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I noticed last weekend that BioWare no longer lists "New Next-Gen Game" under its BioWare Games drop-down on BioWare: Welcome to BioWare. Now I'm not at all sure when this went away but I was just curious if anybody else noticed or knew anything about this.

I think someone just realized that it sounded stupid to keep doing that.

Perhaps. It had only been up there for like 3 years or more I think. I just wondered if anybody else noticed.

On this forum, yes most definitely. It's one of those buzz words that gets repeated over and over again in the poorer reviews that pass the news section. You'd think we live in the 31st century by now.

I think it takes at least 10 years for something to at least 'look' what I would consider next-gen. And at that point the developments in gameplay may have actually gone a few steps back.

Maybe they finally figured out that having next gen up there when you're producing Ye Olde gen games like Dragon Age makes you look really dumb!

I don't believe Bioware has yet made anything to top Baldur's Gate. Little remains of the Black Isle team these days.

Everything new will be "next gen" as it is not created now aka this gen. :laugh:

It at the very least suggest a significant quantity & quality upgrade in technology and gameplay. Just adding slightly better shaded models or having a few more dialogue options doesn't qualify that for me.

Least amount of time 5 years. That would be taking it from Morrowind to Oblivion which, if properly modded, I consider to be Morrowind's better.. but just barely. Valve took their one hit wonder Halflife:2 8 years to develop after the first game. It was very.. shiny.

Charnel wrote:I noticed last weekend that BioWare no longer lists "New Next-Gen Game" under its BioWare Games drop-down...

I remember that Bioware's community have a lot of fanboys who might drool when seeing that title, especially if it is an upcoming game. Maybe they got tired or grew out of it?

Tricky wrote:Valve took their one hit wonder Halflife:2 8 years to develop after the first game. It was very.. shiny.

True, but the graphics engine itself is a huge step forward in terms of being scalable with a wide range of machines, up till the Pentium 3 series and is still able to run smoothly even at the lowest common denominator. This is one of the game engines I respect as opposed to others like the Unreal Engine or Cry Engine.

Heck, even Bioware's Aurora engine chugs on PCs that meet the minimum requirements, even when you tone all the graphical options down to the bare minimum, particularly Neverwinter Nights series and the Witcher. Same goes for Bethseda's Gamebryo engine that powered Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3.

DesR85 wrote:Heck, even Bioware's Aurora engine chugs on PCs that meet the minimum requirements

Works well for Dragon Age on modern PCs though!

galraen wrote:Works well for Dragon Age on modern PCs though!

Yeah, I'd bet it must be able to run smoothly on most PCs, including those which met the minimum requirements. Hooray...

Sure it ran pretty decently on my PC, which is a dual core system, but there are poor performances in parts of the game, particularly Denerim, the temple that housed the Sacred Ashes, plus some graphical glitches on the icicles, and the final battle. Happens both before and after installing the 1.03 patch (In which the latter is the worst). Adjusting the graphical options, both in and outside the game didn't help.

@Des,
I run Dragon Age on a Core 2 Duo (8800 GTS vid card, 2 GB memory, XP Pro) as well, and it's very smooth with the settings pretty much at max.
However, I also updated my video drivers before installing... I gather this can make a huge difference. If you haven't tried it already you may want to give it a shot.

dragon wench wrote:I run Dragon Age on a Core 2 Duo (8800 GTS vid card, 2 GB memory, XP Pro) as well, and it's very smooth with the settings pretty much at max.
However, I also updated my video drivers before installing... I gather this can make a huge difference. If you haven't tried it already you may want to give it a shot.

Well, I did everything you mentioned the last time I played, even going as far as doing a clean install of the drivers, and the problems I pointed out still happened. I know that pre-1.03, the game ran smoothly for the most part, but there were some graphical hiccups, such as slowdowns in one or two parts of the Denerim market district and in certain sections of the temple of the Sacred Ashes plus the visual corruption in your team member's portrait (mostly for Morrigan).

After installing that patch, it became worse together with a fair share of random crashes. Now that patch 1.04 is released one or two months after finishing the game, I can really thank Bioware for dragging it's feet in patching this game.

Weird...
These things are so individual. I have the 1.03 patch installed, plus quite a few mods (including two large ones).. and while I have the occasional crash, overall it's very stable.
I do agree though, the amount of time it's taken Bioware to release the 1.04 patch is shameful. Even worse, apparently there are *still* problems with 1.04.. so, I think I'll be waiting a while to play Awakenings.

dragon wench wrote:Weird...
These things are so individual. I have the 1.03 patch installed, plus quite a few mods (including two large ones).. and while I have the occasional crash, overall it's very stable.

Could be OS-related?

I know I'm running this on Windows 7, so that might be one of the reasons why I am having these issues. Maybe the effect of the bugs are less in older OSes?