Dragon Age 2 - Hi-Res Texture Pack

Just for the record, the high res textures took me 8 and a half minutes to download, so it's not like they through this file up with no bandwidth to get it.

About DA2 being a "rush job:" Yes and no.

This game had less than a 2 year development cycle, which is really short for a AAA game with more than 40 hours of gameplay.

With the hundreds of thousands of hardware permutations present in the PC market, it makes sense to make the game work for consoles first, and then focus on the PC. Instead of pushing the release date back a month, or more, in order to get the high-res textures on the disc, they've kept their release date (which I'm sure was important for EA) while getting a high-res patch out before the game landed in most PC users' laps.

There's plenty of things to complain about when it comes to EA/Bioware and their games, but this isn't one of them. This is, actually, pretty cool of them. Don't forget: hatred produces the same lack of objectivity that love does.

And for everyone complaining about having to have a super sweeeet graphics card to run this game, this is what I have. I'm a 32 year old, married college student with a child. I also have a house to pay for, and two cars. If I can afford this, so can anyone.

@Captain Buzzkill

I still maintain that this was rushed - as you say, the turn around time for a AAA game (even a sequel) is pretty much unheard of. First they left out some of the game assets (so yes, its functional, but not in the way it was designed to be), then there are the issues with the Xbox code (autoattack functionality) being left out the master. That smacks of a rush job. And there was a lack of testing with Nvidia cards, which account for a huge part of the game playing market. I know some people in Nvidia who do testing, and I know that there is a good relationship between Nvidia and game studios - so I think this was again something that fell victim to poor time management. Yes, EA may have pressurised them, but does that excuse such poor planning? If so, where do you draw the line? I think it is not unreasonable to expect a quality product when you fork out you money, not something with bits missing. If they're willing to ship a game in an incomplete stage, what will they deem a day 1 ommission next time? There's always pressure from deadlines - most people learn how to plan appropriately.


@rune_74: the amount of bandwith they reserved makes no difference if you're sitting at the receving end with a slow, bandwidth choked connection, downloading stuff that should have been on the DVD. I'm glad that got that right tho, for those who can benefit.

My complaint here is I'm doubting entirely necessary. Its like those Dx11 games that came out shortly after Vista.

Just like Bio get's a kickback from MS for making a game XBox exclusive or definitely the first to release platform wise, I'm sure nVidia is giving them a kickback to raise the floor for memory. This is not a difference in technology; its just memory.

booboo said:

Yes, EA may have pressurised them, but does that excuse such poor planning? If so, where do you draw the line? I think it is not unreasonable to expect a quality product when you fork out you money, not something with bits missing. If they're willing to ship a game in an incomplete stage, what will they deem a day 1 ommission next time? There's always pressure from deadlines - most people learn how to plan appropriately.

Click to expand...

Yeah I mean - it's one thing trying a different design philosophy for the sequel, and doing something smaller in scope. It might might not sit well with some people, but this does not mean the game would be "bad" by any means. But that does not excuse a rushed job which from what I'm hearing of the game (totally silly and unbalanced nightmare mode, areas reused constantly for most quests...) is what DAII seems to be.

I'm still interested in DAII though - though the plot is probably what is gonna make or break the same for me.

-Sergorn

booboo said:

@Captain Buzzkill

I still maintain that this was rushed - as you say, the turn around time for a AAA game (even a sequel) is pretty much unheard of. First they left out some of the game assets (so yes, its functional, but not in the way it was designed to be), then there are the issues with the Xbox code (autoattack functionality) being left out the master. That smacks of a rush job. And there was a lack of testing with Nvidia cards, which account for a huge part of the game playing market. I know some people in Nvidia who do testing, and I know that there is a good relationship between Nvidia and game studios - so I think this was again something that fell victim to poor time management. Yes, EA may have pressurised them, but does that excuse such poor planning? If so, where do you draw the line? I think it is not unreasonable to expect a quality product when you fork out you money, not something with bits missing. If they're willing to ship a game in an incomplete stage, what will they deem a day 1 ommission next time? There's always pressure from deadlines - most people learn how to plan appropriately.

Click to expand...

Good points, all, but when taken in context, they're not nearly the deal breakers that they're made out to be. Case in point - and I hate picking on Obsidian, because I think they're an awesome company, and I want them to do well - but you look at Fallout NV: that game was horrid when it first came out, and it required a 3rd party hotfix. How long was it before an actual patch was seen? That, in my opinion warrants complaint. Also, KOTOR2, with almost a third of the story hacked off in order to make deadline, that's worthy of complaint. If the technical issues that have arisen are the only ones plaguing this title, then I consider it a pretty resounding success, in terms of development and stability. The quality of the actual game is another matter entirely.

I assume I don't have to download this package at all because I'm still using Winxp and the package is for Direktx 11 only ?

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I assume I don't have to download this package at all because I'm still using Winxp and the package is for Direktx 11 only ?

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DX11 is incompatible with WinXP? If that is the case, then you are correct.

I guess you learn something new every day.

Not incompatible - it's rather so that Direktx 11 is available only for Vista ? and definitively for Win7.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Not incompatible - it's rather so that Direktx 11 is available only for Vista ? and definitively for Win7.

Click to expand...

Dammit, Alrik, can you use DX11 or not?!?!

Since Direktx 11 is NOT available for Winxp, I CAN'T use it.

Okay, then what the hell are you doing in this thread? Shoo!

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Since Direktx 11 is NOT available for Winxp, I CAN'T use it.

Click to expand...

You should upgrade to win7. Its the first good windows ms managed to make.

Captain Buzzkill said:

Okay, then what the hell are you doing in this thread? Shoo!

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Reading ?

To be honest I haven't even used it yet, it looks fine without it. I just got home from work so maybe Iw ill give it a spin to see if it makes it look better, though really it's not really necessary.

I updated my drivers to the beta NVIDIA drivers as suggested and performance went to crap. I tried the demo which ran perfectly fine before and it was crap as well with I suspect smoke effects. I would stay away from the new drivers unless you have problems. I'm going to try going back to 257.21 version which I think I was running prior with the demo.

Edit: Went back and installed 260.63 as I saw that from windows update and now everything is happy again. I have DX11 and Hires and no stuttering.

figment said:

I updated my drivers to the beta NVIDIA drivers as suggested and performance went to crap. I tried the demo which ran perfectly fine before and it was crap as well with I suspect smoke effects. I would stay away from the new drivers unless you have problems. I'm going to try going back to 257.21 version which I think I was running prior with the demo.

Edit: Went back and installed 260.63 as I saw that from windows update and now everything is happy again. I have DX11 and Hires and no stuttering.

Click to expand...

The new drivers perform fine for me... 260 is quite old, I'm surprised it works well.

This is with DX11 though, maybe older drivers perform better for DX9? I dunno. In any case at completely maxed settings I get 30fps, which is fine for a game like this. I would like another driver update that boosts that up though, naturally.

I think we all want drivers that boost framerate. As long as its not a slideshow I'm generally happy. Just posting what worked for me in case it helps someone else who is not so fortunate to have the new drivers work. Have a GTS 250 which isn't exactly high end but is working acceptably for me now.

And it wasn't so bad until I got to Flemeth though not as good as when I played the demo but it was terrible during the cutscenes with like 3-5 second pauses. Anyway the bioware forum lists a lot of problems with people updating drivers and the hires pack but then I would expect that anyway.

No problem with them releasing or generating additional assets that improve the experience for those that have the hardware to take advantage of it, especially when it's done so at no cost to those that don't. But I am surprised at the number of 'missed the disk' things that seem to be going on with DA2 - auto attack for the console version is another example.

I've no idea how much space is already taken up on the DVD (could someone check?) so maybe they decided that it rather than including an extra DVD for all PC copies it would be cheaper to serve the bandwidth for the few players that would want the hi-res pack.

But if not, then it looks like they've got a slight weakness in the logistics chain that they need to sort out.

The DVD actually has only 2.something GBs on it. It's highly compressed though, most of the install procedure was unpacking and the final installed directory is over 6GB.