Support NeoGAF

[FrankT]

Well the framerate in the 360 stream looks good, but he was in a house/dwelling, whats it like outdoors?

I want to get it bad, but mass effect 360 was a technical mess.

Must of been watching a different stream than I was as I saw plenty of outside play yesterday. Regardless, you have someone with first hand experience with it above, and he says "butter smooth".

 

[LCfiner]

Well the framerate in the 360 stream looks good, but he was in a house/dwelling, whats it like outdoors?

I want to get it bad, but mass effect 360 was a technical mess.

I saw previous streams of outdoor stuff of the 360 version and it looked just fine. 30 fps solid.

This does seem to run better than Mass Effect. The one thing that might still be an issue is texture loading. I haven’t seen it but it might still be in there.

edit: or not if the engine is different and this one doesn’t load textures the way UE3 does.

 

[xir]

Mabari Crunch is pretty good.

 

[RPGCrazied]

k, awesome

what about screen tearing?

 

[jersoc]

GODDAMNIT!

I get the email that my game shipped from Amazon. To my parent's house. Fuck. Now, they'll have to send it to me. It's been years since I've used it and yet it still pops up as the default. That will add a week.

call up ups or whoever and ask them to deliver it to a different address. they will do it no problem once they verify it's for you. it'll add a day or 2, but less time than a week i'm sure.

 

[bengraven]

Maybe you should delay your marriage until the 2nd quarter of 2010.

First quarter is going to be a pain in my ass as well.

Well you can put those 30 min a week you used for sex to completing all those games from now on Bengraven.

We've basically been married for three years. Trust me, I'm not even counting my 2 minutes a month.

 

[Haly]

Well I am ready for tuesday

BTW, the Dragon Age folder is 15.2 GB

How did you get the preload? I don't see an option for it on my Steam client.

 

[Erudite]

How did you get the preload? I don't see an option for it on my Steam client.

Restart Steam. Should prompt you to pre-load, or you can right-click it and it'll give you the option to start it

 

[Fredescu]

To actually talk about gameplay for a second, I was thinking of starting as a Mage, but looking at the stat descriptions it seems like the two stats that have most effect on dialog options are Cunning and Strength. That would suggest that a Rogue or Warrior would get more dialog options than a Mage if you're assigning the usual stats as you level, which seems a bit strange. Am I missing something? I usually like to pump stats that will give me more dialog options, so I might switch to a Rogue if I have this right.

 

[lorddarkflare]

I wonder if i will be able to squeak 20 fps:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

Any takers?

 

[Deleted member 20415]

k, awesome

what about screen tearing?

I've noticed a bit of it. It's not as bad as Mass Effect was, I think that's safe to say... but it's there.

 

[water_wendi]

I'm still waiting for him to explain how exactly he had slowdown in 1998 with Baldur's Gate, its recommended system cpu was only a Pentium 200 (I had a Pentium Pro 200 for about 2 years before BG was released, and that ran it fine), not to mention the PIII 800 I upgraded to, a few years after it's release (around the time of BG2 - which recommends a 400mhz Pentium II).

Yeah seriously. i dont remember any Bioware game on PC that had horrible framerate with a mid-range computer. BG1/BG2/NWN1/Kotor are my frames of reference.. dont know if this changed with Mass Effect.

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

I wonder if i will be able to squeak 20 fps:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

Any takers?

I hope so (cuz that's what I have too), but judging by performances with semi-recent games, I'm sure we could get 30 fps avg on medium settings with no AA and 2x AF.

Might need to tone down the resolution as well. But that doesn't bother me at all.

 

[eznark]

Is the PC Gamer review up anywhere? I don't really care about a score or anything, I just want to see what Desslock has to say.

 

[NewLib]

Yeah, I played KotOR with a pretty mid-range rig and it ran like a charm. Aren't these problems people are citing mostly only applicable to console games Bioware makes? I've never had a problem with their pc games, aside from bugs.

KotOR definitely had framerate problems for the XBox. It got really sluggish especially when a lot of force powers were being used.

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

Yeah, I played KotOR with a pretty mid-range rig and it ran like a charm. Aren't these problems people are citing mostly only applicable to console games Bioware makes? I've never had a problem with their pc games, aside from bugs.

Yeah, I first played KotOR on an integrated chip. It was more than playable.

 

[lorddarkflare]

I hope so (cuz that's what I have too), but judging by performances with semi-recent games, I'm sure we could get 30 fps avg on medium settings with no AA and 2x AF.

Might need to tone down the resolution as well. But that doesn't bother me at all.

How did Mass Effect and Witcher run for you(if you played them)?

For some strange reason, those two can run pretty sluggishly, even on some of the lower settings.

As for Kotor, i remember running an unpatched version that constantly froze and corrupted my files on Xbox. Even with all that and the frame rate, i still beat that sucker twice back-to-back.

 

[Tain]

HEY. I have a question not worth making a thread for!

Should I play BG1 or skip right to BG2? Is BG1 vital-vital or pretty skippable?

 

[Tobor]

I played Mass Effect on the 360 and was never bothered by the technical experience, so I'm not particularly worried about DA either.

 

[NewLib]

I played Mass Effect on the 360 and was never bothered by the technical experience, so I'm not particularly worried about DA either.

So far Dragon Age has looked like it runs better than Mass Effect on the 360 and PC. So if that didnt bother you, this shouldnt either.

Edit: You can skip BG1 and play BG2 as the important parts of BG1's story will be explained in BG2. I dont know why you would though. BG1 is a brilliant game in its own right and really different than anything seen since from Bioware.

 

[lorddarkflare]

I played Mass Effect on the 360 and was never bothered by the technical experience, so I'm not particularly worried about DA either.

My PC experience if the game was only marginally better and yeah it was still a pretty good experience.

 

[epmode]

Should I play BG1 or skip right to BG2? Is BG1 vital-vital or pretty skippable?

BG1 is an excellent game in its own right. It's just that BG2 is even better. AND it deals with higher-level content which is nice because low-level DnD is comparatively dull.

I say this all the time but make sure you look into the Widescreen Mod for BG2. It's lovely. You might want to hold off on the other mods until you've gone through the game.

 

[Lostconfused]

I played Mass Effect on the 360 and was never bothered by the technical experience, so I'm not particularly worried about DA either.

Haha, to me it felt like i was playing on pc 5 years ago. Where i had to restart the game because after an hour long session the game would start to glitch horribly due to some memory leak or something.

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

How did Mass Effect and Witcher run for you(if you played them)?

For some strange reason, those two can run pretty sluggishly, even on some of the lower settings.

The Witcher was pretty bad, not unplayable, but I'd get slowdowns to the 20s from time to time but maintain 50 to 60 for the most part. Disabling Depth of Field seemed to have helped quite a bit, but I'd still get a lot of slow downs. I suspected there was some weird frame buffering effects going on because there was very little tearing, but my frame rate suffered because of it.

I ran Mass Effect with no AA (there wasn't an option to begin with), linear filtering, no film grain, High Textures and Medium effects, 1280 by 800 solution. It was pretty jumpy on the Citadel, but other than that, the game was consistently in the low 30s.

 

[Chairman Yang]

HEY. I have a question not worth making a thread for!

Should I play BG1 or skip right to BG2? Is BG1 vital-vital or pretty skippable?

I think BG1 is mostly boring and skippable, but enough people disagree that you should probably check it out. If you get bored, just stop playing and go straight to BG2.

 

[Solideliquid]

I wonder if i will be able to squeak 20 fps:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

Any takers?

I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz, 2GB ram, and an ATI 4870. I'll be fine.

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

And speaking of Baldur's Gate 2, I recently re-installed it and found that the shadows for the areas beyond what my party had explored (the fog of war, so to speak) isn't rendering correctly. Instead of smooth dark edges, it's just black square blocks. Has this ever happened to any of you?

 

[Snapshot King]

First question, there any streams up right now?

2nd, I gotta say, Im really excited. Unfortunately I never played Baldurs Gate 2, by the time I heard of it, it was real hard on the eyes, and the character creation process uses D&D rulesets all over, and no matter what I did I was convinced I had ruined by character. Dragon ages character creation system was a little gentler with me

 

[Spirit of Jazz]

I think BG1 is mostly boring and skippable, but enough people disagree that you should probably check it out. If you get bored, just stop playing and go straight to BG2.

I second this line of thought. I played BG2 first and got on just fine, tried to play BG1 after it but it got a little tedious.

 

[lorddarkflare]

The Witcher was pretty bad, not unplayable, but I'd get slowdowns to the 20s from time to time but maintain 50 to 60 for the most part. Disabling Depth of Field seemed to have helped quite a bit, but I'd still get a lot of slow downs. I suspected there was some weird frame buffering effects going on because there was very little tearing, but my frame rate suffered because of it.

I ran Mass Effect with no AA (there wasn't an option to begin with), linear filtering, no film grain, High Textures and Medium effects, 1280 by 800 solution. It was pretty jumpy on the Citadel, but other than that, the game was consistently in the low 30s.

Then we cannot possibly have the same computer(i only started complaining about Witcher when my FR dropped below 10-15 in chapter 5.)

Mine is a laptop so....

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

Then we cannot possibly have the same computer(i only started complaining about Witcher when my FR dropped below 10-15 in chapter 5.)

Mine is a laptop so....

Me too, have you tried updating your drivers?

 

[epmode]

And speaking of Baldur's Gate 2, I recently re-installed it and found that the shadows for the areas beyond what my party had explored (the fog of war, so to speak) isn't rendering correctly. Instead of smooth dark edges, it's just black square blocks. Has this ever happened to any of you?

This happens to me. I get around it by turning off 3D acceleration in BG2 and disabling DirectDraw in dxdiag. This doesn't appear to be an option in Windows 7 so I'm glad I can dual boot to XP.

 

[Tain]

I say this all the time but make sure you look into the Widescreen Mod for BG2. It's lovely. You might want to hold off on the other mods until you've gone through the game.

I just tried that mod with my BG+ToSC and had issues. :/

I'll have to look into BG2, I think.

 

[epmode]

Using the widescreen mod? Same thing here. Play it in window mode instead of fullscreen.

Happens to me even without the widescreen mod. Seems to be an Infinity Engine problem with modern video cards.

I just tried that mod with my BG+ToSC and had issues. :/

I'll have to look into BG2, I think.

Oh, I should have mentioned:

Don't play vanilla Baldur's Gate. There's an excellent mod that ports all BG1 content into the BG2 engine. It's called BGTutu (there's another option for this but I don't like it as much). This makes it easy: http://www.usoutpost31.com/easytutu/

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

This happens to me. I get around it by turning off 3D acceleration in BG2 and disabling DirectDraw in dxdiag. This doesn't appear to be an option in Windows 7 so I'm glad I can dual boot to XP.

Thanks! I don't have it installed now, but definitely will try this fix later. Allow me to show my appreciation in advance.

Using the widescreen mod? Same thing here. Play it in window mode instead of fullscreen.

No, just good ol' vanilla BG2.

 

[Mindlog]

HEY. I have a question not worth making a thread for!

Should I play BG1 or skip right to BG2? Is BG1 vital-vital or pretty skippable?

I'd say BG1 is skippable and that reminds me, I didn't clarify in my favorite game post!

 

[Cohsae]

And speaking of Baldur's Gate 2, I recently re-installed it and found that the shadows for the areas beyond what my party had explored (the fog of war, so to speak) isn't rendering correctly. Instead of smooth dark edges, it's just black square blocks. Has this ever happened to any of you?

Are you on an nvidia card? There's some sort of fix out there that is related to that issue. Although I fixed it on my pc just by enabling 3d acceleration in the config program, so try that first if you haven't already.

 

[lorddarkflare]

Me too, have you tried updating your drivers?

Well the only one that would matter in this case would be the Nvidia drivers and that is at 186.81.

I have always wondered what was up with my computer(Inspiron 1720) since Witcher runs at the same FR, no matter how high/low the resolution/settings are.

At times that hovers around 20-30, but now i am at 2-8. Shame too, since i wanted to finish the game.

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

Are you on an nvidia card? There's some sort of fix out there that is related to that issue. Although I fixed it on my pc just by enabling 3d acceleration in the config program, so try that first if you haven't already.

Yeah, it's an Nvidia card. I'm re-installing BG2 right now to see if these fixes would help.

 

[Haly]

Restart Steam. Should prompt you to pre-load, or you can right-click it and it'll give you the option to start it

Ah! It worked, thanks.

 

[Satanyoka]

I tried getting into BG2 but, damn everyone in my party died first level. Plus I had no manual so I had no Idea how to use my interface effectively. And the graphics. And all the reading. (I have no patience, though it wasn't really a big deal.)
I'll probably give it another go.

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

Well the only one that would matter in this case would be the Nvidia drivers and that is at 186.81.

I have always wondered what was up with my computer(Inspiron 1720) since Witcher runs at the same FR, no matter how high/low the resolution/settings are.

At times that hovers around 20-30, but now i am at 2-8. Shame too, since i wanted to finish the game.

How did Mass Effect run then? I'd suppose that Dragon Age's performance would be comparable.

 

[lorddarkflare]

How did Mass Effect run then? I'd suppose that Dragon Age's performance would be comparable.

I recently switched to XP, so i do not know how it will turn out now, but in the past, not higher than 25.

Average of 18.

 

[RS4-]

Does anyone know the actual install size for PC DAO? Off retail disc, not Steam, etc.

 

[DevelopmentArrested]

I still can't decide between PC and 360 mainly because I have a single core PC that I'm scared of.. probably won't hit Medium settings.

 

[jabipun]

Do you guys know if Gamestop is actually selling this on Tuesday - or is it going to be on Wednesday?

 

[ntropy]

skip BG1??!! killing Drizzt was awesome, how do u skip that?

 

[Justinian]

Some truths:

- PC gameplay will be superior because the game was designed for PC.

- PC version will have flawless performance on high end and future PCs. The console versions will be inferior in performance and gameplay ALWAYS.

- PC version will enjoy a healthy future of player made mods. The consoles will not.

The only reason I can think of for anyone to get this on console would be if you absolutely will NEVER own a PC capable of running this game. Even if it means waiting for a PC upgrade, I really don't see a point in ruining your experience by playing it on console if you are indeed looking forward to playing the game.

It's just as bad as resorting to watching a bootleg shakycam version of a film you have been looking forward to for ages.

 

[Enduin]

Do you guys know if Gamestop is actually selling this on Tuesday - or is it going to be on Wednesday?

Well since people have said they picked up copies of the game already at Best Buys and such I would assume GameStop also has the game in stock already as well, but if you really want to know for sure you should call your local store cause they would know better than random people on a message board.

 

[LCfiner]

I always thought that they would be put on sale on tuesday if they’ve already been shipped to theatrstores es. since we know that a few stores already have them, I’m betting tuesday.

only when they say “shipping” on tuesday do they get put on sale on wedensday. at least, that’s from my experience.

Some truths:

- PC gameplay will be superior because the game was designed for PC.

- PC version will have flawless performance on high end and future PCs. The console versions will be inferior in performance and gameplay ALWAYS.

- PC version will enjoy a healthy future of player made mods. The consoles will not.

The only reason I can think of for anyone to get this on console would be if you absolutely will NEVER own a PC capable of running this game. Even if it means waiting for a PC upgrade, I really don't see a point in ruining your experience by playing it on console if you are indeed looking forward to playing the game.

It's just as bad as resorting to watching a bootleg shakycam version of a film you have been looking forward to for ages.

jeesh, you’re bring overdramatic. everything I’ve seen of this game makes it look like a slightly more in-depth version of the game Bioware has been making for consoles since KOTOR.

player progression, NPC interaction, spells and combat are either identical or only slightly modified between the console and PC. Using the term “ruining the experience” to describe the console version is a ridiculous exaggeration.