantastic supporters of games. Look at all the patches, and other support for NWN. That is an Atari game. Case closed.

 

That's not Atari's doing; it's Bioware's. Bioware has generally been great about supporting their games. Now, they aren't doing this for NWN out of the goodness of their hearts; for quite some time now (though perhaps not from the beginning), the purpose behind their Live Team (the people who do all of the patches and such) has been to set up and then sell their premium modules. Nevertheless, the initiative in creating the Live Team and continued support of NWN for so long was Bioware's and not Atari's. It isn't wise to judge a publisher by a single example.

[Althernai]

They are still patching NWN because they are still trying to get money out of it.  They WERE still patching it because they WERE still hoping to get money out of it as they worked on expansions.  If it were an unexpandable game that didn't have the potential to sell more after the initial purchase, I think things would have  been far different.

 

What do you care though? The patches are free just like they always were. How is it relevant that they are doing it to sell some junk that you are not obliged to buy?

[Naso]

Whether you subscribe to the LA supressing patches or not, the reaction bioware gave to the problems with KotOR showed they didn't have much interest simply helping people play the damn game they bought. That shows us what to expect, especially from such a "great" dev on such projects as this. That's why I care.

[Volourn]

"Why didn't they simply say something aside from "the game is perfect. get off my lawn"?"

 

Proof please.

 

 

"Whether you subscribe to the LA supressing patches or not, the reaction bioware gave to the problems with KotOR showed they didn't have much interest simply helping people play the damn game they bought. That shows us what to expect, especially from such a "great" dev on such projects as this. That's why I care."

 

Stop postiong like the 5 people you represent are even near the majority of people who bought, played, and enjoyed KOTOR1. You ain't foolin' anyone.

[Naso]

A whole tech support forum of people who tried to get help to play the game and gave up is more than 5.... I didn't get the game right away, but the bioware people were not exactly friendly and stopped saying anything about the time the 1.03 patch came out with a memory leak, which was clearly documented by multiple users. That's the part that sticks with me the most at the moment......

[EnderAndrew]

Bioware supports NWN. It's not on Atari's dime. Atari refused to give bug squashing money to Troika for ToEE.

 

Either way, I really believe a big part of the "bugs" aren't bugs so much in KOTOR:2. The game really seems to push the limits of the XBox, and the XBox only has 64 megs of memory, shared between processing and GPU.

 

It locks up, but I haven't seen broken quests and the like.

[213374U]

"Why didn't they simply say something aside from "the game is perfect. get off my lawn"?"

 

Proof please.

How fun of you to demand proof considering you usually don't even bother to back up your own claims with logical arguments, let alone solid proof.

 

Welcome to Denial. Population: You.

[Naso]

Well, I already spent a long time digging through the forums trying to find a fix so my friend could run the damn thing, so if you want it all in triplicate, I'm too lazy, but here's a bit of it. This is a thread I started to see if I missed anything after ceasing to visit those forums for a while, and it has a link to *ONE* of the threads documenting the memory leak in the 1.03 patch. Note the bizarre defense of the catlyst 3.8 as if it were somehow god's gift to drivers.... That was pretty weird..

 

http://swforums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html...Acknowledgement

[EnderAndrew]

Except that old ATI drivers had problems with a variety of games. There are people who use non-manufacturer drives for ATI cards. I like the hardware, but the drivers aren't always great.

[Naso]

Ok, passing over the memory leak and other things, the ATI situation. It is not entirely credible to me that ATI simply had a flaw in their drivers which didn't cause other games to crash and perform that badly. We're not talking about simply crashes to desktops, or full lock-ups, but attrocious performance indicating at best under-optimized code, and the whole gammut of crashing problems. You can say it's all ATI's fault, but they regularly released drivers and responded with fixes to many other games much less popular than KotOR. They were very responsive with drivers and fixes in the timeframe I'm talking about. Other games had random problems here and there. They were fixed. ATI would not have waited, what was it, a year, to release a fix for something like that if the fault were wholly on their end.

[EnderAndrew]

I didn't play KOTOR on PC, so I can't say what it was like.

[213374U]

Ok, passing over the memory leak and other things, the ATI situation.  It is not entirely credible to me that ATI simply had a flaw in their drivers which didn't cause other games to crash and perform that badly.  We're not talking about simply crashes to desktops, or full lock-ups, but attrocious performance indicating at best under-optimized code, and the whole gammut of crashing problems.  You can say it's all ATI's fault, but they regularly released drivers and responded with fixes to many other games much less popular than KotOR.  They were very responsive with drivers and fixes in the timeframe I'm talking about.  Other games had random problems here and there.  They were fixed.  ATI would not have waited, what was it, a year, to release a fix for something like that if the fault were wholly on their end.

This is odd. We both seem to have the same graphics card and I didn't experience any of the problems you mention, only the occasional crashes to desktop after long sessions. I'm still running on the Catalyst 3.10 drivers, I'm incredibly lazy when it comes to updating drivers so, maybe it's a problem with newer Catalyst releases?

[kefka]

ATi's drivers got progressively worse for Kotor.

 

IMO, 4.2 was the best but all revisions after that were terrible. Repeated crashing during load screens, lag, poor framerates, etc.

 

Dantooine was a slide show. I went from about 38fps with 4.2 to 14fps with 4.5.

 

The best solution was to use 4.2 OpenGL drivers for Kotor even with the latest catalysts. <_<

 

Shoddy ATi drivers was the main reason I switched back to nVidia. The 9700PRO is a great card but I got tired of new drivers creating more problems than they solve. So I bought a 6800GT instead.

[Nur Ab Sal]

GeForce rules...

[Darth Grendel]

well seeing as how the international version is still 2 months off..hopefully the remaining dev's will put some work into fixing some of the bugs and stuf in the xbox version

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I hope they fix the International Version. There is no reason why Obsidian can't reduce the problems for the rest of the people in the world - and would help us accept the delay in getting it

 

Here's hoping

[ShadowPaladin V1.0]

I think I'll rent it. It was on my must buy list but now it's not.

 

If you do buy it and you live in the UK I suggest somewhere like GAME which will take the game back and give you a refund if you dont like it.

[Bastilla_Skywalker]

As people have said countless times that they are experiecing bugs in their game I most am in a way expecting to get bugs and unwanted glitches in the game with the way things are going at this point....I hope not though...agh.

[bodrock]

BUY THIS GAME! seriously.

[GhostofAnakin]

ATi's drivers got progressively worse for Kotor.

 

IMO, 4.2 was the best but all revisions after that were terrible. Repeated crashing during load screens, lag, poor framerates, etc.

 

Dantooine was a slide show. I went from about 38fps with 4.2 to 14fps with 4.5.

 

The best solution was to use 4.2 OpenGL drivers for Kotor even with the latest catalysts.  <_<

 

Shoddy ATi drivers was the main reason I switched back to nVidia. The 9700PRO is a great card but I got tired of new drivers creating more problems than they solve. So I bought a 6800GT instead.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

That's what I found too. When I updated my drivers to the latest ones at the time (I believe 4.5 or 4.6), the game didn't run as good. When I used either 4.2 or 4.3, the game ran almost flawlessly for me.

[Ludozee]

BUY THIS GAME!  seriously.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I just did. I pre-ordered the PC version. They claim they can deliver it on the 11th of February! Thats pretty good for a Dutch retailer. Usually we have to wait a month or so before a new game is available overhere.