Head Starters: How is the gaming experience so far?
Lathspellguest
Member Posts: 60
I'm sort of champing at the bit, here, and with no official release date to look forward to, I'm wondering how you guys are finding the playing experience to be with the official content so far. It's probably been about 10 years since I've played the SoU + HotU campaigns, and I'm getting hit with waves of nostalgia.
Is it worth participating in the Head Start program from a gamer's perspective as well as a tester's? I'm a Mac user, if that matters.
Is it worth participating in the Head Start program from a gamer's perspective as well as a tester's? I'm a Mac user, if that matters.
0
Comments
No faffing about with getting the multiplayer to work is nice.
4k is beautiful.
...but still early days really.
If you are raring to get going in NWN again, this is a great time to do so. There are already quite a few multiplayer servers up and running as well. If you are going to purchase the EE anyway, then I would say go for it. If you are on the fence, waiting to see what they do then I would say hold-fast for now. Your call really. I will be requesting a Steam key on release and moving over to there. If they didn't offer that option I probably wouldn't have bought it yet.
Thanks for chiming in!
Of course I especially enjoy it more because it runs properly on my system, whereas Diamond Edition does not.
Personally I am most excited about the new scripting functions and what we might be able to achieve that we weren't able to before. One example is that we can now obtain a players location when they log out. For PWs this may come in really handy. We may be able to reduce or eliminate other scripting calls to save persistent locations. And being able to save the location right at log out ensures, for the most part, that we can get that player right back where they left off and not back at area entrance or the last place they rested, or the last heartbeat, etc.
So, what are my initial thoughts? They're great! I can tell a lot of work was done to enhance the graphics and add a nice feel to the overall quality of the work. You can tell that Beamdog spent a year working on these tweaks for the game and to have it all run completely smoothly.
Yes, there are still weird bugs present in the OC + expansions. Dorna still has problem disarming traps. You might see some slight graphic hiccups, i.e. traps being occluded under tiles. But mostly, these are all problems that were present in the Diamond edition of the game.
Other than that, the game is otherwise fairly barren. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, don't read me wrong. At this moment in the beta, Beamdog is working with the community to figure out what features to add and what features need improvements.
In my humble opinion, we're a long way away from actual new content in terms of new weapons, new expansions, new stories, possible new classes, and what have you.
It's been a long time since I played NWN - since Rosetta was removed in OS X - and I'm enjoying rediscovering some favourite locations and storylines. I haven't touched any multiplayer content, but I didn't back in the day either. That side of the game doesn't appeal to me.
The last patch switched to openal for sound, and has definitely caused some audio issues. I had to drop in the openal soft dll to get missing sounds to play again. I'm still having some weirdness with sounds playing out of the wrong speakers, and a lot of sounds and music can get distorted, at times. Long term the switch to openal was probably the right decision, hopefully it gets fixed before too long. So far I'm the only one I've heard of that had the missing sounds and sounds out of the wrong speakers, but I've heard others report the distortion.
I have a horse in the race and care far more about weekly development and Trello tickets than I did when I was lurking.