CDPR Defends Difficulty

Originally Posted by DeepO
There is, if you play a mage.

Are you saying you can't complete the game with normal spells?

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Are you saying you can't complete the game with normal spells?

Nope, but the experiments are VERY helpful to overcome challenges.
Straightforward approach in this case leads to a lot of reloads.

Yep. There are some enemies where just straightforward blasting isn't as effective. This is even more the case in Oblivion.

EDIT:

Most importantly, the straightforward approach is usually the least interesting/fun for me looking from both gameplay and roleplay viewpoints. This is why I don't like the streamlined/simplified gameplay in most modern games. If everyone thinks straightforward is best, then dumbed down is what we will get.

Originally Posted by RivianWitch
PS. I find bombs much more effective than traps. They're much more certain to reach their target. Traps are dicey in the sense of that the normal snares seem to hurt you more than the beasties, and while the other traps are more potent, it's not so easy to get who you want to step on them, to step on them…

Not sure I agree with that…

DeepO @ Thrasher

I give up

I'll have to try it again one day… Right now I'm replaying KotOR with mods…

I just spent the last few hours reinstalling Morrowind along with that graphics overhaul mod.

The game looks incredible, but the performance hit is something else. On the default settings, I'm getting an average of 12-13 FPS, and this is with a 3.4ghz quad core and GTX 470 OC.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Right now I'm replaying KotOR with mods…

Speaking of popular games that some of us just don't get…

Originally Posted by JDR13
Speaking of popular games that some of us just don't get…

Even with no hope of convincing you, I can only say you're missing out

It remains one of the most consistently excellent and wholesome gaming experiences - even today.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Even with no hope of convincing you, I can only say you're missing out

It remains one of the most consistently excellent and wholesome gaming experiences - even today.

I played through it back when it was released, so I know exactly what it has to offer.

Suffice to say, it didn't do much for me, despite being a Star Wars fan.

Originally Posted by JDR13
I played through it back when it was released, so I know exactly what it has to offer.

Suffice to say, it didn't do much for me, despite being a Star Wars fan.

Oh well….

Yeah, I get that a lot.

Quite frankly, I can only scratch my head and keep wondering what people see..

I think you've made that pretty clear by now

If you've played it through - then there's not much anyone can do to explain what they see.

Sometimes, these things just affect us differently - and there's no way to "get it" - because people can be so different about what they enjoy.

I think it's almost exactly the same with Portal 2 for me, for instance. Everyone is raving about it - and I haven't got the slightest idea what's so special about it.

It's OK - nothing more.

No explanation necessary, I think we're only stating the obvious at this point.

Originally Posted by JDR13
I just spent the last few hours reinstalling Morrowind along with that graphics overhaul mod.

The game looks incredible, but the performance hit is something else. On the default settings, I'm getting an average of 12-13 FPS, and this is with a 3.4ghz quad core and GTX 470 OC.

That´s likely caused by some "extreme" values in Morrowind Graphics Extender and I think it´s simply engine related.
On the distant land tab disable exponential fog, set draw distance to 6 - 8 cells and, optionally, uncheck distant statics under water reflections and see what happens.

Originally Posted by DeepO
That´s likely caused by some "extreme" values in Morrowind Graphics Extender and I think it´s simply engine related.
On the distant land tab disable exponential fog, set draw distance to 6 - 8 cells and, optionally, uncheck distant statics under water reflections and see what happens.

I already had distant statics disabled, and enabling/disabling exponential fog seems to have little impact. What does exponential fog do visually anyways? I didn't notice anything.

I would think that draw distance should have a significant impact, but oddly enough it doesn't. Going from a distance of 13 cells to 8 cells only added 2-3 fps.

I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps the fps counter isn't displaying correctly. It certainly feels a little smoother than the 13-15 fps it's showing.

*Edit* Do you remember what the max draw distance was for vanilla Morrowind? I'm guessing around 4 cells, but it's been too long since I've played to recall exactly what it looked like.

Originally Posted by JDR13
What does exponential fog do visually anyways? I didn't notice anything.

I´ve no idea . But it seems like it needs higher draw distance to work properly.

Originally Posted by JDR13
*Edit* Do you remember what the max draw distance was for vanilla Morrowind?

I don´t, probably around 3 or so, but I think that with the distant lands setting the draw distance too low results in unnatural look due to fog and setting it too high brings the "Morrowind feels small" issue which is why I think the best values are at 6-8 and these should also be performance-friendly.

But since lowering the cell draw distance didn´t seem to make much difference for you, the culprit is probably somewhere else.
Either it could be the included shaders, for example ambient occlusion (SSAO) tends to cause quite big fps hits so you may try to disable it if there´s one (in Tools-Shader Editor-Edit active chain).
Alternatively, you could disable them all and see if it results in notable increase and then add them one by one to find the culprit.
The order in which they´re added is important, better write the default one somewhere if you´ll opt to do this.

Or you could try regenerate distant lands (Tools - DL creation wizard) using some less demanding values, for example:
world texture resolution - 2048
world normal map resolution - 1024 (anything above isn´t noticeable anyway)
world mesh detail - high
grass density - 80
minimum static size - 200 or more

That´s all I have. It´s probably combination of factors, but my personal bet is the biggest impact are the shaders.

I've always wanted to the try MGE, and the the other graphical upgrades, so please keep u updated! Now where is that ES forum where we could move this discussion?

This is really quite odd. I turned the view distance down to 4 cells, turned off all shaders, and turned off all relections and water effects, and I was still only getting around 20fps. I'm starting to think this program just doesn't like my system.

I wonder if this is a Windows 7 64 issue. I probably should have installed it on my WinXP partition. I'm tempted to do that so I can see the difference, but I really don't want to go through that install process again.

Originally Posted by JDR13
This is really quite odd. I turned the view distance down to 4 cells, turned off all shaders, and turned off all relections and water effects, and I was still only getting around 20fps. I'm starting to think this program just doesn't like my system.

I wonder if this is a Windows 7 64 issue. I probably should have installed it on my WinXP partition. I'm tempted to do that so I can see the difference, but I really don't want to go through that install process again.

I believe Morrowind is self-contained, you could just copy over the entire directory.

Originally Posted by JDR13
This is really quite odd. I turned the view distance down to 4 cells, turned off all shaders, and turned off all relections and water effects, and I was still only getting around 20fps. I'm starting to think this program just doesn't like my system.

I wonder if this is a Windows 7 64 issue. I probably should have installed it on my WinXP partition. I'm tempted to do that so I can see the difference, but I really don't want to go through that install process again.

I tried this a few months back on Windows 7 64 - and I had no such issue.

Well, from memory, I had most "bells and whistles" enabled - and I ended up having a very reasonable framerate.

Something like 30-40 FPS consistently.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Something like 30-40 FPS consistently.

Are you sure? That would be pretty high for any system to reach. What are your specs?

Are we talking about the same program, Morrowind Graphics Overhaul, or were you using the Morrowind Graphics Extender?


@TheSisko - Thanks for the suggestion, I might try that later. Morrowind does appear to be self-contained from what I can see.