I have been playing a long time.....

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whoisthisis
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I have been playing a long time.....

Post by whoisthisis » Tue Oct 16, 2018 4:12 am

I was digging thru my stuff and I pulled out this.
Image

Yep. $54.99 in 2002 dollars For a game that had some bugs that make the EE version ones seem tiny.

I won't go thru them all, they are well listed. But in the end I was the only one I knew still playing with the original version of the game (with updates and expansion packs mind you)

Got to be a massive pain to reinstall. Install NWN, install SOTU, install HOTU, find the manual 1.69 updater I had stashed on a flash drive because the internal updater had LONG quit working.

Used to get a lot of comments from server ops about the weird CD code. I would then have to go thru the explanation above.

This version of the game has the cloth map inside it of Neverwinter as a bonus, a spiral bound manual, two install disks, and a play disk. Yes a PLAY disk. Two reasons. Some HDs were still not that big, and to save space you could not install absolutely everything. Also, the orginal NWN had the bastard thing called securerom. The disk HAD to be in the drive to play the game. They removed this thing before long. But not before my play disk got inner rim cracks from the literal thousands of hours spinning in the drive.

I laugh now when I see the intel folks complaining about EE. The original game would refuse to even RUN on onboard graphics. You had to have Nvidia or ATI. And even ATI was hit and miss. There were a couple graphics items that would never work on an ATI.

Anyway, yep. Just nostalgia. That is all.

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Kreydis
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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by Kreydis » Tue Oct 16, 2018 4:19 am

>New release

I don't know why, but this tickles my funny bone.
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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by The Rambling Midget » Tue Oct 16, 2018 4:24 am

Still have mine on the shelf above my desk; manual, map, and all.

It ran magnificently on Windows 2000. Everything XP and up just made it worse and worse with each ENHANCEMENT.
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whoisthisis
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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by whoisthisis » Tue Oct 16, 2018 4:25 am

Kreydis wrote:
Tue Oct 16, 2018 4:19 am
>New release

I don't know why, but this tickles my funny bone.
That was because I went in and bought it the day it came out. $54.99 in 2002 dollars. probably $75 in today's money.

Tryn Dralar
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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by Tryn Dralar » Tue Oct 16, 2018 2:54 pm

I'm still using the original version I got on day it came out also. Expansions, original keys, everything. 😋

azrael_athing
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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by azrael_athing » Tue Oct 16, 2018 4:34 pm

My original version is still in the desk drawer. Where it belongs faithfully.

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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by Vrass » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:53 am

54 F****** dollars... for this game... even back then? You gotta be kidding me lol. I only payed maybe 30 or so at most. :shock:

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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by DM Symphony » Wed Oct 17, 2018 10:59 am

I said some of the same stuff not too long ago in Discord to the discontent of others. The Bioware patching process was quite painful, and I had a number of characters ruined by mechanics changes. Merging haks to work with the new 2da lines was a pain, and some PW's made their players not update (there was no oldstable or some friend passing you an old .exe on Discord) for 1-4 months. Admittedly I do feel that the original tilesets were super solid, though they were slowly augmented by new tile groups and features in the expansion packs.

I was playing on my dad's top of the line Nvidia graphics card, and the visual appeal was jaw dropping. I ended up going into a forest on my first PW and seeing the shafts of light and leaves falling down was totally unreal. There was one character, a sorcerer named Ras, who seemed to have ghostly visage up permanently, and pretty much nobody else used it, except for on the Rod's of Ghost we found, which we called Ras-sticks. Ghostly visage was some black magic graphics too.

whoisthisis
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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by whoisthisis » Wed Oct 17, 2018 4:44 pm

Ohh the bugs were bad. REAL BAD.

Bioware never intended for the game to even be running 24/7. There were memory leaks like crazy and it was nothing for even the dedicated server to crash every 2 to 3 hours. A smart server op used something like Firedeamon to run the dedicated server, because when it crashed, it would NOT auto reload.

Bioware would spring HUGE features and mechanics changes on you out of the blue. And sometimes introduce NEW bugs.

My favorite was one of the updates had somehow had the disk swapping disabled on the toolset. You had to be able to load the entire module into ram to work on it. Well that was a HUGE issue with computers of the day that only had 128 to 256MB of ram! And they didn't bother fixing it until the next update months later.

HOTU got released without a rollup for the PWs and other versions out there. The HOTU game was VER 1.59 and there was no rollup for older versions or a dedicated server. Then the fix for this got botched, as 1.60 didn't recognize the RARE gold version of the game. Gold was the original and SOU in one box. You never see it.

It wasn't until 2006 or 2007 that the game really settled down in the mid 1.6X patches. So those of us playing from 2002 to then suffered thru a really crazy time where the base game would occasionally turn everything on it's ear. It crashed A LOT, and not just your game, the server crashed A LOT.

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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by DM Symphony » Wed Oct 17, 2018 11:59 pm

It's not as impactful to those here, but when the game first came out, it was the case that each module could only have ONE hak, so essentially anyone using haks (actually, most of the servers I think, at release even) would know about merging assets, whereas a lot of servers for the past 12 years have piled on all of the haks with the things they want, sometimes these haks only having ONE thing in them, and try to reorder it until it worked.

And of course a lot of the player generated content, which came out in small duplicates every day (there was a few Dracoliches, before they were added by Bioware in HOTU), would crash the game, or the server, or both, randomly.

This is only technical stuff, I think a lot of today's players would consider it "unplayable lol" simply because it didn't have Divine might, expertise, true strike, shield spell, divine favor, prestige classes, cloaks and robes, missile storms, resistance feats, or a ton of other stuff that somewhat thankfully?/clumsily? got added into the game in much different styles than the original game's features. Not to mention the extremely limited top down camera angle.

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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by TimeAdept » Thu Oct 18, 2018 2:00 am

Lost my box sometime in a move a few years back, much to my dismay. Still have the CD book from HoTU, but can't find my OG manual or boxes with cloth map. Genuinely upsetting, tbh. Still using my OG CDkeys too.

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Rockstar1984
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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by Rockstar1984 » Thu Oct 18, 2018 2:17 am

I've still got my NWN cds and the original cd key I got back in 2008 when I started playing. Bought the game from Gamestop. Amazing to think that game stores were still selling physical copies of the game for so many years.

Oh the year was 1778...


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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by iria_huntress » Thu Oct 18, 2018 7:49 am

Making me miss my 'glory days' of gaming. I learned about this game from another player while beta testing for...idk. "You seem to like role playing. Check out this game! There are dedicated servers just for it!" I think, at that time, it was Final Fantasy XI, or Ragnarok Online. I'm pretty sure I got it before the Eve Online beta. By that point, NWN was a year or 2 old, and cloaks hadn't been added yet. I remember being super excited about that update!

Thinking back, it had to have been Final Fantasy XI. They actually sent a free CD to install for the beta testers. That was a big deal!

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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by Tryn Dralar » Thu Oct 18, 2018 2:48 pm

I was part of a rpg forum kinda like the ic story section here except other folks would jump in and post their character actions as well. Was called Skullport. We'll talk about NWN coming out soon got everyone excited and the forum owner said he was going to get it and make us a Skullport server. Alot of us got the game the day it came out, played single player getting used to it while we would help test the new server as he was making it. Eventually he gave up, dropping the whole server thing and also shut down the forum. Sucked. But hey, now we had servers popping up everywhere. Been thru some pretty bad servers, and only 4 to that I ever spent more than a couple years on. FRC and Arelith being most of those years.

I haven't played anything other than NWN since it's release.

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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by The Kriv » Thu Oct 18, 2018 8:39 pm

I don't have my box, but I too purchased the game the week of initial release, and have my original manual, and 3-disk glossy disk-folder-case. The cloth map, however, got eaten by the dog.
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Re: I have been playing a long time.....

Post by -Heavyline- » Fri Oct 19, 2018 7:58 am

I wish I didn't threw my original box away after purchasing the "deluxe edition" box when it was the only way to get the expansions back then. I remember buying my copy of NWN 2-3 months after it's release, but my PC couldn't run it. It was a real bummer at the time. 2-3 years later I got a new computer and I was finally able to play NWN, but it was hard to find servers when I only had the original without the expansions. I did find few servers, but they were... let's just say... really weird and unfriendly servers. Then I bought the deluxe edition, played through the original campaign, expansions. After that I was playing World of Warcraft for short moment, but then I went back to Neverwinter Nights and I jumped into Arelith in 2007 or 2008... and I've spent more time with this game than anything else ever. Found my best friend here and it changed me as a person. I got the eye-logo tattooed in my calf because how much this game means to me. I didn't play it for over 5 years now, but that Iam back in here.... Iam ridiculously addicted to it again.

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