Recommendation moved to Do Not Buy, yet

[HorrorScope]

Chatting with Atari this morning has made it clear they are creating more problems vs solving them for PC users.

First today here is what they said about PC issues:

Here's our priority:
XBLA
PSN
PC
You're just going to have to wait a while, I'm sorry.

The one issue I cannot get over is there is a patch for Daggerdale, only steam and boxed version users can get this. They will not update the other avenues or give us a link to download and apply. When asked when will they address this, the answer was:

Here's our priority:
XBLA
PSN
PC
You're just going to have to wait a while, I'm sorry.

To me all people selling the digital version should take Daggerdale off their sell list until this is corrected.

Here are the issues:

1. You don't know for certain what version you have. There is nothing in game and they won't give us any way of telling by file date or size of a certain file. I guess we aren't sophisticated enough to do something complicated like that.

2. Version can't join together.

3. If you have an unpatched version you have a great chance of losing all your skills at some point forever and you may also have save progress issues where the game will no longer save period. All these compounded if you play coop. And let me tell you when you hit these two you will not be happy.

They won't take the time to update all sites with the same version, they won't release a patch to us because:

Here's our priority:
XBLA
PSN
PC
You're just going to have to wait a while, I'm sorry.

I don't know how souless the person at Atari has to be to then release it to the public knowing these issues. Steam you should investigate.

[dogstar060763]

Game definitely has technical issues. Missing textures is such a big one, and so widely reported since the game's initial release on PC disk, it's staggering the Steam version still has the bug. But there are many other glitches and bugs need sorting.

Whole thing feels unfinished. I'll cut some slack to the worst of them, god knows as a PC gamer I've grown used to having to do so, but Daggerdale really does feel like a work in progress.

[radio_babylon]

Steam you should investigate.

no offense but... thats like saying "best buy, you should investigate"... not going to happen, SHOULDNT happen. it isnt the storefront's responsibility to "investigate" anything.

caveat emptor.

[Cogeneration]

FYI,

With Steam you will always have the latest version by default because of 'Automatic updates'. Right-click Daggerdale in Steam and select Properties and then the 'UPDATES' tab.

Additionally, if you are uncertain if your installation is complete or corrupt; select the 'LOCAL FILES' tab and then 'Verify Integrety of Game Cache...'.

Best of luck!

[Cogeneration]

no offense but... thats like saying "best buy, you should investigate"... not going to happen, SHOULDNT happen. it isnt the storefront's responsibility to "investigate" anything.

caveat emptor. I am a software engineer and business owner and I can confirm that this is often the view with software because customers have been programmed to believe they have no rights.

However, this is not the case with most any other widget you'll buy in a store. Imagine if all toasters sold at wally world came without a power cord or if all their TVs were missing remotes.

Don't believe for one second that you have no rights. I often use small claims court to settle minor issues, it takes 5 minutes to fill out the paper work and it never fails to start a fire under the correct people.

Best of luck!

[Cogeneration]

Here's our priority:
XBLA
PSN
PC
You're just going to have to wait a while, I'm sorry.


Unfortunately, that is the priority for most all game companies right now.

Sales on a game like this would often look something like the following:

XBox 65%
PS3 30%
PC 5%

[HorrorScope]

Unfortunately, that is the priority for most all game companies right now.

Sales on a game like this would often look something like the following:

XBox 65%
PS3 30%
PC 5%


As mentioned above, that is what we are programmed to believe.

At the very top of the money food chain are pc companies, sure not always the games we play. But beyond that even there has been many producers recently talking about the strength of the pc market. But your not all wrong or anything either, depends on genre.

The point of this is we have people with two versions out there and there, they can't talk together and one is critically broken. And there is nothing we can do until they get around to it and we are down low. It's stupid we can't get everyone on the same version. This is like a new low/problem, this isn't common.

[radio_babylon]

I am a software engineer and business owner and I can confirm that this is often the view with software because customers have been programmed to believe they have no rights.

However, this is not the case with most any other widget you'll buy in a store. Imagine if all toasters sold at wally world came without a power cord or if all their TVs were missing remotes.

Don't believe for one second that you have no rights. I often use small claims court to settle minor issues, it takes 5 minutes to fill out the paper work and it never fails to start a fire under the correct people.

Best of luck!

even in small claims, youd be suing the publisher, not the distributor. i say again: caveat emptor. or for the latin impaired, "all the info you need is online, so f'ing go read it before you spend your money, and if you dont, then dont cry about it later"...

customers have a responsibility to do their due diligence before parting with their money just as much as manufacturers/publishers have towards the customer.

and in either case the transaction processor has no responsibility to you beyond a) correctly charging you and b) delivering your product to you. if you couldnt download, or were overcharged, or were charged but didnt receive your game in your library, THAT you would take up with steam.

[Metro]

Why are people surprised when obvious schlocky console games get no support on PC? Especially when they're published by Atari. See, e.g., Sanctum of Slime.

[M4nkoRid3r]

Why are people surprised when obvious schlocky console games get no support on PC? Especially when they're published by Atari. See, e.g., Sanctum of Slime.

To be honest, I haven't been shafted from Atari until this game.

[velfarr3]

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/06/25/dungeons-dragons-daggerdale-review/

thats why I'm not buying it.

[malek1013]

To be honest, I haven't been shafted from Atari until this game.

Neverwinter Nights 2?

And besides the representative for Atari on their forums is a major a$$ hole.

[Kringe]

I read yalls conversation but on the bright side Horror, they respond to you and push feedback. Infact another Atari team member left you another reply today. By the size of the game I am sure they have 1 at most prolly 2 coders left on the game that have it as a side project. After release companies down size alotted coders for a game, granted they have other staff to help them prioritize whats need to be fixed for the game. Marketing staff prolly sold the game once their budget was met and had to cut losses by either focusing their devs on another game with a higher expected budget or cut losses on what they thought would not sell. The fanbase is always the ones who suffer.

[M4nkoRid3r]

Neverwinter Nights 2?

And besides the representative for Atari on their forums is a major a$$ hole.

I didn't have any problems with NWN2.

[jbmac03]

I didn't have any problems with NWN2.

I feel bad for you. I would go majorly off-topic if I were to rant as to why.

[jbmac03]

even in small claims, youd be suing the publisher, not the distributor. i say again: caveat emptor. or for the latin impaired, "all the info you need is online, so f'ing go read it before you spend your money, and if you dont, then dont cry about it later"...

customers have a responsibility to do their due diligence before parting with their money just as much as manufacturers/publishers have towards the customer.

and in either case the transaction processor has no responsibility to you beyond a) correctly charging you and b) delivering your product to you. if you couldnt download, or were overcharged, or were charged but didnt receive your game in your library, THAT you would take up with steam.

Under the law, as contained in both the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and various state consumer protection statutes, a seller of goods almost always guarantees to his buyer that the goods he is selling are "good," and they will be fit for general use. This means even if the alleged defect really is a manufacturing condition, each seller of those goods- the manufacturer to the distributor, the distributor to the retailer and the dealer to the consumer- guarantees to his customer what is being sold is not defective.

Not only is the retail seller totally responsible to his buyer for the condition of goods, but in most situations, he is the only one the consumer can sue. In most cases, the guarantee is treated as a contract right made a part of every sales agreement.

So yes, It would be Best Buy's responsibility to look into the matter according to your example. Steam is an entirely different thing. It depends on if they actually buy the goods and retail them or if they let the publishers sell directly through their medium for a fee.

If they are a retailer then reselling broken garbage is their problem and they should investigate.

[DanMan3395]

even in small claims, youd be suing the publisher, not the distributor. i say again: caveat emptor. or for the latin impaired, "all the info you need is online, so f'ing go read it before you spend your money, and if you dont, then dont cry about it later"...

customers have a responsibility to do their due diligence before parting with their money just as much as manufacturers/publishers have towards the customer.

and in either case the transaction processor has no responsibility to you beyond a) correctly charging you and b) delivering your product to you. if you couldnt download, or were overcharged, or were charged but didnt receive your game in your library, THAT you would take up with steam.

QFT 5chars

[WoogieMonster]

FYI,

With Steam you will always have the latest version by default because of 'Automatic updates'.

Not true. There are games on Steam that do not give you the up-to-date version when you download the game. Test Drive Unlimited 2 is another game, that if you download from Steam you are installing a version of the game that is months old. The games 3rd-party client will then install the 4 or 5 patches it requires for the game to even launch. Incidentally, that is also an Atari game that was released incomplete.

[maxbialstok]

Like so many others, I plopped down $15 to download DnD Daggerdale because, frankly, I trust STEAM. When the game failed to lauch on my Win7 platform, my first thought was to look to the forums to find a solution - not complain. Wow, I was surprised at how common my situation was. Caveat emptor, indeed.

I appreciated all the good critique, the well-founded opinion on the state of affairs of the gaming world. However, I found it next to useless as a practicle solution. Perhaps it was this absence of a solution in particuler that spurred me to action.

Disclaimer: I am not a scientist. I am a self-employed chef who occasionally enjoys the fruits of his labors by playing games - some of them on computer.

Here is what I (not because I have a great deal of time on my hands, but because I have learned to multitask very well due to a healthy scientific curiosity) did. I put three OSs (XP, Vista, Win7)on the same computer to avoid hardware differences in order to test a hypothesis.

Question: DnD Daggerdale can't be a total piece of junk, right? Someone is playing and enjoying it.

Method: Using STEAM, I downloaded the game onto the same computer in three different OS platforms and tried to play it. Curiously, download speed in win7 was 245/kbs. Vista was 895/kbs. XP 425/kbs. Time of day for each download was approximately the same but on different weekdays.

Win7: Game failed to lauch. Attempted to fix by using Steam to verify file integrity. Resulting in thee corrupt files being reacquired but game still does not launch.

Vista: Game launches but with no audio other than cut-scenes. I played the game anyway to observe other reported bugs.

Bugs in Vista version of DnD Daggerdale: No audio. Textures missing at times. loss of certain keyboard controls (mis-assigned primary,secondary melee) after opening treasure chests in the "prison breakout" segment which cannot be remapped. unwinnable scenario in finishing the game - defeating Raszlu (sic?) and dragon. All of these are confirmed in my version.

XP: Game launches fine, plays fine with audio. Game is winnable (I beat the dragon) at the end. The annoying camera that sometimes travels behind walls obscurring the players view seems to be a feature, not a bug (LOL). Also, the same "bug" appears in the XP version where, in the prison break-out, keymapping is lost, but it is easily remapped per game design and is logical and well thought out since you might want to revamp your weapon/hotkey choices at that point.

Conclusion: DnD Daggerdale is NOT a COMPLETE piece of junk. It is a poorly-ported console game that likely has only been "play tested" on the XP platform. The philosophy by ATARI (in this case)might be: "close enough for those at the bottom of the Totem-pole" Well, this might be the norm in government, but this is the private-sector. Not good enough!

Advice: I personally enjoyed this simple little game, and I think it worth the $15 I spent. So buy this game only if you are using XP, otherwise WAIT for the game to be patched for other OSs. To all the scientists out there, please accept my apologies for a poorly constructed experiment. Thank you for your attention and remember to have fun!

><)))> Max

[Ace42]

I didn't have any problems with NWN2.

It was a massive uphill battle to get it to work at a decent frame-rate, and took several patches to do so. Despite WoW having been out for plenty of time, they spent no effort whatsoever trying to learn from its vastly superior control system.

Even to this day it's buggy.

The module-loading system was terrible, making patching modules a pain, and requiring stupid amounts of data.

And I'm someone who remembers it *fondly*.

As for Daggerdale, I really like the FR setting; but
Daggerdale might’ve achieved mediocrity if its lazily ported UI didn’t interfere at every opportunity. Console button prompts are everywhere, and it fails to understand the most basic mouse-and-keyboard prompts or the concept of remappable hotkeys. Could it get worse? Yes! killed it for me.

I view ALL console ports to PC as a betrayal of quality gaming; and I have yet to see a console port to PC that isn't an inherently superficial and tacky game anyway. The fact that they botched the port so badly is just unforgivable though. Daggerdale's coming off my wishlist as of right now.

[maxbialstok]

Ace42 wrote:

"I view ALL console ports to PC as a betrayal of quality gaming; and I have yet to see a console port to PC that isn't an inherently superficial and tacky game anyway. The fact that they botched the port so badly is just unforgivable though. Daggerdale's coming off my wishlist as of right now."

I completely agree with you, Ace. We should all vote with our wallets if we wan't some respect.

><)))> Max

[maxbialstok]

oops! how did an ' get in the word want?

><)))> Max