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Still waiting for the new music/movies


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I would like to know if Lucas Art and Obsidian just wanted to make fun of us by talking about a patch comming soon with sterea music tracks and "hight def" movies.

 

There was a post of a dev saying it was ready but the bureaucratic structure was making the release a slow process.

 

With this announcement a guy who was remaking the music decided to stop his project as Obsidian would ship the original tracks, so duplicate ?

 

Now that was 2 months ago. More or less, I've stopped to count the week since a while now.

 

I know that Obsidian doesn't have a communtiy manager as it was one of the reason to close this board, but how much would it cost you to SAY something once a while ? Is it too much to drop a reply to custermers ? Yeah I understand that's surely more exciting to talk about a upcoming project that about one covered by dust.

 

I will not stop my rant with an useless "I'll not buy NWN2!", I'm weak so I'll surely buy it but I'll not preorder it and I'll buy it "soon" after the second patch (which means in Obsidian terms "maybe tomorrow, maybe next year").

 

Aaaaah I know it's like pissing in the wind but I feel better now....

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I feel your pain. :/

 

I'm not going to buy any of their future games without reading real gamer reviews on them simply because I don't want to end up waiting months before the game's high res movies come out in a patch. ;)

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The only thing that I can think is that LucasArts are holding back the patch to roll it up with other bug fixes and make a "super-patch". This is in keeping with what happened in Kotor 1: first patch addressed high profile issues, second patch was much bigger, and the third patch just tidied up a few things that sneaked through as a consequence of the second.

 

However, the stated reason that the music and movies were withdrawn from the first patch was because of the size of the download. How is waiting to add more content to the patch going to help that?

 

Other people have speculated that LucasArts don't want this patch to see the light of day. There is some truth in this. Publishers hate to see patches because they are the confirmation that their products are less than perfect; it doesn't matter that the forums are on fire with discontent - does anyone seriously believe that LucasArts even know what is happening on their forums, anyway? Of course the biggest problem with this theory is that LucasArts commisioned the work for the music and movies patch in the first place.

 

It is, however, interesting to speculate as to whether either they or Obsidian gave any thought as to how a patch of that size (movies currently stand at over 800Mb) would be distributed, though...

"We were hoping we could bring the Xbox platform into December but didn't want to make the formal announcement until we knew an earlier ship date would not compromise the quality of The Sith Lords," says Producer Mike Gallo.
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I think their best bet is to approach the PC game magazines and get it in their cover discs. Otherwise it would be windows xp service pack 2 all over again...

"We were hoping we could bring the Xbox platform into December but didn't want to make the formal announcement until we knew an earlier ship date would not compromise the quality of The Sith Lords," says Producer Mike Gallo.
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I can understand reluctantly releasing hi-def movies (like bandwidth and stuff) but music and the rest should be released.

This is a general internet question, but how come they just can't heaps of mirrors on places like FileFront, Fileplanet, and all those sorts of things. If they're really crazy on bandwidth maybe they should have like a 100mb-type music/game patch, and have the movies on say, BitTorrent. I can understand companies hating BitTorrent but really, the whole bandwidth reason is one of it's major strengths.

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Pure Pazaak - The Stand-alone Multiplayer Pazaak Game (link to Obsidian board thread)

Pure Pazaak website (big thank you to fingolfin)

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Agreed on music; much smaller.

 

I think that the movies were a bit of a problem from the beginning; as the fourth game disk has less than 200MB free space there was really no chance of including them there, and distributing a game on five CDs is such a rarity I can't think of one. Maybe it causes packaging problems? I know the fourth ends up in it's little paper sleeve...

 

The alternative of course is DVDs, but we aren't quite in that place yet were a game can be released exclusively on a DVD format without excluding a fair part of it's intended audience.

 

Putting the movies in after the fact must have become a major problem. Bink files don't compress, the current movies are over 800MB in size and the replacements should be bigger.

 

Delivering it through the auto-update thingy is unfair on those behind 56K dial-up who could probably live without it. Delivering it through FilePlanet and its ilk is almost as bad; it takes the bandwidth problem away from LucasArts and makes the download optional, but these download services aren't 56K friendly, either.

 

I don't think there is any way a software publisher would consider BitTorrent in the current climate, either; these services are inextricably linked with piracy in their minds and any association would be politically unthinkable. LucasArts is one of the more litigous publishers which makes it even more unlikely for them to accept this as an option.

 

The biggest problem is the anticipation in these forums. As soon as the release of the patch is announced, someone's bandwidth is going to get slaughtered...

"We were hoping we could bring the Xbox platform into December but didn't want to make the formal announcement until we knew an earlier ship date would not compromise the quality of The Sith Lords," says Producer Mike Gallo.
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The biggest problem is the anticipation in these forums. As soon as the release of the patch is announced, someone's bandwidth is going to get slaughtered...

 

Very true. That being the case, I wonder if it's feasible to provide a CD to registered game owners for nominal shipping/handling charges?

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Like I care about someone elses bandwith.

 

LucasArts do, and I should say that is the whole problem.

 

I'd just like the ending fixed

 

Not going to happen. Obsidian requested that they be allowed to put cut content back in, LucasArts refused (John Morgan, elsewhere on these forums). Of course, this puts Feargus' press release about being happy with KotOR II as released in a n interesting light; if they were happy with it, then why the request?

 

Our only hope is the TSL Restoration Project.

 

And who do I have to sleep with to get them to start making the cut scenes realtime?

 

You mean rendered by the game engine? The irony is that some of them were. The introduction of Visas (perhaps the one that looks worst lo-res) exists in the game as a rendered cutscene and as a Bink movie. The cutscene can be re-enabled via a patch from the TSL/RP here.

 

[Conspiracy theory corner]

 

One of the things that strikes me as strange in all of this is the behaviour of Obsidian devs. John Morgan has popped up very infrequently: once to say that the cut content was nixed; once to say that the 1.0B patch was done and with LA QA; and to reveal the existance of the content for this patch.

 

LucasArts want to calm people down by giving them something quick, simple and cheap. The music must already exist in high-quality, the movies simply have to be re-rendered at a higher resolution. Quick. Simple. Cheap.

 

Until you have to deliver the content to the customers. What would you do when that hurdle appears? No promises made, the content could be forgotten without too much trouble. But once John made his announcement all of that changed. Two fingers to LA, perhaps? Get out of that one, if you can...

"We were hoping we could bring the Xbox platform into December but didn't want to make the formal announcement until we knew an earlier ship date would not compromise the quality of The Sith Lords," says Producer Mike Gallo.
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Agreed and agreed. I think we have latched on to the movies and music patches' existence as proof that this game will not be abandoned by LucasArts and Obsidian, and that has elevated its importance far beyond anything it deserves in and of itself.

"We were hoping we could bring the Xbox platform into December but didn't want to make the formal announcement until we knew an earlier ship date would not compromise the quality of The Sith Lords," says Producer Mike Gallo.
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All things considered, I don't mind about the movies.

Right now is the problem of movies, so really they should at least put out music and content (quest bug) fixes in first.

Look, nothing is 56k friendly if it involves downloading.

sigpic0yb.jpg

Pure Pazaak - The Stand-alone Multiplayer Pazaak Game (link to Obsidian board thread)

Pure Pazaak website (big thank you to fingolfin)

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