Do the patches cause problems with current games?

[corinthian]

First a bit of introduction:

Old-time player of the original "gold box" SSI Dungeons and Dragons (in fact, PoR, CotAB, SSB, and PoD are about 3 feet from me right now). I've also got the original Bard's Tale games in a box. I even have the original Temple module.

I vaguely remember reading that TOEE was going to be made in a game, but I didn't notice it until I saw it in the value section about 10 days ago. I snapped it up, and have been playing it non-stop.

I went with the basic party model - Two fighters (ranger, barbarian), rogue, mage (wizard), and cleric.

They're all level 10 now, and I'm in the process of working on the Elemental Nodes.

My first question for the board is about the patches - will they make my current saved games invalid, and will they help?

For the first week, I played with only the very rare crash to desktop. In the last couple of days, though, I seem to get trapped in cycles.

here are a couple of examples:

For the last couple of days, I've been unable to return to Hommlet. Sometimes, I can step into Northern or Southern Hommlet, but if I try to enter any buildings, the game crashes.

This is also occuring when I try to return to the areas from the Hommlet quests: Emridy, Deklo, etc.

I'm in a current cycle where I can travel from Nulb to the farmhouse, the Imeryd's run (spelling?), and the secret exit to the moathouse.

If I have any encounters, I can't visit any places on the map (including the ones listed above) without a crash.

Two examples of this: I decided to engage Zaxis. I let him join, and then when I left the map and selected Nulb, it crashed when I arrived.

The other thing that is going on is Sargen's courier. I can accept the gold from him, but after that, when I try to leave the random encounter screen and select a new location on the map, it crashes when I arrive.

I seem to have no trouble traveling between Nulb and the farmhouse so I can enter the Temple.

Any thoughts? To get back to my question now that you've waded through this long post - will the patches fix this and/or will they affect my saved games?


Another cycle I got trapped in was where I could not split, trade, or sell anything that had more than one item stacked. Dragging them to the sell window or to a character potrait didn't do anything - no message, no item transfer error, etc. The only thing I could do was drop them. This made sharing crossbow bolts quite irritating.

I ended up carrying them all around with my barbarian - something like 32 tribal necklaces, 160(!) aquamarines, the 4 or so diamonds from Hendrak, and so on. After finishing the gar quest in Nulb (not sure how I missed that pirate the first time I explored the village), I was suddenly able to sell all of them to Otis. Weird.

[Lord Plothos]

The official patches fix a large large number of issues, and at least some of the ones you mention I remember seeing listed on the reports. There are a great many patch combinations, but if you just want to start out with a fixed, stable, relatively unmodded version of the game, the best bet is patch 2 with temple.zip on top of it. Adding temple.zip must be done after applying patch 2. If you have a saved game from a patch 2 version and add only temple.zip, your game will probably be fine, unless you made use of metamagic feats, which can cause problems. If you have no patches at all and add patch 2, however, there is a good chance things will not work out for you. So if you have no patches, I'd recommend patching with 2 and temple.zip, then starting over from scratch. (I know that sounds bad, but it can be made much better by just using the console to level up to where you were and slogging through the easy stuff to get back to where you were. ...or by starting afresh with a new party for a different flavor. - There's a similar work-around for not being able to sell jewelry: drop it somewhere and use the console to give yourself the appropriate money - see the sticky thread about console commands for how to do all this.)

Hope that helps! Welcome aboard!