fragmentate's Journal: Black & White 2: Plagued With Bugs

Embarrasingly, I just recently opened a game I got on release day (September 16, 2005). Black & White was a great game for killing a lot of time, but I stopped playing it because it would crash frequently while saving. So, enter Black & White 2 (B&W2), hopefully a much improved product. Much to my dismay, no such luck. It arbitrarily, and at the worst possible times, crashes. No warning. No dialog. Just my desktop where the game used to be. In spite of two patches from Electronic Arts (EA), it still just crashes.

So, I remove my second card from my SLI system, and try it with only one card plugged in. Things were looking good. I stepped away while the game was paused, and came back to a dialog stating that B&W2 had to close. Progress! At least now I'm getting a dialog.

Spoke too soon. It crashes again a few minutes later with no warning.

Against all my principles, I install the game on a second machine -- A VIA chipset based system with an ATI graphics card. Poor graphics notwithstanding (it's a cheap ATI card), the game ran rock solid for hours. Now, this suggests that my graphics card on my superior machine is probably defective. So, I grab a fresh new card -- an nvidia 7600GT based card. Still no luck. The game still crashes.

The excuse? The game is not stable on nForce4/SLI systems using an nVIDIA graphics card. The solution? Well, EA, in a tech support response, stated, "we suggest you replace your system with a compatible system utilizing our suggested minimum requirements." Huh? I exceed those. So, the obvious question is, "Are you suggesting I shoot for the bare minimum?"

Two weeks later...

"No, we suggest you use an ATI based system, rather than nVIDIA. The game was designed to work on ATI."

That's just insane.

What they've managed to do is alienate someone that spends (and recommends) thousands of dollars a year on game software (I have kids). I won't ever buy another EA product again.

Maybe it's a blessing that Microsoft bought Lionhead Studios. And I can't even believe I just said that.

System specifications:
(I did set the BIOS settings to very conservative values as well
i.e. RAM at 3-4-4-7)

ASUS K8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD 64 3500+ @ 2.2GHz
2048M Corsair DDR RAM (2-3-3-6)@400MHz
100G SATA + 300G SATA Seagate hard drives
Two eVGA [nvidia] GeForce 7900GT KO 256MB Graphics cards in SLI configuration
Pioneer DVD/CD RW