Ik kan het echt niet anders uiten. Kunnen we dit hoofdstuk nu eens sluiten, je bent te ver van mij vandaan.

Zoiets komt toch wel bij je op als je de recente ontwikkelingen na de release van Ubi Soft's Pool of Radiance 2: Ruins of Myth Drannor achterelkaar opsomt. Hilarisch is het bijna, maar toch ook wel een beetje triest. Het volgende is er aan de hand:

During our installation of PoR, the install program locked up the computer, forcing a reboot. After this, the PoR installation program would only give the option to uninstall the game; at this time, the program also wiped out our Win98 SE system files and would not reinstall the game.

A further bug was uncovered in the installation program that prevents the user from installing to any directory other than the default. (AVault)Nu heeft Ubi Soft officieel gereageerd op de PoR foraUbi Soft wishes to extend our sincere apologies for all frustration and inconvenience encountered by some of you who have purchased Pool of Radiance. I will take some time here to personally addre the problems and to let you know we are working diligently to correct them as soon as po ible.

The first point I will addre has been expre ed on several forums. Ubi Soft did not knowingly release a product that would not install or safely uninstall on people's hardware or that is “beta” code. As you can imagine, it would be sensele for a software publisher to do so. The most common bug - inability to install on drives other than drive C - is simply a major mistake on the part of our staff in final testing and verification of the masters. This will be fixed imminently.

Second, some of you with older CD-ROM drives are experiencing a problem a ociated with Safe Disc copy protection. There are older drives that are incompatible with Safe Disc and cannot read the disks when you attempt to install the program. For those that are affected by this, please contact our Tech Support as they have been able to help some people get around this.

Third, one problem we are still investigating is the uninstall i ue reported by seven people. One of these people was the publisher of a major online site and as such his experience was posted to his own site and then re-posted almost everywhere relevant to Pool of Radiance. We are still investigating this i ue; our work so far seems to indicate a problem with the install program and with certain types of utility programs in limited use. If you have programs that can interrupt the uninstall proce (such as Clean Sweep or Norton Utilities) it appears that a problem can occur if one of these programs launches and interrupts the InstallShield uninstall program while it is in the uninstall proce . To avoid this problem, make certain that before you uninstall Pool of Radiance that you turn off any of these programs that may be currently running in your task bar.

As soon as we have any more information about this and any other key problem, we will let you know.

Also, there are a few video card incompatibility i ues with certain video cards, namely GeForce 256 cards and some older ATI and Voodoo cards. Key point is to make sure you have installed the latest drivers for your video card from the manufacturer, and that you have the latest version of DirectX 8, if you didn't install that when installing Pool. We are attempting to understand and fix these problems also.

We appreciate all the detailed feedback and information that you have been giving the customer support staff at Ubi Soft. We are true fans of Pool of Radiance here, and have labored for many years to deliver a worthy sequel to the many D&D products we created in the past. Pool of Radiance is a huge game. We had more QA personnel working on this title than any other product we have published.

Though this is certainly no consolation for those who have been unable to play succe fully, Pool of Radiance is fully playable by the majority of the people who purchased it, and the good news from reading the forum is that the majority of people are enjoying the product.

Ubi Soft is committed to making this right. Please continue to give the Ubi Soft customer support staff as much detail on any other problems you encounter. Please be patient and we will have a patch available as quickly as po ible to solve the problems listed above and the others that we are aware of. We want those of you that cannot enjoy the product right now to be able to do so soon.

Sincerely,

Bret Berry

VP of Product Development - Ubi Soft Baelnorn heeft het er ook zichtbaar moeilijk mee..

Dit incident is natuurlijk iets dat niet mag gebeuren bij de ontwikkeling van een spel, bij de afwerking van het spel zouden deze dingen er toch makkelijk uitgehaald moeten kunnen worden omdat het nogal 'peanut' features zijn die over het hoofd gezien zijn. Maargoed, laten we hopen dat de patch er snel komt en dat Ubi Soft gepatchte versies van PoR2 gaat laten drukken zodat het leed nog een beetje beperkt wordt, en de game beoordeeld gaat worden op haar grafische en gameplay kwaliteiten en niet op de domme afwerkingsfouten die buiten het spel omgaan...