Thanks for the update.
Unfortunately, I misread your comments and thought that top-down would work as before - unfortunately, it does not seem to work as expected.
Any idea when the patch to fix this will be released? I can’t play with it like this.
Also, is there a way to load an EE save game with the original NWN?
The frustration of the OP was not that bugs exist, but that they felt, from their perception of the bug and personal experience, that it was a poor use of beta testers as it seemed easily caught internally (leaving players/builders to break harder to find/more interesting/unexpected things).
I don’t think that perception was quite accurate in this case, and I definitely don’t share the sentiment, but I don’t think it was intended as a rant about bugs being present at all (which does irk me a bit, yeah).
(There will still be bugs post-March, though, just not these 
)
@niv Top Down camera is broken. The default for Top Down has been changed to what looks like over-the-shoulder. It is possible to restore the top down view by carefully using the PageUp key but zoom in/out is disabled for Top Down. Without zoom in or zoom out, the camera is stuck at one height which makes playing the game very difficult because there are times when it is necessary to zoom in or zoom out. The default camera mode of NWN is top down. When starting a new game in the OC (as plain vanilla as possible) it is obvious that the “top down” camera is no longer defaulting to top down. Attempting to zoom in or out fails. All of this is obvious within the first 30 seconds of starting a new game. These are the facts, not opinions.
Thus I feel safe in stating what is probably true that top down camera was not tested. Because if it was tested, then it would have been immediately obvious that it was broken. Hence my assertion that it was not tested. There are also several players of NWN that get motion sickness when using any camera other than top down (this was briefly discussed on the previous board). This is a fact. Given that myself and others get motion sickness from other cameras and given that the lack of zoom renders portions of certain maps unplayable, I think it is safe to assume that we will not be playing NWN: EE until this issue is fixed. Given the tremendous business value of having end-users perform beta testing and providing feedback, this issue becomes significant and non-trivial. Hence my assertion that not only was this obvious bug not tested, but that this sloppiness has a real business cost. Given the pending release on Steam, the opportunity cost of a group of end-users not testing the app is much higher than it was back in December. Which is why I am so critical of this particular bug at this time.
Given how trivial it is to discover this particular bug, it concerns me that the developer(s) did not find it. And given how you think that drive-mode camera needed to be tested more instead of testing top down camera is also very concerning. Are we to assume that it never occurred to anyone to do a sanity check of top down camera? Not a full regression test, but just what I did – fire up a new game. Very concerning indeed.
I’m saying this because there are two issues at play:
Both issues have been fixed by me, yesterday/today, and will be addressed by the next patch.
I guess I will be reverting to NWN - EE is unplayable for me. Any chance of making the patch or fix available today?
I’m hoping for a completely free form camera that you can put anywhere and it would stay there. Hold your mouse wheel, put camera anywhere, release. Stays there.
something like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGA8ocywuu8
I think this workflow will be greatly improved when the game actually launches.
Having two branches, one with the latest and greatest but sometimes not fully regression tested and a stable release branch will be great for players who want to experiment but want a stable release to jump back to.
@niv Thanks for taking care of this personally.
It’s not just the camera. Rendering is borked widely throughout the game. A few examples:
Has anyone else seen these artifacts as well?
Judging from the shape of the hair - that last one’s my fault. Open edges in the mesh do that. HF45, right? Hold up, I’mma fix that.
Yes, the borked rendering is a known regression. I guess that it’ll be fixed in the next patch, but don’t quote me on it.
Andarian what module is that… I am slightly curious… 
Thanks, Trinital! The last three are scenes from my Sanctum of the Archmage modules, which I’m updating for NWN:EE. I was doing a final release test when I saw the rendering issues.
How can this game be remotely ready for a public release. Seems to me each new patch destroys something else. This is the main reason I’m sticking with 1.69 for now.
For what it’s worth, the issue with crossbows/slings/cloaks/etc was caught before it went out, just not early enough for a fix. They mentioned it in the patch notes under Known Issues.
Sorry not buying the “not enough time to fix it” argument. It’s an excuse, and a shoddy one at that. If you know something is broken why bother releasing it? You wouldn’t ship a three-legged table if it was supposed to have four, would you?
Shipping software and shipping physical things are really different. That analogy is not really helpful. And even it if was, a table that fell over would be more like a program that just crashed immediately than one with a minor rendering issue or two in otherwise working code.
Software products ship with known bugs all the time. That’s what release notes are often for. They also ship with unknown bugs all the time but it’s hard to release note those…
Minor rendering issue? I don’t call those screenshots from Andarian a minor rendering issue. There are also enough other issues to make one wonder if the code could really be considered “…as otherwise working.” I really hope they get it all fixed up by release date, but from my point of view its looking doubtful. More than likely what we’re going to see is a continuation of the functional beta that is far less stable than people will be led to believe by the moniker attached to the game as it being a “…full release.”
When consumers see “full release,” they will naturally expect something that is relatively bug free. If new users find they just purchased a game that has major bugs in it, they’ll leave negative reviews which in turn could drive other new buyers away. By the same token, “old timers” like myself are going to expect a game that functions as it did in v1.69. If those old timers don’t at least get that, then they’ll be wondering if they should have just stuck with what they know works.
It is a cause for concern. And it’s enough for me to decide to delay my release plans for a few weeks.
I’m sanguine that they’ll get it all sorted out eventually. But I’m not going to put other important life priorities on hold to rush to try to do release tests on a broken system.
EDIT: OK, never mind. This looks like they finally just got the UI scaling implemented. Tweaking that seems to adkjust this.
Just installed the latest update. Is it my imagination, or are the resolution controls now borked? Set to 1920x1080, but the portraits and controls are taking up a huge amount of space (and far more than they used to). Or is this intentional?
vs
