A Message from Ubi Soft Re: PoR

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Bret Berry, VP of Product Development at Ubi Soft, posted this apology on the official PoR message boards.

Ubi 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 address the problems and to let you know we are working diligently to correct them as soon as possible.

The first point I will address has been expressed 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 senseless 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 associated 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 issue 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 issue; 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 process (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 process. 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 issues 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 successfully, 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 possible 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