New patch is still buggy with UI and playability
nightofgrim
Member Posts: 7
Sorry to say it guys, but clicking on things is still a nightmare, panning still causes accidental clicks, and spells drop frame rates to insane low levels.
To me, it's unplayable. I know lots of people can manage and still enjoy it, but not me.
To me, it's unplayable. I know lots of people can manage and still enjoy it, but not me.
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The pan/zoom registering as a "move to" command is still there unfortunately and is horrible (many re-loads from dying by accidentally walking into groups of hungry monsters when I meant to pan).
Also, the last click you do on the saving/loading screen still registers as move commands for some reason so saving the game cause my party to move to the location "under" the save/load button (that's the actual saving screen where you name your save, not the one before that).
Further, the iPad version *needs* a way to rotate the move-to markers the way the desktop version does it since BG's original release. Moving around in tight areas can be a frustrating exercise (e.g. you don't want your squishy mage in the back accidentally end up as the front-line tank due to how the game deals with the current location relative to the location I click - well, tap - to move to). Lots of manually positioning every single character right now where I would have just rotated the markers in the desktop version.
On an unrelated note it seems the path finding horror that caused the last member of the party (and others, when in tight spots) to explore the map - as in 'still unexplored areas' - by themselves in order to reach the intended destination is still there but that's for another thread and probably not iPad specific.
I believe the other points are already in the bugs section and the developers are aware of them.
EDIT: By the way OP, try using pause to your advantage to get around the issue temporarily and also set it to auto-pause on enemy sighted. If you pause while panning and planning then at least you won't have your party exploring the map accidentally due to misinterpreted taps (while paused, select the entire party with the dedicated button and tap the x if unwanted move-to markers show up). This doesn't solve the save game button being interpreted as a move-to tap
, however.
Its an interesting, unique challenge getting this game smooth on iPad. My hat's off to the crew and their dedication.
You know, BG was awesome in its day, but I'm looking forward to what this developer does with a new RPG for iPad.
The game is not UNPLAYABLE. There's about a gazillion ways to prove it...please stop overstating the problems.
I will now address the comment you MEANT to post: "I'm finding the interface still frustrating to use after the patch and it's causing enjoyability problems for me."
Your opinion is, obviously, your opinion, and I’m sure Beamdog/Overhaul is sad to hear you are still unhappy with the game. My response is not to you...your opinion is made up. My response is to the tens or hundreds of other people who will read this and say "Oh, gee, maybe I shouldn't buy this game after all if it's that hard to use!"
If you are in this boat, please continue:
1) Clicking on things is no longer a nightmare...it wasn't even that hard BEFORE the patch (pause and zoom are your friends, use them). I'd appreciate an example of what you're having problems with...if nothing else they've gone slightly too far in the OTHER direction: clicking on things is now too EASY and can interfere with proper party positioning in a very limited set of circumstances. I cannot imagine anyone having an issue with properly accessing a doorway or loot drop with how they have things in game setup now.
2) Panning still causes accidental clicks: Yes, yes it does. However, I've also noticed that in many cases what you're calling accidental clicks aren't actually clicks. While the circles DO show up indicating that the characters would be moving there on a pan, the characters actually never do move...while the tap DID register the move request did not. I have not yet determined what causes this kind of behaviour (I suspect that the more careful you are about tap and drag to pan the less likely you are to register a true tap/move command), other than to say it is DEFINATELY possible NOT to move your characters on a pan of the map...I do this regularly and have never once had an issue where my characters have run into trouble because I accidentally moved instead of panned. Again, pause is your friend and paying attention to what you're doing is your friend also. In dangerous situations where you are "looking around" the map, pause the game to make sure your characters don't go running off on a bad tap.
This one's been discussed quite a bit. I'm sure something will come up with it eventually. That said, this is far from making the game "unplayable" or even "difficult". Trust me when I say, you can scroll the map screen without moving your characters into danger...you just need to be more careful with what you're doing and how.
3) Spell Frame Rates: Welcome to Baulders Gate from 15 years ago. This is neither a problem with BG:EE nor with BeamDog's coding or re-coding of BG nor with the iPad or other hardware platforms. This is a problem that has existed since this game was developed and released in the early 90s. To be short, AOE spells have ALWAYS caused this problem. Fixing the issue requires a re-write of the graphics/rendering engine which is neither quick nor cheap nor easy to do. If anyone was expecting a magic wand to be waved and this last patch to have a fix for this, they were sadly mistaken.
This WILL be fixed, there isn't a developer/CSR at Beamdog dealing with this product that doesn't know about Entangle. No one is "sitting on" this bug because they don't feel it's a priority to fix. It was the FIRST bug ever reported for the game on all platforms and (as noted by Beamdog Programmers and CS reps on these boards) will take a while to fix. That said, they're actively working on it (see the last page of the "Next Patch" thread for as up to date info as we have). So far I've managed to get past everything I've encountered without using Entangle or other AOE spells like this...mind you I'm not a huge way into the game but so far it's not causing me issues to avoid AOEs like this...again, not game breaking so far.
4) Party Orientation Fix: This mentioned, this is a HUGE problem (identified in the known bugs and issues thread and in the developer bug tracker database) that us iOS users do need to see an answer to at some point. Again, there's a metric ton of ways around the use of the party orientation functionality but it certainly does cause a lot of extra time wasted manually positioning people in the game.
Again, it doesn't make the game unplayable but this functionality missing IS one of those things that causes some frustration and significant extra work to work around, hopefully a fix isn't far from coming on this one.
I do agree on most of your points and the kind of superlative language being thrown around on the Internet nowadays.
The pan->move issue is definitely a problem for me even with the latest patch, however. Sporadic or not the iPad version acknowledging pan as move has caused me many a death. It almost gave me CPS (compulsory pause syndrome).
The rig I played on 15 years ago made the whole game slow so I can't comment on AOE issues in BG1, neither do I know what AOE with the current version of the engine does to the iPad hardware. Can't remember it being much of an issue in desktop BG2 however? (Keywords: can't remember).
Anyway, @OP: I hope you find the workarounds ok until some of them are sorted out or - and maybe this is nostalgia talking - you'll miss out on one of the finest digital adventures known to man in a splendid version, on the whole. I play BGEE on my iPad as if I were reading a good book: in a comfortable armchair with a nice drink next to me (maybe I'll just find a 'BGEE ale' to set the mood whenever I play, though I foresee some uh interactivity issues if I'm downing that every time).
Actually, yes. Words mean something. We communicate thoughts with words as humans and the words we use DO matter...different words DO mean different things. If you look at your boss at work or your teacher at school and say "That's impossible", that is a vastly different meaning from "I don't know how to do that."
By calling the game "unplayable" you are making a judgement statement and giving advice to others all at the same time. By stating the game is unplayable you are saying "I CAN NOT play this game right now and you will not be able to play the game if you try to either."
"Unplayable" is a broad statement with connotations to everyone with this game loaded on their iPads or who may load the game on their iPads. "Unplayable" is not an opinion, it's an "either or". Either you can load the game up and make the game function properly to accomplish the goals the game is coded to allow you to accomplish, or you cannot. "Unplayable" says "I cannot".
Conversely, "unplayed" is a statement of current being applying to you and only you. "I WILL NOT play the game right now" is very different from "I cannot play the game right now and neither can you."
I have no problem if you want to put your opinion out there that "I feel the interface is annoying enough that it keeps me from enjoying the game, so I am not playing it right now." This is an obvious personal opinion that carries an inherent "your mileage may vary" statement on the end of it.
Why does all of this matter? Because there are many people on a daily basis that see the game on the App Store and say "I wonder what this is all about?" and come to this site to make decisions on whether or not they want to buy the app.
A review that says "I personally am not playing the game right now because I can't stand the interface." is a very different review from "This game cannot be properly played right now."
It is important to make this distinction. Every lost customer to Beamdog is one more reason why they should not make the next game. If too many people post "The game is unplayable" when they really mean "I don't like to play the game because..." it can affect revenue stream and affect future possibilities.
If you want to post a review that says "I hate this game and I don't suggest you pick it up because the interface is crap." I fully support your right to make that statement. If you want to post a review that says "The game cannot be played right now, don't buy it." I call foul and point at the hundreds to thousands of us who are on our second or third play through since we got it.
You're going to call me everything from picky to a grammar ass-hole for this post, feel free to do so. Words...do...matter...
--Illydth
In the same vein that hardware is no stronger than its software, software is no stronger than its interface. The difference is of course that hardware with no software is a non-starter for the end user, whereas bad interface choices can sometimes or even often be worked around - the interface is still there. In the case of BGEE on the iPad it can absolutely be worked around in my opinion and besides a few annoyances it works well on my end, but I can also see how someone could eventually be deterred from playing with, say, the pan->move issue (even more so if they don't realise how to set-up auto-pause in time and manually pause when necessary).
On "words", there's a lot more to communication than simple lexical meaning. The problem is of course that written discourse is often interpreted in a more direct sense, hence all the misunderstanding on internet forums. It often stems in both the original poster misunderstanding how the written medium can make a statement (that would have worked fine in spoken discourse) to be completetly mis-interpreted, but it can also be the follow-up poster's unwillingness to comply or try to interpret the original poster's intention (or simply misunderstanding it). We miss prosody and other stimuli (micro contexts, gestures and other feedback channels etc) that makes spoken discourse so much easier to deal with when it comes to both conveying the "real" intention and meaning behind an utterance and also how the listener goes about to interpret this "real" intention and dismiss other, possible meanings. Implicatures for everyone!
We also parse written discourse differently; errors and grammatical mistakes we wouldn't even realise were uttered in a spoken discourse might end up working against a poster in that the rest of his/her statement is now treated and interpreted differently, with possibly negative consequences.
Add the fact that many of us aren't native English speakers (I'm one of them) in a world where English has become lingua franca and giving the benefit of the doubt should be seen as a rule, rather than as an afterthought.
All in all, I think you're both right and wrong, Illydth.
Because this argument is entertaining to me and I have nothing better to do...that's why.
Unplayable is NOT subjective. You may see it as subjective and you may USE the word subjectively, but unplayable has a definitive definition that indicates (in this case) that the game cannot be played.
This game is not unplayable. You may choose not to play it, you may not like to play it because of an aspect of the game, you may even find it too challenging for you to enjoy playing, but none of the above make the game "unplayable."
If the game will not load past the title screen, that is unplayable. If the main quest in the game has a broken piece to it that disallows the next room or level to be unlocked, that is unplayable. If the game crashes every time you perform a required action, that is unplayable.
Being frustrated because a click and drag causes a click action does not make the game unplayable unless the game crashes with every click action. Being annoyed that an AOE spell causes a framerate drop does not make the game unplayable unless you must cast an AOE spell to complete the game and the Framerate drop causes an application crash.
Every language is full of many different ways to express your frustration with a game's bugs or bad interface design, yet "unplayable" is the keyword everyone throws around. In almost EVERY CASE this is hyperbole and no where close to what the definition of the word means.
It is pervasive in any gaming discussion to call a game unplayable for everything from having a problem downloading it to any minor frustration ("The first boss is too hard, I actually had to try TWICE, the game is unplayable!").
My son plays Minecraft, he REGULARLY shouts out "HACKER" Every time he dies. Hacker = I died and didn't want to.
In the same way, "Unplayable" means "I don't like something about this game!"
In much the same way as I ignore my son yelling "Hacker" when he's upset, I tend to ignore anyone calling a game unplayable since they're likely doing nothing more than bitching about some minor inconvenience or PEBKAC (Look it up) error they've experienced.
Words matter.
It *is* subjective whether you agree with that or not.
You seem to contribute a lot to this forum in other threads so maybe it's just the matter of a long time fan getting a bit too upset over how someone can not work around a few annoyances in the UI to see the greatness of the game and Beamdog's fantastic effort that is bringing BG to a mobile platform. Understandable.
After all, most of us on this forum *are* a bit fanatic (and I like it that way).
Anyway, I'm out.
Do you like it? Play it.
You don't? Don't.
The frame rate was a problem for me at first, but I chose to adapt rather than standing firmly in my dislike. That's another option too.
Do as you will, and I hope that you find happiness in doing so.
Although it might not be edible [I] for that person [/I] in a subjective sense, it IS still edible. The negative effects might not make it worth eating (or playing BG:EE) [i] for that person [/i] but it is still by it's very definition edible. There's a difference between subjective and objective.
If I say that it is unedible [i] to me [/i] it is subjective and from my perspective it is. From a general perspective it might still edible (or playable) though. Based on either the fact that it ACTUALLY is edible (or playable) in the sense that it is chewable etc (or start and plays on (certain) computers) OR on the fact that it is edible for many people (or playable for many people) but not what some people prefer perhaps due to negative aspects such as for example taste, allergies or cultural upbringing.
Edit: HOWEVER that something is unedible or unplayable is BOTH subjective and objective. Not just one or the other. Therefore if we discuss somethings edibleness both perspectives should be taken into account and the subjective reasoning can prefferably be made clear.
(Edit 2: Crap, this post didn't come out quite as clear as I expected/intended when I started writing. And how do I make parts of my text italic?)
"Edible"/"inedible," being a demonstrable quality, is much less subjective than "playable"/"unplayable," so perhaps this was not the most fortunate of metaphors.