65 réponses à ce sujet

[casadechrisso]

Well, you can. If you install Windows. Which is really the only option for "Mac gaming" anymore. Unless you're satisfied with Indie games from Steam, which is perfectly fine... for others, not me.

[Kaldor Silverwand]

A little too harsh on the Mac version. Aspyr did eventually provide a 1.23 (1765) patch and you can use a Mac with multi-player. The expansions were never released for Mac but there are ways to get them to run on a Mac as long as you can install them on Windows first or are savvy enough to get the files needed directly off of the disk.

As for running games on Mac without Windows, that too can be done. In fact I am currently working on getting the NWN2 Toolset to work. I may not succeed, but I have only just begun my attempt (at this point it loads and the screen comes up mostly and the pull down menus work, but nothing more, yet). I have successfully installed the Windows versions (from disc and also from the DnD Anthology at GamersGate.com) of BG, BG2, IWD, IWD2, ToEE, PS:T, Dungeon Master, NWN, and NWN2-Platinum+MoW on my Mac, all without requiring a Windows OS. I have posted about most of this on my blog (about NWN; about installing BG, BG2, IWD, IWD2 from disc; installing the DnD Anthology). Where there is a will, there is a way.

Modifié par Kaldor Silverwand, 08 février 2012 - 11:11 .

[Shallina]

Mac cost to much for the power they provide.

[casadechrisso]

I didn't want to turn this into a platform war, and I like my Mac and I like my PCs and whatever. Let's not get into that now.

But no, I wasn't a bit harsh on the Aspyr NWN2 port, I wasn't even harsh enough. If you consider it user-friendly having to buy the Windows versions too (along with Windows) and go through hours of trial and error moving gigabytes of data, only to end up with a buggy, unsupported Mac game... I don't. And if you have to buy the Windows discs and install Windows anyway, better just stay there, the effort isn't worth it. And yeah, one year later they finally put up a Mac 1.23 patch too, that's incredibly kind.

[nicethugbert]

MokahTGS wrote...

In truth, the NWN series has always been about building for me, so the toolset is by far the highest point of both NWN 1&2.

The games themselves have always been a toss, since I looked at them as a tutorial for the toolset.  If I had to make a list (and I do) then it would go something like this:

• Party Creation and Mechanics - Very much a high point of NWN2.  I've always enjoyed creating a group of adventurers and NWN2 finally allowed this with SoZ.  It’s very sad that this feature came so late.  NWN2 might have been received very differently if this feature came in the original.
• Character Customization - The sheer amount of builds is just silly.  I can create pretty much anythingI want with the NWN2 system and play how I want.
• Very rich bestiary and story hook possibility - The is one area where DnD shines and the NWN games have so many creatures and races that creating many different encounters and stories is very easy right out of the box.  DA suffered horribly in this regard.  In that game you have an undead mutant...and another kind of undead mutant to work with...blech...
• The Overland Map - Again, a feature that should have been there from day one.  It added so much old school fun to SoZ that I could easily see myself playing just on the OM and never needing anything else.  Sadly the OM is such a custom system and the documentation of that system is so bad, that the community has largely skipped this wonderful feature.
• Visuals - I know there are prettier games, but bang for buck, NWN2 has some real potential to wow when it comes to eye candy.  NWN2 in the hands of a talented builder can make areas that evoke deep emotional responses.  That is something to be praised.
• Flexibility - People will debate this of course, but the NWN series was built with the community in mind to do what the community does best:  Mod.  Some of the mods and modules over the years have simple astounded me.  There are not many games that allow this kind of freedom in building.
• Multiplayer - The NWN series kicks arse here.  No other game out there even comes close to the flexibility, depth and RP potential of these games here.  I spent several years running a weekly game in NWN and some of the best gaming of my life was just standing around RPing a shifter with multiple personality disorder that couldn't control her shapes when in high stress situations...oh fun times.

Now, here some stuff that just doesn't measure up:

• Combat Implementation - The combat of both NWN 1&2 suffered the same problem.  PnP shoe horning.  The 6 sec round systems are all well and good for PnP DnD, but in CRPG terms each round is an eternity.  This was a fault, I actually blame on the community, as they insisted that a system that worked in BG could work in a fully 3D game like the NWN series.  Bioware should have had the nads to just rewrite the system so that the dance of death never existed.  Instead, they bowed to pressure and just screwed the pooch.  The sad thing is that the combat system is not what is broken...it is how it is implemented.  Skills, feats, and dice rolls can be done in a roundless system...it just wasn't.
• Lack luster writing - I'm not sure why this is, but games just don't have good writing.  There are a few gems, but really, for the most part, game designers fall back on the "go kill 10 rats" mechanic. How many side quests did we need in the NWN2 OC?  Really?  They had this epic story, and we're spending the first half of NWN2 running guard errands?  Just not acceptable.  Not make a 40-60 hour game if you don't have that much REAL story.  Keep it tight, good, and leave out all the stupid fluff...I don't care about Kelgar's dreams to be a ballerina...THE SHADOW KING IS STORMING THE CASTLE!!!!!
• The broken engine - I don't understand why this is so hard.  Don't game developers play games?  Haven't they ever played a game that has smooth camera work, a slick and responsive UI, and smooth animations?  Really?  Do they have to reinvent a broken wheel with every game?  Look at ANY MMO and you will find a smoother game experience.  Why can't they just use that system?  If the game is designed for isometric gameplay, then JUST LEAVE IT THAT WAY.  If it is designed for 3D, the JUST LEAVE IT THAT WAY!  Don't try to make some sort of unholy offspring of the two.  Figure out who you are and what you are making and DO IT WELL, or don't do it at all.  There is a reason WoW is popular, and it's not because people like Blizzard.  The game just works.  Say what you will about the MMO gameplay, but you can't argue the game mechanics.  I wish more SP CRPGs would just license an established MMO engine and make the game from there.  NWN2 would have been HUGELY popular if it had worked well right out of the box.  By patch 1.23...it's was just too late.
• Voice acting - OMG the NWN2 OC has some of the worst VO I've ever heard in a game.  Load up the OC and take a listen to your stupid elf step-father deliver his first line of the game and tell me you don't want to rip your own ears off in disgust.  Lastri in SoZ is another example.  Who green lit that VO performance?  Have they been fired yet?  'Cuz if not, I'll write the pink slip myself.  Bad bad bad bad suck suck suck!  Did anyone listen to the VO of the Witcher?  Hire those guys.  So much better!

Alright, there ya go...NWN2 as a game is passable, but what is it for?  Building.  Playing as a SP game?  Not so much.

I agree with all of that.  But, I have played games that didn't have as many features as NWN2 and still managed about the same level of enjoyment and tedium per "module".  DA2 comes to mind.  DA2 is not a sluggish game, like NWN2.  That is huge for me.  By the time DA2 came out, I was sick and tired of slow moving characters.

Bioshock 2 is a beuatiful  game with a great perspective.  But, at the end of the first part of the game wen the game difficulty ramps up suddenly, I had enough.  Trudging around at a snails pace in a featureless game was bad enough.  Running out of ammo in the blink of an eye, enemies placed all to conveniently for them, too much.  By then I suspected I knew the whole story anyway.

But, the entire DA series does not have the longevity of NWN2.  As others have pointed out, if you want the NWN2 feature set, there is no better alternative, not now and not in the forseable future.

I guess that for games like NWN2, DA, etc.  It's the bad writing that kills them for me.  The OC is a good case in point exactly as you describe.

But, how about The Witcher 2?  I'm not entirely sure what turns me off about that game.  There is one thing, but, is that enough?.  I hate how you can just walk into anybodies house and raid it while they are in there and the world does not care.  The game hints that you need the money and have big things to do.  Yet, you can get away with that nonsense.

Modifié par nicethugbert, 09 février 2012 - 11:01 .

[MachinSin]

   Hi to all,

casadechrisso wrote...

[list=1][*]Multiplayer and persistant worlds - the main reason I stuck to NWN1 and NWN2 for so long, there is no alternative anywhere. If you want to create your own little world/MMO/roleplay sandbox, you can stop looking, there's nothing else (and I'd happily switch to DA/Fallout/Skyrim if it had the same capabilities).

   I'm for that one: no other game can offer that to you,

   MachinSin

[painofdungeoneternal]

casadechrisso wrote...

I didn't want to turn this into a platform war, and I like my Mac and I like my PCs and whatever. Let's not get into that now.

But no, I wasn't a bit harsh on the Aspyr NWN2 port, I wasn't even harsh enough. If you consider it user-friendly having to buy the Windows versions too (along with Windows) and go through hours of trial and error moving gigabytes of data, only to end up with a buggy, unsupported Mac game... I don't. And if you have to buy the Windows discs and install Windows anyway, better just stay there, the effort isn't worth it. And yeah, one year later they finally put up a Mac 1.23 patch too, that's incredibly kind.

At one point i found a forum comment from the programmer they had doing it ( and he was in the forums here ), and he basically described it as the worst porting job he'd ever seen. I think he could have fixed it but they got rid of him rather quickly. Basically i just gave up on the mac version, but i do have a great mac version of NWN1.

This really is where companies like blizzard shine - they started out as a mac centric company porting games to mac, and they finally decided what they were porting was awful so they did their own games like warcraft and starcraft. They still to this day release both mac and pc versions on the same disk. They actually just do it all once and have the ability to compile to either platform long before they became well known in the PC community. This is one reason I think they have been so successful.

Let's leave the platform wars out of it. If you get rid of the mac users here, well you should know that it's people like me, kaldor, kemo. I really can't imagine what this game would be like if you got rid of Kemo's work and Kaldors work entirely just because some wish there'd be no support for mac users at all. ( Not even commenting on the Open Knights which did a lot for NWN1 to support both mac and linux, and which developed some tools we can't live without even if you are using windows. ) Lot of folks prefer macs, lot of folks prefer PC's, and people should support that freedom of choice instead of expecting everyone to live life by the same criteria they do. As a community we are richer for having that diversity.

Now enough off topic commenting, what is NWN2 good at and what is it bad at. You need to be nice to the president if you want a full pardon.

Modifié par painofdungeoneternal, 09 février 2012 - 04:29 .

[Kaldor Silverwand]

casadechrisso wrote...

I didn't want to turn this into a platform war, and I like my Mac and I like my PCs and whatever. Let's not get into that now.

But no, I wasn't a bit harsh on the Aspyr NWN2 port, I wasn't even harsh enough. If you consider it user-friendly having to buy the Windows versions too (along with Windows) and go through hours of trial and error moving gigabytes of data, only to end up with a buggy, unsupported Mac game... I don't. And if you have to buy the Windows discs and install Windows anyway, better just stay there, the effort isn't worth it. And yeah, one year later they finally put up a Mac 1.23 patch too, that's incredibly kind.

I find it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

And as I said there were people who installed MotB and SoZ onto the Mac directly from disc. I'm just not one of them (Ranger Solo is I believe) since I needed the Toolset for development anyway and as a .NET program I knew it was only likely to work decently on Windows.  Besides I was burned on the Mac version of BG many years ago, so I always buy both the Mac and Windows versions anyway though that isn't really necessary for most people. I really don't see any significant difference fiddling around to get things working on Mac OS than those who had to fiddle for hours to get NWN2 to run properly on Vista, or Windows 7, or undoubtedly Windows 8, or 64 bit machines.  No matter what rig you have there is some amount of trial and error to do. NWN2 is a bear to install and patch and get running well and that has been true on every platform or we wouldn't have 15 how-to-install-and-patch threads or people saying "just get the Steam version, its fully patched", like that should be a real reason. Fortunately the files are cross-platform compatible as is multi-player, so Mac owners are not left out in the cold as has been the case for many games. For that I am appreciative.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Regards

[The Fred]

Kaldor Silverwand wrote...
I find it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

Or just, you know, turn your Darkvision on.

[nicethugbert]

I must say, the in is a step in the right direction.

The parley/pay off feature adds some minor level of personality to the fights. Most encounters lack tremendous amounts of personality, if not reason to exist. Typically, monsters mill about the world with the PCs lurking about the edge of their perception range. Every fights to the death. It's like a zombie survival fest.

I wish monsters had a rational mix of personalities. Most monsters should run for their lives when close to death. It would make sneak and range attacks useful.

[nicethugbert]

Can't edit the last message because my "smart" phone thinks it is a picture when I try to do so.

The first sentence should read, "I must say, the OM is a step in the right direction."

[casadechrisso]

nicethugbert wrote...

Most monsters should run for their lives when close to death. It would make sneak and range attacks useful.

It's been done, for example the Dammendrech PW used such a system for years.

[M. Rieder]

nicethugbert wrote...

I must say, the in is a step in the right direction.

The parley/pay off feature adds some minor level of personality to the fights. Most encounters lack tremendous amounts of personality, if not reason to exist. Typically, monsters mill about the world with the PCs lurking about the edge of their perception range. Every fights to the death. It's like a zombie survival fest.

I wish monsters had a rational mix of personalities. Most monsters should run for their lives when close to death. It would make sneak and range attacks useful.

I think Lugaid incorporates this into his mods.  I seem to remember that if you killed a group leader, the other enemies would flee.  I think this is a good idea and I actually also think there are standard switches built into the current AI scripts that alter the enemies' likelihood of flight. 

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

The ironic thing about video games is that oftentimes they try to be an idealized version of our work lives. You got your tasks to complete and your rewards, so you just go at it, with as few complications as possible. After a bad shift at a bad job, where the tasks and rewards don't match up all that well, it can be soothing to spend a few hours in a perfect job, where the goblins always fall just like they're supposed to, and there's always a bit of coin at the end of the day.

But the President is bored with the grinding, with the rat race, with the illusion of accomplishment. He wants to sit down and play, watch the colours fly by and poke things with sticks to see what they do. The thing with critters running away, it's an annoyance if you just wanna get to work and collect 50 beaver pelts, but for the player that actually wants to play, it shows him that the gameworld is an interactive system, you can mess around with it, and it'll do different things, depending.

Maybe the problem is that most games are made by people locked in cubicles under florescent lighting, who spend all day wishing they could be out regularly slaying dragons every 5 minutes instead of occasionally squashing a bug in between meetings.

BTW, I'm thinking of revamping that whole rout mechanic with some will saves involved, so that spellcasters can be a bit more manipulative.

[Clyordes]

Highs:
Well - its D&D & you can write your own adventures or - in my case - recreate ones you had great fun with 20+ years ago & watch it all coming to life - what's not to like about that?
Also, for a good few months, it was great to play online with a couple of friends that now live in a different part of the country.

Lows:
The (relatively) poor documentation officially released for the toolset - so much not covered that really wouldn't have taken much doing to produce without having to rely on the community - made a really steep learning curve that I still feel like I'm climbing. Probably safe to say that its one of the big reasons that more of the NWN1 community didn't move over to NWN2.

Also, my gaming buddy suddenly finding out that his new ISP somehow doesn't let him join NWN online games - Guildwars & DDO are nowhere near as deep or varied :-(

But overall, the good definitely outweighs the bad.

Cly

[Axe_Edge]

nicethugbert wrote...

Can't edit the last message because my "smart" phone thinks it is a picture when I try to do so.

I had the same problem with my Android. I just figured out that after you press "edit", and after the post and toolbar appear, press the "BBcode" button. Its still difficult to get the cursor near the end of a long post.

Having just started my yearly OC runthrough, a major thing that makes NWN2 much more enjoyable now than back in 2006 is technology catching up. Areas load almost instantly now that my computer is sporting 12 gigs of ram and a ssd drive. I had a good computer at release and I had to wait for days for the game to load up.

[rjshae]

For RPGs in general, I usually enjoy the elements that bring out an emotional response. This can be from an enjoyment of the beauty of the graphics (sunlit water scenes in Morrowwind), the sense of the setting (grim hopelessness in Fallout 3 or the old Europe feel of The Witcher), the surprise of unusual combat tactics, the pleasure of finally solving a difficult puzzle, or just interacting with a well-developed character with a unique persona (Minsc from the BG series). Good conversations with NPCs or social interactions between party members can be as enjoyable, if not more so, than a mundane combat scene. I think all of these aspects are possible with NWN2.

Modifié par rjshae, 11 février 2012 - 12:29 .

[nicethugbert]

Lugaid of the Red Stripes wrote...

The ironic thing about video games is that oftentimes they try to be an idealized version of our work lives. You got your tasks to complete and your rewards, so you just go at it, with as few complications as possible. After a bad shift at a bad job, where the tasks and rewards don't match up all that well, it can be soothing to spend a few hours in a perfect job, where the goblins always fall just like they're supposed to, and there's always a bit of coin at the end of the day.

But the President is bored with the grinding, with the rat race, with the illusion of accomplishment. He wants to sit down and play, watch the colours fly by and poke things with sticks to see what they do. The thing with critters running away, it's an annoyance if you just wanna get to work and collect 50 beaver pelts, but for the player that actually wants to play, it shows him that the gameworld is an interactive system, you can mess around with it, and it'll do different things, depending.

Maybe the problem is that most games are made by people locked in cubicles under florescent lighting, who spend all day wishing they could be out regularly slaying dragons every 5 minutes instead of occasionally squashing a bug in between meetings.

BTW, I'm thinking of revamping that whole rout mechanic with some will saves involved, so that spellcasters can be a bit more manipulative.

That is quite right.  And I don't see that as being related to difficulty level.  A game world should be alive and have interesting stories no matter how easy or hard it is to play or how many builds you can make.

There are morale rules in D&D.  I can get you those if you don't have them.

[nicethugbert]

Incidentally, is it possible to have in NWN2 an active quest/quest hint system like The Witcher 2?

[The Fred]

Yep.

[Arkalezth]

nicethugbert wrote...

Incidentally, is it possible to have in NWN2 an active quest/quest hint system like The Witcher 2?

I haven't played TW2. I'm not sure what you mean.

[nicethugbert]

You select a quest in the journal to be active. When a quest is active, a quest hint appears underneath the mini-map and a location marker appears in the mini-map.

The hint is something along the lines of "go there see so and so or do such and such."

It's simple but effective.

[Arkalezth]

Oh, yeah, I've seen that in other games.

[M. Rieder]

The active quest hint is certainly possible through UI and XML coding. It would just take a modder to make it.