Beamdog Update, February 20, 2019
JuliusBorisov
Member, Administrator, Moderator, Developer Posts: 22,754
in News
A month has passed since our last livestream. And what a month this has been!
Catch up on all the latest studio news and updates on our games on the Beamblog!
Catch up on all the latest studio news and updates on our games on the Beamblog!
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Needless to say, I find this extremely lamentable. Luckily, I didn't fool myself into expecting anything happening on the UI front at this point, but since now we have confirmation of no work being done on the PC UI, I will make sure not to buy anything else from Beamdog until this situation changes.
I'm sure they won't miss my $5 worth of DLC purchase power, but I can't in good conscience support a company that displays this sort of neglectful behavior towards its games.
Gosh, what's up with all you people? I've been reading the forum for 5 years, and such comments just leave me speechless. Yeah, "neglectful behavior"... This comes after 2018 saw the 2.5 patch with more than 1600 fixes.
Please don't take it personally, it wasn't meant that way. I'm sure you know my complaints by now. If not, let me share with you this reminder.
Your company has just announced that after a month shy of 3 years there still isn't any work being done towards fixing the PC UI. That's pushed the matter just past the limit of my patience as a customer. Once you take steps to rectify the issue, I will retract my disavowment and I'll be a happy camper once again. It's as simple as that.
you can play the game just fine.
"It doesn't bother me, so it shouldn't bother you" doesn't cut it. It's a subjective matter, and it does bother me, so I, the subject, took a personal stance against it. You don't need to agree with me.
I thought Gaider hired 5? Where did the other 4 magically disappear to. This does not give me any hope that a new game is being worked on at all.
even though this is said right after:
"it’s likely that the next things you see from Beamdog will be original products, instead of more Enhanced Editions. We can’t say for certain what the next project is. Right now we’re looking at our options."
So it is sounding like whatever Gaider was brought in for has been shelved, or else that would have been the next project.
That also means fan requests of other classic crpgs, something they don't need a writer for, is also not on the agenda.
I am really curious to know what options they have.
This update basically tells desktop players that no (visual) updates will come for a looong time. Going by Beamdog's own setted records, we may very well have to wait until mid 2022 for patch 2.6 to reach all platforms. Especially since A&A:O hasn't even gone into Early Access yet.
We can’t get into any specifics regarding new story content for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, but there are things currently in the works. We have one full-time writer in-house, and work with external writers as opportunities arise.
Do you mean that you have one writer just for NWNEE or as total in the Beamdog team?
I guess I shouldn’t be holding my breath.
I am done.
64-bit and the new renderer are in the process, and quite advanced.
Catmull-Rom was in a previous version no? You can't reuse the code?
@JuliusBorisov do you have a list of what will be fixed in 2.6?
Bugs like https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/72308/unaffected-by-effects-from-the-flail-of-ages-4 are show stoppers for me. I cannot bring myself to invest the time to mod the game (and I would install quite a number of mods) and start playing if I know things like this are broken (this bug was not in 2.3 as far as I remember ?). This takes the fun out of it, for me at least. I can to some extent feel with the people complaining about the UI I believe, although I take the current UI every time over broken game mechanics.
So, I am really hoping patch 2.6 gets released. On the plus side maybe SCS 32 will be released by then and work with 2.6 flawlessly :-)
This is exactly what I've been arguing for many months now in the face of some here (not you @deltago) who kept getting mad at me for saying so. Now Beamdog has confirmed it. The project Gaider was hired for was canceled, and there is no current project for a new game.
The way the answer was phrased leads me to believe my question was fundamentally misunderstood.
I mean, can ESRGAN even be used for dynamic in-game scaling? IIRC, ESRGAN was discussed on these boards to upscale art assets regardless of zoom level; once put into the game, they'd look generally prettier but would still be subject to the in-engine Nearest Neighbor or Bilinear scaling when zoomed in or out. Catmull-Rom would replace either of the latter two. In other words, ESRGAN and Catmull-Rom are not mutually exclusive and would do different things.
He actually hired 3. I probably counted him and Phil, who both left the company as 4&5 in my head.
Well I was misled by this: http://blog.beamdog.com/2018/02/farewell-to-dave.html which states:
Most lasting, Dave has built a creative team that will shape the stories Beamdog tells in the years to come. He has freely shared his incredible wealth of storytelling and narrative design experience with the developers, designers, and artists around him. We’ve all learned a lot from Dave and we hope he picked up a trick or two from us as well.
and
Someday we will share the fruits of his labour!
That was only written a year ago. Axis & Allies was already being worked on then so it wasn't as if the entire team was shifted to that project. There also isn't a story or narrative design to A&A.
He also hired 3 Narrative Designers back in August 2016.
So if I am going to ask anything, its are we still being strung along with the hope that Beamdog is going to release a game with narrative design in the near future?
One fulltime writer does not cut it if they are.
That's all I need to hear. Take all the time you need. Start a Kickstarter if necessary. Long as I know NWN:EE isn't dead
UI updates scheduled to come to PC by Christmas 2023
Now that's odd. If I remember correctly, 2.6 was ready back in December but postponed due to a problem with the voice pack. These two are meant as one thing or did the team decide to use the extra time to include more fixes?
However, my concern is every time a new store/environment is supported and included in the release process, it adds more time to the release times of the updates. And I'm not talking about additional weeks here, I'm talking about years. So, with the addition of consoles, it looks like every new update to these games will take around 4-5 years.
Either Beamdog will find a solution to break this cycle, or this is the way I see things will be moving on.
Until console port was released I was kind of hoping that the game's life cycle is coming to its end so there would be some kind of closure to it (which would be really practical for me as a modder), even if some bugs remained. Instead, there will be more waiting, possibly for years, with only vague indications of what might happen with it.
But to close this comment on a more positive note, I am curious about the console port. Like, reeally curious, because I somehow can't imagine it. If it ended up well, I might even think about purchasing it, because I do own a console and I play some coop games with my wife on it (D3 currently). It would have to allow modding though.
But I don't understand!
The 2.6 patch was supposed to be a smaller patch to be released before the end of 2018. Then we heard it's being delayed, with rumors going about that it's being delayed by the DLC (which is quite frustrating for people that don't care about the DLC), and now we just stop receiving any information about it, whatsoever.
And no, "It's in development." without any information about what is holding things up, or when they plan to release it, or what they plan to address, is no information at all.
Please make us understand!
Give us some patch notes or something!