Why is the patching system for NWN so blindingly blazingly useless?

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Hi. Just bought the game,full retail copy and all that sort of deal, and noticed it had (by that stage) been patched to 1.26 (now 1.27), and for reasons that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, decided to hold off from playing the game until I had patched it.
Should be pretty simple, I thought, just download the patch, copy it to my computer and then click. Wrong. Firstly, the patch itself comes on a zip file, for some weird unknown (to me anyway) reason, so you cannot just simply click on the next or enter radio button (cause it ain't bloody there). Why this was done simply mystifies me. Every other game I have ever bought has patches that are self extracting archives. Even Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2. And the addons. (Throne of Bhaal, for example).

And yes, they are BIOWARE GAMES!!!!!

They managed to get it right for those. Why in hell did they screw it up so bad for Neverwinter Nights? If someone knows why they changed to such a stupid, inane and useless system of patching, could they please tell me?

Secondly, as I do not yet have my own net connection, I logged on at my library and checked out the instructions on Bioware's own NWN site for a manual patch. They say that you have to download the updater, which I did, extract that file to the NWN directory, which I did, download the manual patch (AGAIN), which I did, (just in case I d/l'd a dodgy file, or something), move the file (without unzipping it, which seems rather odd, or so I think) to the NWN directory, which I did, then click on the NWN main icon, then on the update button, which I did, then according to the website, the game should be updated.

Which it wasn't!!!

Still isn't.

All I got when I clicked on the sodding updater was some horrid text which said that the system was unable to find the file, and I would have to go back to the website for instructions on how to patch it manually.

Which I already have done.
To the letter. (I think).

Why oh why oh bloody why does Bioware insist on only letting you update the bloody game if you have a bloody Net connection?

At least that is what the buggy useless piece of crap installer seems to be doing.

And if you think my language is terrible, it has been noticeably toned down from what I really want to say. (insert your own favourite piece of Anglo-Saxon invective every time you see bloody).

I want to play the game, not mess about online, and have no interest really in the multiplayer aspect. I only bought the game (second hand and still boxed with instructions admittedly) as a change from Baldur's Gate 2 and it's multifarious addons.

It's a change, alright, though certainly not for the better, and I for one will not be buying future Bioware games until I read online or in magazine reviews that they have sorted out their crappy system of updating their titles.



This is all the more odd in that I love Bioware RPG's. I have played most of them, save ID and ID2, I have even played and completed Planescape:
Torment, which in story and plotline is arguably superior to Baldur's Gate 2, yet they have almost completely destroyed my desire to play their newest flagship title by having such an uncharacteristicly amateurish patching system.

Not all gamers have T1 or ADSL, hell, I don't even have a 56k modem I can use, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to play the same, updated regularly, game that everyone else does.

Or does it?

Well, that was long enough I think.
bye
Tam

 

Thanks for that, Blackthorne, though I must admit I don't see the point of downloading any more patches until I am convinced that the system Bioware forces me to use actually works.

By the way, in their support page for the game, they give you a link to click for the latest version of their updater, which takes it to version 1.11.

And it does not exist. Period. Absolutely full bloody stop.

Click on the link and you get nothing.
Except an "Internet Explorer cannot find the file, blah, blah, blah" error.

Which is typical of my experience of the game.


I went next to the Infrogrames UK support site for the game and found out their version of the updater only goes up to version 1.10! ! !

So someone is lying, or at the very least cack -handed.

And I am left slowly spinning in the wind.

Tam