Agreed =) 

After the tutorial level the entire game consists of staring at a loading screen for Chapter 1, whose loading bar gets to about 70-80% and then never progresses any more.

Quite a lot of people seem to be suffering with this bug, and there are some more nasty ones like memory leaks slowing down the game massively on certain combinations of hardware and drivers. If you're thinking of buying you might want to wait until after the first patch.

I've tried some workarounds from Ubisoft's forums, they actually made matters worse for me as the game now freezes when loading my previous saves. 

Any finnish people here? (Friction I think?)

Could you please find me a contact email address for http://www.mbnet.fi/ or http://www.mikrobitti.fi/ (seems to be quite the same)? Some site/network/files admin one's prefered. I can't read a thing...

Thanks! :) 

what's czg05 infamous for? you ought to finish it, just because it's so far along and contains a lot of neat designs. cramped bits could use some cleanup, and the pipes generally horrify me, but there's a lot of awesome in there.

need to dress it up in idbase, though. the textures you used are a monotone horror (and I should know) :) 

I just went ahead and bought this and am installing now.

Probably because I'm just stupid. Also hopeful and optimistic. But mainly stupid.

Does anyone else appreciate the irony that the user agreement has both "licence" and "license" on the same display during installation? Also, from the box copy:

Notice: The game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some disc and and virtual drives. (emphasis mine)

I'm sure that the presence of typos and errors in the installation and on the box don't mean anything though.

Also, when I manually edit the install path from the default
C:\Program Files\Ubisoft\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic to
F:\Ubisoft\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
and click "Next", it changes the fucking install path to
F:\Ubisoft\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

I have to manually change it from the default (with the M&M folder included) to just F:\Ubisoft and then hit "Next" for it to sort things out and not shit all over itself with redundant folders.

Things that bode well = 0 

I got an email address. Thanks. 

pjw: Yeah I noticed most of that stuff, it's not exactly encouraging.

I've been able to experiment a bit more with making it go better: I had bought a boxed copy and just used the key to unlock a Steam preload so I didn't have to faff about putting the DVD in the drive. I tried installing the SP off the disk instead. With the DEP disable workaround and a massively bigger swap-file than I usually use, I can finish chapter 1. And then it locks up loading chapter 2.

Up until then, the disk version seemed to work a lot better than the Steam one. The disk install loads levels in about 15-20 seconds rather than the 3-4 minutes it takes the Steam version (both are installed on the same partition by the way). Some people were claiming that the Steam version's GCF files are more heavily compressed, but that's almost certainly untrue as the files are all exactly the same size between the two installs. 

Got it off steam earlier today, only had one crash (after a few hours of play, I'm up to chapter 5). No other problems with it though, it runs fairly well and load times are reasonable.
I'm quite enjoying it anyaways, going with an assassin at the moment, and dispatching people is fairly satisfying, just hope I'll be seeing some more monsters soon, humans are boring...
I like the fact that there are lots of secrets to find all over the place, encourages exploration. 

A thing I found is to set texture resolution to medium instead of high, the textures still look great and loading times and in-game hitching is MASSIVELY reduced. Worth a try anyway.

As for the crashing, it hasn't done anything like that yet on my system (STEAM version).

Bal, more enemies will be coming to you very soon =) 

Yeah I'm kicking orcs off cliffs by the hundreds. =D

Haven't had any other crashes, and yeah I have my textures on medium (I read on the forums that it just didn't run with textures set to high). 

...and haven't really had any trouble at all. Reasonably quick load times, etc.

I noticed that apparently the game installation takes a look at your rig and decides what the recommended settings should be (as denoted by an asterix in the menu), but it doesn't actually change your settings to be less than "godlike". Wow, that's really silly.

Even though I have a decent rig (3.2 w. SLIed 7800s) things were still set higher than "recommended for your system" by default. This is probably a good contributor to people's computers taking a shit when they try to run the game.

I also notice overlapping brushwork in the start/tutorial map. For fuck's sake.

I'm having fun playing the game though. :) 

Ok a few months ago I bought a second matched pair of ddr400 (2x512mb) and installed it into my pc, it is exactly the same brand,model,size,etc as the first matched pair seen below ->

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/92002

But when I install it my pc suddenly becomes super-unsatble and crashes all the time (full sys lockup - cant do a thing) I am trying to understand why... All of the 4 sticks of ram are exactly the same and should technically work fine but they dont.

I have run memtest86 overnight a few times now but it never finds any errors with the memory at all so I am at a loss.

If I remove 1 of the new memory sticks the system still crashes but maybe once every few days or so which is bare-able but it really bugs me because I dont understand why.

There was a gap of around 4-5 months between buying the first matched pair and the second pair, all I can think of is that somehow the newer memory is incompatible with the older stuff in some way, but like i said its identical so I dont know about that.

Any tech-heads have any clues on this? I have an asus nforce4 sli-se mobo, amd64 4000+ running win64, and it was fine before I installed this new memory... 

maybe it causes overheating of some sort ? no real idea why though. 

Maybe you could try to remove the old sticks and check how the computer behaves then. This could give you a clue. 

I'm not sure but... I think it can come from 2 things: either the compatibility between your mother board and your PC3200 memory, or the connection distance between memory and CPU memory controller.

I guess it is not the first one, and that you are aware that memory to memory compatibility need to be checked (i.e PC3200 is faster than PC2700. you can change from PC2700 to PC3200, but a mother board that has been designed for PC3200 will not work with Pc2700 memory.. it is not backward compatible...)

Anyway, I already experimented such issue. Like you, I added memory to my PC. I have 3 slots on my nmother board, I removed the old RAM stick, and I didn't took care when I re-placed the memory stick into the slots... and I put them on the "opposite" side, that was the farest slot... Due to both memory and CPU memory controller timing constraints (that need to be respected), the data were not stable when sampled by the CPU, and so completly incoherent and not understandable by the CPU: that explains why the PC crahses...
So I think you should try to change of memory slots (the biggest memory as close as possible of the CPU), if you still have free slot on your mother board...

Maybe it also can come from clocking, power supply, etc.. at memory input...

I hope it helped. 

I will certainly look into these things, thanks everyone.

Well my mobo has 4 ram slots, and each one has a 512mb stick in it, all pc3200 ddr400 with the same ras, cas latency etc, so I dont know whata happening really.

I have tried moving all the ram around into different slots but nothing seems to work. Also I dont think its an overheating problem as the case is quite well ventilated with case fans / dual psu fans and the biggest cpu fan I have ever seen... 

seems that all I had to do was upgrade the motherboard bios to the latest version and it appears to be stable now with all 4 sticks of ram installed.

Strange thing is that the ram is now working at 160mhz rather than 200, but I cant see any noticeable performance hit, and if it makes the system stable I wouldnt really care if it did :) 

Yeah so NWN2 is out and it will make everyone's PC cry. Preliminary reports indicate that Core 2 Duo E6600 + 2GB ram + NVIDIA 7950 GX2 = unplayable in 1920x1280. 

because the screenshots aren't really impressive at all... in fact, it looks ugly as hell...... 

disgusting. I myself refuse to play games at less than 15384x10240. 

that system sounds teh awesome, yet it can't run a game at (presumably) the native resolution of the screen. That sucks.

I hate playing games at less than 1920x1200 because they always look shit on my screen. It was never a problem with CRTs, because they could handle any resolution and produce crisp output. My monitor is a fucking POS when it comes to displaying anything other than a 1920x1200 image, so I try to avoid it. Some TFTs are ok though.

Also, if you use half the resolution of your screen (i.e. to 960x600) the picture is likely to be fine, but anything in between will often produce dodgy results. I guess it depends on which monitor you have.

Anyone else got the same problem? Anyone got a nice TFT that can handle all resolutions crisply? 

I've got two Viewsonic VA1912WB 19" widescreens and I don't really have a major issue running non-native resolutions or resolutions that don't match my ratio (16:10), like 4:3. Then again maybe I'm not picky and don't notice anything problematic that others might. 

I've got five Panasonic 60" HDTVs connected to my computer, I don't notice many problems with my array of thirteen overclocked GF x666's 

It runs fine with what I've thrown at it: 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200 (native). But then again I've never seen other LCDs run at non-native resolutions, so I don't have much to compare it with. 

you fuckers owe me for one scrollwheel. so many posts, so little substance.