Curse

koitsu · May 05, 2005, 07:38 PM // 19:38

Since purchasing GW, I've gotten in maybe an hour of play time, simply because of all the strange client intricacies which are worth mentioning. These are things which keep me from enjoying playing GW -- and yes, I am a stickler for quality.

In no particular order:

1. Mouse/cursor acceleration ("pointer speed") when running in windowed mode (haven't tried full-screen) is absolutely horrid. Holding down Right Mouse + panning (to look around) feels incredibly slow (about 50% the speed of normal cursor movement). This feels a lot like "smooth mouse movement", which is implemented in other games. The GW client offers no way to turn this behaviour off, or adjust mouse acceleration.

2. Click-to-move is documented (see the GW manual) as "necessary" since apparently it can map a path to a destination which you normally cannot reach using the keyboard (asdw controls). What's up with that?

3. Click-to-move must be turned off to use windowed mode -- or, well, sort-of. If you have click-to-move enabled, then change focus from GW to another application, then change back to GW by clicking on the visible rendered content window, you end up walking where you clicked. This can be fixed by GW handling WM_SETFOCUS events, toggling a boolean, and checking for that boolean in the main mouse button handler elsewhere (therefore ignoring the mouse click).

4. This was fixed in one of the latest patches, but it's worth mentioning anyways: when running in windowed mode, if you changed focus away from GW, you'd completely stop fighting. A bizarre bug of sorts, but I'm glad it got fixed...

5. For some reason, this particular game causes *severe* load on my Radeon X800 XT 256MB card, causing the fan to kick in to high speed. Even with all of the GW settings set to "Lowest" (and some "None", ditto with turning off post-processing), it still happens. *No other 3D game does this*, not even WoW (with all of the settings on HIGH!). Completely bizarre. I'm not sure what's going on in the GW client rendering code, but it's taking quite a toll on my 3D card. :-)

6. Chat settings are not retained (saved) when exiting the GW client. You have to toggle all of the chat channels every time you restart. The same goes for the "Chat filter" option (maybe this was fixed in a later patch).

7. After logging in to GW, as your character is loaded, the music/audio completely stops/jitters for a brief moment. I have absolutely no explanation for this, as it makes no sense in numerous respects. Why is the audio handler being put "on hold" when loading model data + textures from the disk for a character? *shakes head*

8. The UI needs an overhaul, to put it lightly. I appreciate the simplicity, but there are simple things which require you to hit the "Menu" button in the bottom left. Also, common UI interactivity (such as bringing up the Inventory) completely stall rendering of things in the client -- WHY?! This is a common complaint (re: the UI needs an overhaul).

9. The map in the upper right is incredibly worthless. I know of no such map / compass system where NORTH ROTATES AROUND A SINGLE AXIS. North always points "UP", folks. Please change this behaviour so the map content rotates and the actual bearings remain static -- not the other way around!

10. There needs to be an "always-follow" camera option. The present camera orientation is, to put it lightly, complete garbage. Having to control the camera independantly of my character is ANNOYING. Period.

11. The "chat bubbles" above characters. PLEASE allow these to be turned off. They're annoying, stand out / take away from your focus elsewhere, and are generally worthless.

12. More UI, graphical, and sound toggle options in the Options menu (F11). There simply aren't enough. Permitting the toggle of antisotropic filtering (NOT the same thing as anti-aliasing!) would be quite nice, as people like myself find AA quite annoying, while AF to be useful.

13. Language "Bork Bork Bork!" should be removed. Come on guys, this is something that should've been removed prior to the official product release. Looks very unprofessional. The Opera browser folks eventually admitted this, so why can't you. :-)

14. NPCs need to *NOT* block you from moving. There have been numerous cases where henchmen have literally *blocked you in*, not letting you move or do ANYTHING. I've also seen similar behaviour with other NPC characters, such as the girl at the very start of the game who follows you around -- she'll run at you, and then "wiggle/jiggle" until she passes by you, blocking your movement. How about removing all of this unnecessary code, and simply let you walk through friendly NPCs?

15. More strict limitations on character names. After creating my character (who was named in a role-playing fashion, although I do not RP in online games), the first PC I saw was named, and I quote, "SMASH FURIOUS". Shortly thereafter, a pal of mine saw a character named "ULTIMATE NINJA MONK". If I were managing this game, I'd be deleting characters left and right. :P

16. A ChangeLog/Revision History between patches. These are not being released or provided *ANYWHERE* I can find. This is a major MAJOR issue, folks -- I'm almost willing to call it "shady". GW is incredibly reliant on the "dynamic changes" concept, and therefore these sorts-of changes NEED to be documented somewhere where users can read them. The first patch that was released, as we all saw, was completely broken -- the client crashed when you moved. This could've been more quickly addressed had users been able to read a ChangeLog prior to running GW, then reading forums to see what the results were (there will ALWAYS be users who are guinea pigs, so... :-) ).

17. An official forum for GW. The GW folk seem to put a lot of pressure on the "general GW user community" to provide services they should be providing themselves. I understand there's no monthly fee -- which is a good thing -- but is it really that hard to set up a forum that's run and maintained by the GW devs/PR folk? There's 20+ GW fan forums/sites all over the world, and there's no way I'm going to traverse ALL of them to find out if other users are experiencing a certain bug or issue. One central point -- hosted by the GW folk -- would be a lot easier.

Sadly, GW feels very "incomplete", i.e. released too soon. I'm AMAZED that something this "simple" (per se -- don't take this literally) took _FIVE YEARS_ to develop. I would expect the GW manual to mention things like Merchants, identification kits, and so on. None of this is mentioned in the manual, nor is it mentioned anywhere in the game. You have to ask someone, or you have to figure it out "magically" on your own.

*HALF* of the GW manual is dedicated to the "storyline". Over 70 pages, folks. A bit excessive? No -- MOST DEFINITELY excessive. I did not purchase GW to find out its user manual was a Robert Jordan novel. Yes, I appreciate good verbose game history -- which can be read via a browser while online.

Those are my general complaints right now. Food for thought, comments are welcome.

Luchaire · May 05, 2005, 08:15 PM // 20:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by koitsu

1. . . . 4.

I can't imagine playing in windowed mode, so can't comment on the first 4 things.

Quote:

5. For some reason, this particular game causes *severe* load on my Radeon X800 XT 256MB card, causing the fan to kick in to high speed. Even with all of the GW settings set to "Lowest" (and some "None", ditto with turning off post-processing), it still happens. *No other 3D game does this*, not even WoW (with all of the settings on HIGH!). Completely bizarre. I'm not sure what's going on in the GW client rendering code, but it's taking quite a toll on my 3D card. :-)

Not sure why you would be having this issue either, since my cheap-n-cheesy FX5500 doesn't seem do this with most settings on high. Then again, my system is designed to run exceptionally cool, so maybe the card is happy where it is. *shrug*

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6. Chat settings are not retained (saved) when exiting the GW client. You have to toggle all of the chat channels every time you restart. The same goes for the "Chat filter" option (maybe this was fixed in a later patch).

The chat filter toggles do stay between sessions now. The channel still resets even between instances, which is annoying to say the least - I can't count the number of times I've been talking to my guildmates, switched instances, and accidentally announced some inane and out-of-character thing to everybody in Ascalon...

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8. The UI needs an overhaul, to put it lightly. I appreciate the simplicity, but there are simple things which require you to hit the "Menu" button in the bottom left. Also, common UI interactivity (such as bringing up the Inventory) completely stall rendering of things in the client -- WHY?! This is a common complaint (re: the UI needs an overhaul).

The UI can be customized considerably - change the placement and size of every component. Also, there's not a single component for which there's not a keyboard hotkey, so the "Menu" button is actually superfluous, so I'm not sure what you are referring to that "requires" you use it. Anyway, play around with it - move things around, re-size them, etc. Whatever you don't like, change it.

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9. The map in the upper right is incredibly worthless. I know of no such map / compass system where NORTH ROTATES AROUND A SINGLE AXIS. North always points "UP", folks. Please change this behaviour so the map content rotates and the actual bearings remain static -- not the other way around!

This is amusing in that I never even noticed/thought about it. The way it works now seems to be pretty obvious - "up" is always the direction you are currently moving. Having the map itself spin around so that north is always up would just annoy me, now that I think about it. Does it really require that much re-adjustment to get used to the way it works now?

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10. There needs to be an "always-follow" camera option. The present camera orientation is, to put it lightly, complete garbage. Having to control the camera independantly of my character is ANNOYING. Period.

Odd... unless I am manually moving it around, the camera always follows my character, directly behind and at whatever zoom distance/angle I've set it at. Perhaps you have accidentally hit "free camera" option at some point which disables this activity?

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12. More UI, graphical, and sound toggle options in the Options menu (F11). There simply aren't enough. Permitting the toggle of antisotropic filtering (NOT the same thing as anti-aliasing!) would be quite nice, as people like myself find AA quite annoying, while AF to be useful.

Can't you just adjust AF via your graphics card? I mean, it's not like it's the sort of thing you would need to change "on the fly" so why not just set it where you like it and be done with it? I am curious, however, who would (or rather, why they would) find AA annoying - I don't think there's any single feature that does so much to "clean up" the visual appearance of 3D games. All it does is smooth jagged edges - how can that be a bad thing?

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14. NPCs need to *NOT* block you from moving. There have been numerous cases where henchmen have literally *blocked you in*, not letting you move or do ANYTHING. I've also seen similar behaviour with other NPC characters, such as the girl at the very start of the game who follows you around -- she'll run at you, and then "wiggle/jiggle" until she passes by you, blocking your movement. How about removing all of this unnecessary code, and simply let you walk through friendly NPCs?

I agree - being hemmed in by NPCs is extremely annoying! I'm not so sure about being able to walk through them, as even walking through other players in town is a bit disconcerting, but at least being able to push them aside would be nice.

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15. More strict limitations on character names. After creating my character (who was named in a role-playing fashion, although I do not RP in online games), the first PC I saw was named, and I quote, "SMASH FURIOUS". Shortly thereafter, a pal of mine saw a character named "ULTIMATE NINJA MONK". If I were managing this game, I'd be deleting characters left and right. :P

Everyone paid the same price for the game. While I personally wouldn't name a character anything other than a "real" name (in the fantasy/RP sense), I wouldn't presume to dictate how other people name their characters - if they enjoy being Jim-Bob Josephine or Uberninja Monkey, so be it. I just don't party with those sort of characters and thus don't have to deal with them outside of town. It's certainly not worth getting upset about.

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16. A ChangeLog/Revision History between patches. These are not being released or provided *ANYWHERE* I can find. This is a major MAJOR issue, folks -- I'm almost willing to call it "shady". GW is incredibly reliant on the "dynamic changes" concept, and therefore these sorts-of changes NEED to be documented somewhere where users can read them. The first patch that was released, as we all saw, was completely broken -- the client crashed when you moved. This could've been more quickly addressed had users been able to read a ChangeLog prior to running GW, then reading forums to see what the results were (there will ALWAYS be users who are guinea pigs, so... :-) ).

Have you read this?

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17. An official forum for GW. The GW folk seem to put a lot of pressure on the "general GW user community" to provide services they should be providing themselves. I understand there's no monthly fee -- which is a good thing -- but is it really that hard to set up a forum that's run and maintained by the GW devs/PR folk? There's 20+ GW fan forums/sites all over the world, and there's no way I'm going to traverse ALL of them to find out if other users are experiencing a certain bug or issue. One central point -- hosted by the GW folk -- would be a lot easier.

An Official Forum would be nice indeed.

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Sadly, GW feels very "incomplete", i.e. released too soon. I'm AMAZED that something this "simple" (per se -- don't take this literally) took _FIVE YEARS_ to develop. I would expect the GW manual to mention things like Merchants, identification kits, and so on. None of this is mentioned in the manual, nor is it mentioned anywhere in the game. You have to ask someone, or you have to figure it out "magically" on your own.

Who reads the manual anyway? :P

Incomplete? I have to disagree. Unlike many a game, the manual is clean, well-written, and not filled with typos and misspellings... it gives just enough information to get started and expects you to find the rest out for yourself. Doesn't seem unreasonable for a game that not just encourages but expects you to use teamwork. If it were a single-player game, I could see your point. But it's not like there's not a million people to ask, and I rather liked having to "learn" what to do and where to do it - exactly as the character would have to learn.

Quote:

*HALF* of the GW manual is dedicated to the "storyline". Over 70 pages, folks. A bit excessive? No -- MOST DEFINITELY excessive. I did not purchase GW to find out its user manual was a Robert Jordan novel. Yes, I appreciate good verbose game history -- which can be read via a browser while online.

Excessive? Hm. I don't know about that. It's a nice change of pace to have a game wherein the designers wanted the STORY to actually be important, and made that desire plain in the presentation of the back-story. I've played entirely too many games where one is halfway through the game and still not quite sure what the whole thing is about anyway and why any of it matters. As for reading it "via browser while online" I'd much rather have the printed material to read in spare minutes here and there and save my online time for things like actually playing the game.

Principa Discordia · May 05, 2005, 10:53 PM // 22:53

No offense to the original poster if I'm wrong, but I'm sensing some serious axe-grinding. A lot of those problems are irrelevent and/or have simple fixes.