got the demo, but is the game good?

Skuld · Post by **Skuld** » Thu Jan 15, 2004 11:59 pm

So I downloaded the demo and the only problem I'm really having is identifying magical items such as potions and scrolls. Just about every potion and scroll you pick up needs to be identified, in a low level portion of the game simple potions and scrolls would've been no problem for a Bard in BG, but I don't really even know how identifying items works in TOEE. Also something that bugs me is that in the inventory screen for my bard, when i mouse over my items, the decription is jsut blocks in palce of letters. I'll close the inv screen reopen it and back to normal. Probably just a bug. I love how they took the radial menu from the game Silver, if anyone even remembers it. That game used basically the same menu system, but much simpler of course. The only other thing I'm worried about is that the demo seems relatively hard. Some encounters take quite a few tries to beat and that's only if the sleep spell knocks out enough enemies. I love the turn based combat but on some ocassions you'll be in battle with an enemy and it won't even try to attack you. It'll be beyond the fog of war and you ahve to engage and defeat it before moving on. That's just a problem I have with turn based combat in general, but they did an awesome job. These things are just minor.

Another thing is the party you're given: a Gnome Paladin, Human Monk, Half Orc Cleric(with no healing spells mind you), Half Elf Bard, and an Elf(at least I think she's an elf) Wizard. The whole partys pretty good except for the half orc, he just get's hurt a lot. His spells are nothing to brag about, and neither are his combat abilities. But in the game you get to make your own party or at least PC so I'll defiantely have no problems there.

Just my two cents on the demo for anyone who's interested, or anyone who wants to give me any insight into the problems I'm having, as minor as they may be.

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Fri Jan 16, 2004 5:59 am

The game is quite good. HOwever alot of people have technical problems. Therea re some rules bugs (certain spells and things not working correctly)
as well as a fair majority of people experiencing slow downs. Also a few people have reported the game crashing to teh desktop for no apparent reason. Personally on a 2.4 ghz 512 mb ram, 64 mb geforce4 mmx 8xAGP system that is maintained fairly well through regular system maintenance I get no real major slow downs until I get quite a ways into the game.. then it becomes unbearable. Other people report they can play through the area.
Troika is working on a second patch, it should be available soon as they report that the files should be going to atari sometime next week for QA... as to the IDing question, the Co8 mod patch changes the read magic spell so that it can ID potions as well. So you can make a read magic wand for almost nothing and ID a whole whack of stuff, my wizard and cleric each carry one all the time.

Altair · Post by **Altair** » Fri Jan 16, 2004 9:17 am

You lucky people ! here in europe we havent yet seen a byte of a 1st patch.

The game is quite good but nothing real new under the pixelized skies: isometrics view, small sprites (though large+ creature look real good), animiations are ok but lack energy (i remember some PS-Torment spell effects that rocked).

The system is bug-packed. Lucky those who get a patch. (atari promised a european patch). You can still crawl your way through the dungeon with all the fun you can get from a dungeon crawl. Being an old pnp player, ToEE brings back good memories.

You shouldnt expect much Rp interraction. There're a few quests, some dialogues are fun. ToEE is a more of a tactical game - as DnD3.5 has become anyway.

My advice: wait a year or two when the game will fall into the cheap shelves of your retailer. By that time it should be patched, have a few communauty made mods, and it'll save you some bucks - as its all i regret from buy 50 euros such a buged, nothing real new game.

Skuld · Post by **Skuld** » Fri Jan 16, 2004 10:46 am

I ususally end up waiting until the game goes down a fair bit in price before buying it anyway. Oh, yea. I beat the demo last night, and the final "master" I guess you could call him is ridiculously easy compared to the battle before hand where you're fighting 10 or so guardsmen. I did have to use a good 5 or so potions that I jsut new were healing potions just from the look of them. But I still have no idea as to the rest of them, or the scrolls. I lost the useless half orc cleric there, and just left him. He was relatively useless anyway, what good is a cleric that can't heal. I did skip one or two battles I think, so I may go back and finish them up. And I wanna play it again, to see if there's anything I can do better/different. And looking at the stats on your machine I'm surprised it even runs on mine(although I did expect it to runa bit slow): PIII 750, 128MB, ATI Rage Mobility Pro 8MB.... Jsut about the only RPG I've found painstakingly slow on this system is NWN, and I just let my friend "borrow" it. Someday when I get a new machine I'll ask for it back if he still even has it, no worries.

aquarian_tiger · Post by **aquarian_tiger** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 2:18 am

Did you make sure to adjust your clerics memorized spells in the magic page of the character's stat info? That's one thing often overlooked. Also, if you enjoyed the combat and dungeon crawling, the rest of the game is pretty similar but on a much larger scale. The whole moathouse is maybe the size of one level of the temple. You are certainly right about the Master being a bit of a let down after the battles right before him though. But that's all really just the start. Items can be identified by any of the merchants for 100 gold, also. BTY, I run the game on a 3 year old stock Compaq with 700 AMD Duron, and 64 Mg RAM and have not had near the trouble as many with newer faster computers.

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 6:00 am

The game is quite good but nothing real new under the pixelized skies: isometrics view, small sprites (though large+ creature look real good), animiations are ok but lack energy (i remember some PS-Torment spell effects that rocked).

[/b]

All the characters/monsters are 3D. They aren't sprites..
This is probably the cause for lag on alot of people's machines.

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 7:24 pm

Buggy as can be, with extremely unimaginative characters and quests. Good graphics. My review's up here on GameBanshee. I'm sure it won me no favors from the Troika folks, who have done such great things in the past.

Banzai · Post by **Banzai** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 7:33 pm

Originally posted by fable
Buggy as can be, with extremely unimaginative characters and quests. Good graphics. My review's up here on GameBanshee. I'm sure it won me no favors from the Troika folks, who have done such great things in the past.

I second that. I went from excited to barely amused and then to extremely angry at the final parts of the game. I finished it just because of the challenge, and because it's a D&D game.

I miss Black Isle.

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Mon Jan 19, 2004 7:42 pm

I guess you guys missed the part where Troika had supplied Atari with a newer version of the game before they manufactured it, but atari opted to go with the more bugged previous version?
Or the fact that they're currently pumping out an unpaid patch because atari doesn't want to put any more money on it?

After applying the official patch, and making sure my video card drivers were updated... I found the lag to be severely reduced from constant to extremely rare (going through earth node prior to drivers was constant freeze ups, after patch went through fire node which is supposed to be the worst with only a single 4 second freeze up)
Troika is even changing the RNG number generator to a more acceptable one so that the computer generated numbers appear more random instaed of clumped like they do now.
Maybe pay a visit to the atari forums, you'll see the progress on the patch. Yeah it was released before it should have been, but hopefully they'll learn from this.

fable · Post by **fable** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 11:28 am

Originally posted by kellinjar
I guess you guys missed the part where Troika had supplied Atari with a newer version of the game before they manufactured it, but atari opted to go with the more bugged previous version?

According to whom?

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 11:50 am

According to the guys at Troika (since atari wont' say anything on the subject at all)
They're the same guys who are spending their vacation time working on the patch for free without any support from Atari.

fable · Post by **fable** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:02 pm

I'm not trying to attack your credibility, Kellinjar, but who are these "guys from Troika?" Where was this information posted? Or is this information that was passed on from reader to reader, until there's no telling where it started--and belief in it is more of a matter of willed belief, than fact? After all, Arcanum and Fallout 2 were both extremely buggy on their initial release, and that had nothing whatsoever to do with Atari, which hadn't contracted for either game.

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:04 pm

Try visiting the atari ToEE forum..the official one.. the Troika guys post there. There are 2 or 3 of them who do so.
There are huge threads about whats going to be fixed in this next patch...

fable · Post by **fable** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:12 pm

I did check through there, for a good while, both before and after the game came out. I never found a post by any Troika developer claiming that Atari had released an earlier beta, when they already had in their hands gold code that was so much better.

If this truly happened, I'm really curious about it. As who wouldn't be?

And as there's no way to search on such a concept, I lack any means to verify those comments.

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:14 pm

THey were made very shortly after the game wsa released..when alot of the backlash started.
If yo uwant to verify it you can just go ahead and use the search function on the message board. I will attempt to find it, but it has been several months now.. the post was probably made in october sometime.

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:17 pm

here is a thread that mentions it back in september.. I will attempt to find the thread that that actually says that Troika had a newer version for Atari before release.
http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/sh ... tari+newer

here post 3. it was actually a statement made in Dev chat BY troika
http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/sh ... tari+newer

fable · Post by **fable** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:23 pm

There's no way to really search for that. The search mechanism is limited to single words rather than Boolean logic, if I recall correctly--so I can't look for "gold code" AND "beta" AND "Troika" AND "Atari," for instance. I was reading during the timeframe you mention, and never found any remark like that. If you can do so, the more power to you.

The whole idea of Troika having a far less buggy gold code of TOEE available, at Atari's headquarters, but Atari issuing an earlier beta seems, on the face of it, IMO, a bit suspect. For one thing, Troika/Atari has already released one patch, which (if we go with this version of events) is at least as good as the code Troika provided and Atari overlooked--or better; yet the game is still incredibly buggy. So, if Atari had Troika code sitting around that was later than the stuff they released, it wasn't really that good or that bug-free.

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:24 pm

look up, I just posted the two threads

and yeah you can use the atari search functions with multiple words.. I just searched for "atari newer"

fable · Post by **fable** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:39 pm

I don't see a comment by a developer on this subject. What I see is: "And guess what? It was. Troika stated in a dev chat a few days ago that they had completed a newer build of ToEE before it went into production but Atari decided to ignore it and make the outdated last build the gold one." This was posted by a forum member, not a developer.

So we know the remark now has legendary status, and has become accepted wisdom; but that doesn't mean it's accurate. If I were Troika, I wouldn't contradict such a view when someone stated it, true or false, because it's to my advantage that some of the heat is taken off my firm. And Atari has a very specific, stringently enforced policy of never commenting about issues in player forums.

Thanks for looking, though. Appreciated.

kellinjar · Post by **kellinjar** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:41 pm

Well i'm sure if we wanted, we could find a log of the chat. No one contradicted it (including other people who were in the chat I'm sure and read the threaD)
Very rarely do such chats happen and there not be a log created. I will dig around and see if I can find one.