What a waste of time.
Originalnwnonly
Member Posts: 28
What a waste of time nwn ee has been. A complete lack of marketing or any sort of drive to boost player base.
Tell me what did i pay $40 for ? i could of just carried on playing the old 1.69.
i think refunds are in order.
change my mind.
Tell me what did i pay $40 for ? i could of just carried on playing the old 1.69.
i think refunds are in order.
change my mind.
3
Comments
If you have a steam copy you can try to get a refund but from what I understand they like to push the legal limits of resisting their obligation to provide legally guaranteed full refunds. At one point the steam store tried to get customers in certain regions to waive their legal rights to refunds in the EULA. However if the cooling-off period has already elapsed then you no longer have a right to a refund.
As for the lack of players I believe this has already been discussed ad nauseam. Over the summer some streamers did play NWN EE with the #sponsored hashtag which would indicate paid advertisement. Since the SoME there have also been several sales, each time causing a short spike in concurrent player peaks, as previous predicted. The strategy seems to be maintaining the levels of interest by periodically bringing in new players with sales, at the risk of not converting those players from short term to long term players. NWN DE appears to get more online players than NWN EE during European evenings, while NWN EE overtakes it during North American evenings. For comparison the online players make up about 65% or 70% of the reported steam concurrent players, which helps to extrapolate an approximation of active players. Appending DE active players with EE active players would increase the EE active players to about 160% of the current total, and increase the PW players on EE to about 180% or 190% or the current total.
If you've had the game for longer than several months it's unlikely you can get a refund on any grounds. You could, as you've suggested, continue playing the 1.69 version until you feel that it would be better to play the EE version.
-Dave
People cough up 40+ bucks for kickstarter projects all the time, where you don't get anything til the game launches. With NWN:EE we got an improved version of the game right away and it runs great. I'm currently playing through Daggerford and it's lots of fun.
Maybe that's too generous.
It's like watching something on DVD, and then watching it again in HD Blu-ray.
I still prefer 1.69 with nwnshader functionality. Getting gamma control back one day would be nice as well.
It's a problem that I don't see changing dramatically any time soon. Beamdog were made aware of the branching development of 1.69 servers after their initial announcement but decided to focus on improving NWN EE. It was a reasonable decision but at the same time people explained that it would have a diminishing impact on the total PW population being split between two versions, which is also what ended up happening. Currently NWN EE has fewer players in the PW master list (including lan games) than the old community list + unlisted servers had for NWN DE before the release of NWN EE. However the overall total of players between both versions is more than before.
I would hope that Beamdog would take more serious steps in rectifying the situation by working with community developers of 1.69 servers. I have a feeling that the situation will persist until NWN EE catches up to the NWN DE community developments, and surpass NWN DE in other respects. It may be that tapping another market will boost the player base but I'm skeptical. People were adamant that Steam players would transform the player population back to a golden age which didn't really happen. You would need five or ten more Steams to make that a reality.
That's not to say that there aren't winners in the PW space after NWN EE released. There are perhaps 2 or maybe 3 servers which benefited greatly and account for the majority of EE PW players now. The rest have significantly lower numbers, so if the 2 high pop options don't tickle your fancy you might not stick around. It's not the most healthy situation for the player population, and while gog and android releases might contribute to improving it I don't think they'll have a significant lasting impact overall. 5 high pop servers would be better than 2 give more variation of choice, attract more players, and increase the likelihood or trying low pop servers.
So I think the player base will be unified eventually but I think it might take years not months. We'll also have to wait and see what impact the rumored 3rd expansion will have.
The under the hood improvements are great, but fancy new screenshots and videos are what will appeal to the masses.
I remember seeing the proof-of-concept for the temple graphics overhaul and was amazed, thinking that NWN never looked so sexy. Now I see that we're still some time away from the entire game being made to look that way, let alone be a stable experience.
I purchased the NWN:EE and Darkness Over Daggerford. The premium module had some promise, but with crashes coming about every 20 minutes, it made the experience horrible.
In related news...
This last week saw a big patch for BG:EE, which fixed a lot of Beamdog bugs that popped up in the EE project. This game was released six years ago now (!) and that's a looooong time to wait for bug fixes. I have the feeling that NWN:EE will be great, eventually. But if we all have to wait 6 years for that...
Anyways, I agree with some of the folks here that Beamdog missed a really big window in attracting new players, and it will be an uphill climb from here on out to convince people to buy and try this game. That being said, I don't really harbor any ill-will towards Beamdog for this, I applaud that they are trying to revive it. I think they just got a little too excited and released it waaaay too early. If I recall, they released it only about 6 months after publicly announcing it was in the works. They'll get another window when they launch the inevitable DLC for it, but that will have diminishing returns with each release of DLC.
As I write this, there are actually more people on NWN1 servers than NWN:EE, according to nwnscry and the Beamdog master server. However, these are mostly non-English servers on NWN1, while english-speaking servers are on NWN:EE, so maybe there is room for growth in the international scene. Still, steamapps tracking shows a steady decline in average player count since the April release.
What does stand out, are the 100+ completely empty PWs on the NWN:EE server list. The game badly needs players, and it seems like a lot of the NWN community that is left are builders. I'm not sure that NWN:EE will ever be able to recapture the magic that was the original PW scene with NWN. I remember that PWs were never really meant to happen, the toolset/DM functions were built around the idea of a small group, so it was partly amazing in itself that PWs ever were even a thing at all. People had lower expectations of them and there was definitely a "hobbyist" feel to the scene. Nowadays, to run a successful PW (by measure of large player count), you need an entire staff of semi-professionals to do so, and it will take up a significant portion of your life.
Perhaps Beamdog still finds success in making NWN:EE a game that reflects table-top D&D with smaller groups, but I have my doubts about a flourishing PW community ever getting back to the high water mark it enjoyed in the first 5 years after NWN's original release. And you know what? Maybe that's fine. Maybe it was just a one-shot deal at the time.
I don't want this to come off as a rant really though, and I'm fine with giving them my dollars. The entertainment value I got out of the original game was unmatched in all of my years of gaming (only rivaled by the Civ series) so I don't feel too badly about all of this. But, like others, I'm saddened a bit by the fact that the NWN community waited for a long time for official support and in the end it felt rushed out the door. The funny thing is that as an ex-PW admin, I can definitely relate to rushing something out because you're excited to share it with your community, only to find that there are still some bugs to work out!
Anyways, I'll see you all in six years!
Myself being a huge nwn fanatic, I still get turned off by the awful graphics. I have to wonder just how big an impact a proper visual overhaul would have. I guess from a business point of view a huge investment in an old game could be risky. But the only important enhancement nwn truly needs is the visual one, and years is just too long.
For some reason dungeons and dragons have avoided tablets. I always figured that wotc didn’t like money.
Only bringing bioware classics over, as well as that one card game.
The things that always bothered me about Neverwinter have been
- character customization
- difficulty of getting new modules
- Henchmen/pets/familiars ai
Supposedly beamdog will fix this.
I haven’t played much since release as a result.
Relax, just a little bit. Take a few breaths, and be calmed. Exhale, all the way out, and hold it a moment.
There.
We've all been privy to watching the butcher make the sausage. We all think we WANT to see the butcher make the sausage, and the butcher thinks we SHOULD get to watch him make the sausage. Thing is, watching it from the beginning, for a long time things look pretty bad. Bloody. Messy. Gross. We don't see how it'll all fit into the casing. The flavor will be bad. Ugh, the meat's laying in gobs. Just give us the sausages, NOW! Why can't you add the spices before you do all that, anyway?
I think one only needs to read between the lines a little, to really listen, and hear some exciting news.
1. Mobile is almost done. This will mean backporting for UI mods to the PC game, and almost certainly a gigantic increase in players (and revenue for Beamdog, so they can, you know, continue to exist and make stuff).
2. 64 bit.
3. NWSync.
4. Alan Miranda and the Ossian team ARE PRODUCING graphical content for the game. !!!!! HUGE!!!!!
5. Trent says, "I can see new Premium Modules from other sources (i.e. community teams, etc.). Again, huge news! In fact, his answer was just shy of admittance that such a project or projects are, if not underway, then under consideration. Obviously, I have no proof of this, but just look at his face, listen to his voice, when he answers (PAX stream).
6. We are reaching critical mass on people out there understanding, creating, and deploying the 'new' graphics assets of which NWN is now capable. See the WiC project from @LaputianBird and @Croquette for what this WILL mean for community-produced modules.
So, my final thought is that before Christmas we'll get news on new module(s) being produced. We'll get news on upgrading most of the base game assets as an option (which will be required on the new modules and premium offerings). We'll see more opening up of hardcoded stuff like spells and classes.
Let's see.
Happy Labor Day, to my USA brethren. I'm enjoying a day off tomorrow!
-JFK
I want an improved user interface and maybe some slight updates to the original campaigns before i start playing the title again, as these would be features that directly effect me as someone who wants to play the game. And right now i'm seeing a lot of improvements from a content creators standpoint but none from an end users standpoint.
Its great to give content creators more controls and tools to work with, but if the engine your giving them still uses the same old UI that can simply be doubled in size ( sometimes cutting off parts of it ) then it means less people will play the cool content that these creators come out with.
This is just an opinion from someone who purchased the game on release and haven't seen much enhancements if any at all from my perspective.
Generally small quality of life improvements.
While there haven't been many visual upgrades, there's been quite some "under the hood" improvements that aid builders/content creators. And hopefully there will be more to come, including visual upgrades to the models/tilesets.
Why can’t people just read a good novel or get a hobby like knitting.