I'm sure I could milk at least 75-80 hours out of it.
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And I still get far too many crashes.
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The more I play this, the more I like it.
30+ hours into a very good RPG. Combat, magic and crafting make some nice improvements over most recent offerings. The story is good, but does not really engage as much as I would hope. There are some implementation issues, typos, and odd oversights, but the concept the designers seem to have delivered to the programmers is excellent. Very few, and relatively minor, problems. Biggest issue for me is too much hand-holding for my personal taste, but many RPGers like that. Large world — wide open empty spaces in parts (scattered animals) but also many hidden towns, camps, etc. Chapter two opened up a new island, but I still have a few areas and quests to finish on the starting one. It is very easy to underestimate the number of quests hidden out there. And there is a learning curve on magic and crafting — would be easy for someone to miss all the possibilities and potential there.
Huge world, non-linear, and a bazillion (often creative) quests. In chapter two your choices start to make a difference — I had a girl commit suicide because of a bad decision. Someone posted they finished this in 20 or so hours — I simply can't buy that. After 30+ hours I am just into chapter II because of all the side quests. (No clue yet how many chapters.) No way someone in 20 hours without taking the time to level on sidequest experience could face chapter II baddies, let alone what I expect is coming for the finale. They must mean 20 hours as shown in the savegame date stamp — it seems to run about 1/2 to 1/3 of elapsed playtime.
Thanks for the lead in this forum!!
I spent ab hour researching the console options and stole a bunch of good ideas from various places in the TW2 forums. The result is a huge improvement in graphics.
Do the following if you would like to try it:
in your TW2 folder create a new folder called Parameters
use notepad to create a new file called autoexecgame2.con — this will go into the parameters folder
type otr paste the following into autoexecgame2.con:
Engine.MBlurIntensity 0
Engine.ParalaxOnTerrain 0
Engine.FOV 70
Engine.BloomMultiplier 0
Engine.EdgeAABlend 0
Engine.Farplane 1500
Save it and run TW2 — you should see a large improvement.
I also went to my NVidia control panel and overrided game AA options. 8x worked fine, 16x blacked out everything.
Hope this helps, and thanks RPGwatch for the leads!
Follow-up …
No clue why, yet, but in 2 hours since making the graphics change I have had no crashes. I was having 3-4 an hour at zone transitions.
Thank you for the graphic tweak.
I noticed after using the tweak, that my cooling-fan of the gfx-card is more quiet.
So it could be that your crashes were the result of gfx-card overheating.
But, it seems waiting for a patch and perhaps some more content would be wiser. Not that I think it's a bad deal for ~30 hours of gameplay - but I was hoping for a more epic thing.
Exactly my thoughts. It's not a bad game at all, but i've been waiting for this game since 2 years back, the devs have been saying its going to be larger than TW1 etc. Very disapointed that a huge portion of the map is only for MP and its not not really bigger than TW1, but even smaller. Risen was quite small too, would've been nice with a really big landmass to explore. The sailing which seemed like such a nice idea is also quite useless. I really want to go back, but i think i'll wait for a patch and maybe even for a DLC.
Not only can riding horses fast be fun, but there are a couple of quests associated with them also.