BG::EE was released too quickly

SamuelVarg

I own a new Mac and have an old PC.

Since the website still says that the Max OS X version will come out two days ago and I have tried to contact @trentoster 2-3 times about when we can expect any release for iPad or Mac without answer I became tired of it and choose to download it on the PC. The download went well... and the I try to launch it. Nothing. Black screen and nothing more then halv a second of music. Crash. Nothing more. No information about hove to fix it. Nothing.

I search the website and see a link that will fix the problem. At least according to @trentoster . I installed it. The same thing. Black screen. Nothing more. Game crashes.

Did the developers become greedy and needed the money before they where ready to release the game? It sure seems so. But of course I don't know...

I'm a little disappointed. But just a little. I still love you guys.

darrenkuo

I feel you can decide if you buy it or not , nobody will force you , even you can refund it.

I believe trent should put the bugs fix in more higher piority , not reply to you ~

I suggest you can re-refund it first and wait for a while when those bugs be fixed ,

SamuelVarg

I did buy it. But when I buy something I want it to work.
Trent and the guys sold something that wasn't ready for the market.

SamuelVarg

I would be happy to pay 50 bucks for it if the game would work. I will not download it for free. Thats stealing.

darrenkuo

I can catch up your points , because my laptop has same crash issue and desktop work well ,

When i play enhanced edition , i figure out it worth to play couple years , if the feature can get better and better and continue support on going ~~

If there are no Overhaul Games , i don't feel BG series can live more longer time in the future ,

Yes , they don't handle it very well , but it is still on going ..

Small company need to make profit first , otherwise they will die and no further BG-EE sereis ,

Market will decide if they were qualified or not later ~

Vittor

"( just get ur money back man. Sometimes people screw up things, thats how lige goes

Zanian

Have you tried playing the game on your Mac through Wine? It might help determine whether it's the software that's broken, or the specs of your "old PC".

mch202

-

SamuelVarg

I will try that. Thanks for the tip.

Paulg

everything works great for me, i love the enhancements, faster loading, saving, sleeping, faster transfer from zone to zone, AND you can wear rings of protection with certain armors now! yay for that, and yay for the new playable characters and the add-on. totally worth the money to me. especially because my old discs were getting worn out and scratched up, and the TOSC disk had damaged data, so now i can finally play that again. super happy, and cant wait for BGII remake. honestly, nothing worth complaining about here.

Zanian

For me, it has been worth every penny. And even if it wasn't, said pennies go towards more remakes and a possible sequel.

Zanian

@TrentOstriga If you really hate this game and company so much, walk away. Staying here to troll and flame is a waste of both your time and ours.

Sar

Never Pirate the game, it's worth paying a good retailer for the games. Gog.com sell all the IE games very cheaply, and modded up they are far better suited to PC play than the EE. I get the serious impression that the PC version was "released" to get money in to work on the mobile device versions.

That's why the UI scales up to a blurry mess, rather than having discrete resolution settings. That's why the text is blurry, the spell icons etc. It's all dynamically scaled up or down, depending on your screen resolution, which is how android and iOS games cope with different device screen sizes.

What they should have done for the PC version:

Incorporated the bug fixes released by the community over the years
Incorporated the Widescreen mod into the main game files
Looked at TuTu and converted BG1 into the BG2 engine in a similar or identical fashion
Fixed the stuff they broke as they went along
Increased the number of screen resolution settings to cater to modern PC displays (1680*1050 & 1920*1080)


Surely the "devs" could have made specific changes to the PC version alone in order to have the game look its best to what will be it's primary audience for the initial release. That initial audience will be the ones spreading the word about how the game runs, looks, plays (and by extension, the quality of work done by Beamdog), long before the mobile device versions get released. Too much bad mouthing about the EE by the time they get rolled out will virtually kill the chances of the mobile versions seeing good sales. ATM the game is virtually heading there already - see the GameBanshee review for starters.

They really should have thought this through better tbh, and known that first impressions last, for a long time, and they are very hard to shake or rectify.

Lemernis

The issues with Intel graphics drivers seems to be pretty major. Doesn't Intel have roughly half of the market? With that large a number of Intel users you can't just blame the problem on Intel. You simply make it work for those customers (assuming that it's a very large number). And if the problems with Intel end up being solved by a Direct X fix, for example, then should this not have been foreseen? I mean, maybe it required a lot more user data than they had prior to release. But then you expand the beta, right?

I was fortunate enough to have an extra computer lying around that uses an ATI video card, and the game runs like a champ on that rig.

But I was pretty horrified when the game repeatedly crashed my computer with a GeForce video card and Intel CPU; and to see my laptop, which also uses Intel, run the game in an incredibly lagged (and unplayable) fashion--and not even playing the movies.

For now I'm playing the game on my computer with the ATI card. I'm not even worrying about running it on the other two computers. I'll just wait until a full fix is implemented.

It's hard to estimate how many customers are affected by the Intel problem. And I have no idea if there was anything Beamdog could have done better in preparation for the issues we saw at launch. But my guess is that some sort of fix should have been made for Intel graphics drivers prior to releasing the game.

Berserk_Alucard

It does seem like a large oversight on Overhaul's part. And I really don't see how all this stuff was missed in the beta testing. As for pirating or attempting to get a refund, well its only been a couple days since it released so I'm going to be patient. If I can run the GOG version with no problems whatsoever on my intel graphics laptop, then surely these guys will be able to patch it up to play as it is intended and it should play fine on my set up eventually.
Its just frustrating...I was looking forward to this so much, and so far I've only been able to play a little bit through due to the slowdown when there are lots of spell animations and things happening.

Berserk_Alucard

TrentOstriga said:

Your problem is the out dated engine. No patch will resolve it. Its the substructure.
Patch will resolve some gameplay bugs. Maybe some crashes. But a lot of customer remain disappointed .

So my only option is to wait until I can play it on a computer without Intel graphics? I read in another thread that if they try and work in DirectX support, Intel graphics computers could work. Isn't that able to be patched in?

RedGuard

Berserk_Alucard said:

TrentOstriga said:

Your problem is the out dated engine. No patch will resolve it. Its the substructure.
Patch will resolve some gameplay bugs. Maybe some crashes. But a lot of customer remain disappointed .

So my only option is to wait until I can play it on a computer without Intel graphics? I read in another thread that if they try and work in DirectX support, Intel graphics computers could work. Isn't that able to be patched in?

I don't know the specifics of what Overhaul are doing, but they have said they are working on it (but not really giving out any specifics on what that may be). I suggest reading around the forum a bit more to get a better picture of what the Overhaul team are saying.

Berserk_Alucard

@TrentOstriga - I can see how developing and updating PC games would be a really big task though, there are so many different PC setups to take into account, and with big games like BG, there would be a lot of things that could go wrong. And it seems they are working on a time limit now, as a lot of fans are annoyed and asking for refunds. They can only work on it so fast.

@RedGuard - Yeah, I'm going to keep playing through as far as I can and wait for something to happen in future that could speed up the performance. I'll try looking, but I'm quite new to this forum and its hard to find threads, let alone individual members hehe =p Thanks for the tip

RedGuard

@Berserk_Alucard No problem. I suggest reading the stickies in the General and Support sub-sections. They should provide some answers hopefully.

GygaxianProse

@lemernis: wow, I'm out of the loop. When did intel integrated graphics become anything more than a punchline? With half the market?
When I built my Pc two yrs ago, int. graphics were getting better. Nvidia and amd had mobo graphics that were barely acceptable for gaming, which was a news story. But the general thought as I recall was that Intel int. graphics suck and cause a lot of bugs.
I have an amd/ati rig, radeon hd 5700gfx. Intel is for Yankees fans. : )

elminster

Check out the windows subsection for bug fixes/workarounds.

SamuelVarg

elminster said:

Check out the windows subsection for bug fixes/workarounds.

Been there. Done that.

IkonNavros

Released too quickly.. not at all. If the Devs would have kept the right production order.. pc original -> pc enhanced -> tablet - that would have saved us from the troubles created with the production order pc original -> tablet -> pc enhanced.

We would have gotten a Full Quality GUI and less Technical Problems.

Miscalculations can happen, but they SHOULD not happen.

Because if you create a pc port from an tablet port, which was in the first place a pc original game, so many small mistakes can flow into the final code base, but i am sure, it is only a matter of some big patches until things do flow.... better.

And to show that that is indeed true, just take the fact that Tablets work well with OpenGL - one more evidence that the PC EE is a 1:1 copy of the tablet EE !! It runs with OpenGL and does not support Directx

It is like consoles. You have more or less a fixed hardware, and nothing can go wrong.

PC is different. You have tons of graphic cards, cpu's, main boards - DirectX would have been the more intelligent way for PC.

Tarquin

SamuelVarg said:

BG::EE was released to quickly

This post's subject line was released too quickly.

Tarquin

IkonNavros said:

Released too quickly.. not at all. If the Devs would have kept the right production order.. pc original -> pc enhanced -> tablet - that would have saved us from the troubles created with the production order pc original -> tablet -> pc enhanced.

You keep saying this. What gives you any indication that this is true?

Beyond trolling, you just seem to not have any clue how computers, software, or programming works. If you did, you wouldn't make such silly statements.

Shadowdemon

GygaxianProse said:

@lemernis: wow, I'm out of the loop. When did intel integrated graphics become anything more than a punchline? With half the market?
When I built my Pc two yrs ago, int. graphics were getting better. Nvidia and amd had mobo graphics that were barely acceptable for gaming, which was a news story. But the general thought as I recall was that Intel int. graphics suck and cause a lot of bugs.
I have an amd/ati rig, radeon hd 5700gfx. Intel is for Yankees fans. : )

I believe that most of the newer CPU's (e.g. i3, i5, & i7) have a graphics chip built right into the CPU. Not sure about some of the older CPUs but they may have had something. I've seen systems from retailers with just that as the only hardware based graphics capability (no additional ATI/NVidia).

I've heard that Intel treats Open GL as a second class citizen for Windows when compared to DirectX so it may be why there are so many people having issues with Intel-based solutions. They don't put the resources in to their OpenGL drivers as they do for DirectX. I really wished they didn't tie this so hard to Open GL.

IkonNavros

@Tarquin one moment, i am not trolling otherwise i would not have bought the EE!

But since when it is forbidden to count the facts together and say what you believe?

If i am wrong, i am sorry. I never planned to insult anyone or anything. Ok? Feel free to proove me wrong, i am interested to listen to your explanation or how you count things together

Tarquin

IkonNavros said:

one moment, i am not trolling otherwise i would not have bought the EE!

But since when it is forbidden to count the facts together and say what you believe?

If i am wrong, i am sorry. I never planned to insult anyone or anything. Ok?

Ok, sure. For not wanting to insult anyone or anything, you have sure said the same thing (that BGEE is a "tablet port") a lot!

So, why do you say this? What features from BG vanilla have been removed in BGEE to make it more able to be played on a tablet? The initial targeted tablet (iPad) has a higher resolution than 1080p, so the graphics clearly aren't dumbed down from the tablet version. Additionally (IIRC), the iPad version was announced substantially after the project began. So why do keep saying this?

Lemernis

GygaxianProse said:

@lemernis: wow, I'm out of the loop. When did intel integrated graphics become anything more than a punchline? With half the market?
When I built my Pc two yrs ago, int. graphics were getting better. Nvidia and amd had mobo graphics that were barely acceptable for gaming, which was a news story. But the general thought as I recall was that Intel int. graphics suck and cause a lot of bugs.
I have an amd/ati rig, radeon hd 5700gfx. Intel is for Yankees fans. : )

I'm no expert on the subject by any means. I just read on Wikipedia that basically it's Intel vs. AMD. And I see a lot of commercials on TV for Intel, and none for AMD.

When I bought a Lenovo laptop about 2 years ago it was a great bang for the buck at Costco, which is what made me decide to get it. It's quite a powerful laptop specs-wise. It has an Intel chipset. I never intended to use if for gaming, though.

The other computer that I have that the game crashes uses a NVIDIA GeForce card, which about 4 years ago was a pretty good one, lol. I only play BG, really. So I never thought my video card would matter for gaming!

I think for the future I will certainly go with AMD and ATI, which is what the computer has that I'm playing BG:EE with so flawlessly.

IkonNavros

Tarquin said:

So, why do you say this? What features from BG vanilla have been removed in BGEE to make it more able to be played on a tablet? The initial targeted tablet (iPad) has a higher resolution than 1080p, so the graphics clearly aren't dumbed down from the tablet version. Additionally (IIRC), the iPad version was announced substantially after the project began. So why do keep saying this?

@Tarquin Just take for example the GUI Do not blame me again for telling it, you just asked, and i do answer, just saying sorry already again, before you accuse me again of trolling friend

It is quite in a low resolution, You can not count the quality demands between Tablets and computers as a 1:1 ratio - There are screens around which can be larger as the most largest tablet The GUI seems to be designed in a way which may look good on tablets, but not on 1080P Resolution on PC's.

Same goes for the New Intro Movie.

For a tablet Version you have to create a bit lower Content, because a tablet is never as strong as a pc... No matter how high the resolution of the tablet is for example.

Now... If it would have been otherwise, the Tablet Would feature more HQ Content, but its the opposite in reality. The PC EE features so much less Low Res Content.

You get it now? If you stil disagree, it is your right to do, i accept your opinion for sure, but do also accept mine.

And please.. Do not accuse me of trolling anymore, i never cursed or humilated anyone at no time Otherwise i could never watch Avatar again without being disgusted about myself

Peace and out

And.. I even tried to defend the EE - Because accusing that something is released too early indicates that the makers have not cared at all. While a miscalculation is not made in the first place, it can happen.

Things are cleared up hopefully by now? My Honor Defended and Restored? I am happy again

Paladin

I think we've got to give the team a bit more wiggle room here. They're a small team without the major dollars that some companies have. I have no doubt that they are working very hard to satisfy their Apple-using fans. It's unfortunate that it is not available yet but I'm sure it will be coming soon.