Rubeck

If you're having such a hard time, have you considered a lower difficulty level? Oh, the "git gud scrub" argument. Read Boeroer's post, he explained the way I feel perfectly. I agree with him 100%, even the part about my tone (yes, I *AM* being rude to Obsidian, on purpose, because this kind of QA is beyond unacceptable). And, by the way, not all of the bugs that annoyed me were strictly harmful to my character. The very first bug, the one where my rogue basically achieved 100% crit rate (due to sky high accuracy) at the cost of being himself critted 100% of the time (due to abysmally low deflection)? Once I learned that's what was happening, he basically made a lot of bosses trivial. I just had to wear paper towels on the rogue (for extra speed, it's not like he could tank the damage even with plate with this bug), lure them with Éder, wait a bit, then insta-gib the bosses in a few hits, before they had the time to switch targets. But that WAS NOT the point. I *could* keep playing the game with that bugged character, probably even be better at it than with a "normal", non-bugged rogue, but it wouldn't be satisfying. He wouldn't be overpowered because I learned the rules and applied them effectively, he would be overpowered because of bugs, and that's not fulfilling. The other time where I rolled a different character and got locked out of a main quest due to a bug? Yeah, it doesn't matter if I turned it down from hard to easy, the quest would still be bugged and I'd still be unable to move on with the game. Difficulty had literally nothing to do with it, the only way forward was backwards: load a save from 10 hours ago and redo the quest. I spend a lot of time reading up on the game every single time I decide to come back because I want to know how exactly the mechanics, damage of abilities and items' properties work and these things change EVERY SINGLE TIME I COME BACK TO THE GAME. The main source of fun in these types of RPGs - for me at least, and certainly to a lot of likeminded munchkin players - is to learn a ruleset and then apply that knowledge to develop the main character and story companions in the most optimized way possible (regardless of whether or not being optimal is even necessary). It's a pain in the ass to do that when some of the ruleset doesn't even work properly due to bugs and the rest of it is vulnerable to random balance changes or just straight up overhauls all the time. This is acceptable in an MMO, not a single player game. See, I *can* play it and beat it - even on hard, never tried or wanted to try PoTD - without fully understanding the rules of the game and just "winging it". But doing so entirely defeats the purpose of even playing it. It's like playing Street Fighter by button mashing rather than learning the combos: it's a "strategy" that "works", as in you can beat the campaign mode and some random newbies with it, but you don't get the achievement of actually mastering the underlying system. Don't even know why I bother with these posts. Arguing with other customers leads nowhere and it's not like the devs or QA even read this ****. Wish they did, though, because it's coming from a customer who actually sees MASSIVE potential in the game being held back by very basic, but critical, programming mistakes. As I said: the worldbuing, characters, writing and ambience are superb. Obsidian just needs decent QA - not perfect, just DECENT like most midlevel devs - and to learn how to avoid constantly shifting their game's ruleset. Do that and Pillars would go from "frustrating mess" to not just "passable" or "good", but rather "masterpiece". Heck, forget other developers. Even Obsidian's own less important, less passionate projects like Dungeon Siege 3 and the freaking South Park games seem to have 10x better QA than their flagship, passion project title.

About a year ago, this is what I asked you guys (no obsidian employee replied, only other posters). Apparently I had very good reason to ask that. I STILL want to know when the FINAL version of this goddamn game is finally going to be released. Normally I don't mind when a developer patches an older game. Heck, it's usually a good thing: they're either patching out MINOR bugs (because the big, nasty ones are tipically gone by the time a game is "older" when the developer's name isn't Obsidian) or delivering quality of life improvements! With YOU at Obsidian, however, it's a VERY different story. Every single goddamn time you people put out a patch, it either: a) Creates a new, usually significant, bug in interactions that were previously working fine (really bad, but it's ALMOST forgivable) or b) Completely overhaul major systems (3.0 and 2.0) or c) If not completely overhaul, just willy nilly decide to perform small "balance passes" that serve only to nerf a particular build or item combination that wasn't even that egregious of a problem anyway. See this gem from 3.06: "dropped the Unlabored Blade 'Firebug' proc from 3 to 10%". Great, now the Unlabored Blade went from "useful in particular fire-based builds with Scion of Flame" to "basically useless to everyone, as you'll almost never see its proc". Usually those balance passes are neither necessary nor desired by any player, ever. I understand situation a). It's certainly amateurish but at least those are honest mistakes. I am, however, infuriated by situation b). After the game was officially out of Early Access and released onto steam, there SHOULDN'T have been any major reworks. It's not an MMO, it's a single player game. Even if the reworks were accompanied by expansions, it's still TERRIBLE that basic things like the way Athletics worked were revamped. How is a normal, average player coming back to the game from the 2.x days supposed to know that Athletics no longer prevents fatigue from travelling? Hell, in one of the early maps, TO THIS DAY, your character still utters a line to the beat of "The more I keep going, the more likely that I'll need to sleep", which heavily implies that travelling still causes fatigue, just causing even more confusion. I'm not even arguing here that the old Athletics was better, it's a matter of "legal certainty" so to speak: players should have the expectation that, if they return to the same SINGLE PLAYER game 2 or 3 years down the line, it'll still be mostly the same game (minus a few bugs at best) and their old knowledge will still apply. Not so in Pillars. Situation c) similarly makes my blood boil, maybe even more so than b). At least in b) there was a poor excuse ("tweaking things to fit with the new expansions"). This type of situation, though, has no excuse and no reason to exist. Again: this is not an MMO, it's not even multiplayer at all. Balance is important to a certain degree, but if people discover fun, slightly overpowered builds, let them keep it. If you're building a character around the Unlabored Blade, you should be able to have an effective character, not a useless gimp - especially given how late in the game you get the weapon and how laborious it is to unlock it fully. I just restarted playing this game (not sure I'll continue, to be honest, these patch notes have left me sad) and was planning on building Sagani around the Stormcaller bow right now. It's not even the most powerful ranger build I could give her according to most posters, but I find the idea of having her proc mini Returning Storms frequently a fun one. Which guarantee do I have that the Returning Storm chance isn't going to be dropped to 8, 5, 3 or even 0% tomorrow and, thus, render the Heart of The Storm talent that I gave her useless? None whatsoever. Maybe Stormcaller will have an entirely different proc, maybe it'll randomly make its wielder grab their crotch mid-fight and yell "hoo-hah", maybe it'll just shock your own character, maybe it'll cause you to explode, there's just NO WAY TO KNOW. Sure, there are always respecs, but those take all the fun out of the game. ------ Let me use a legal concept as an analogy: "legal certainty", at least in civil law systems, is a principle according to which citizens can safely expect that the government and its officials won't just change laws out of the blue or behave unexpectedly. This means that what is legal today very likely will still remain legal tomorrow, at least in broad strokes: you won't suddenly wake up to find out the possesion of chocolate biscuits is punishable by death, for instance. Most single-player games end up implicitly following a gaming version of this principle, which allows you to pick up a game you've played three years ago and still find a use for that old knowledge, because - at best - only a few bugs were fixed. Maaaybe if the developers were feeling particularly cheeky, they may have had the audacity to implement a slight UI tweak or add one or two items that improve quality of life. This is good. Here's what happens with Pillars, on the other hand, during a similar time span: ATTEMPT 01 --> Playing the game at release (close to it anyway). Man, I'm pumped! The story seems dope, the worldbuilding is excellent, the writing is superb! Wait, why is my rogue getting one-shotted AND one-shotting everything? Oh... oh no, he has a gazillion accuracy and negative deflection (causing him to crit and be critted all the time) because developers couldn't handle a temporary buff/debuff from his modal ability. They applied the buff/debuff like a normal, permanent increase/decrease to his Accuracy stat (which is a surprisingly AMATEUR mistake to make, why the hell is the total even being stored there?). Welp, that playthrough is bust. Let's wait a few weeks for a fix, sometimes launch can be a bit rocky (surely by then it'll be stable). ATTEMPT 02 --> Weeks pass, and now that previous bug is fixed! But just to be safe, let's go with a different class this time, it was either a Paladin or a Barbarian or something (can't even remember anymore). First thing I discover is that one of his skills - obviously one that I picked - is somewhat bugged and doesn't work properly (lol, so much for playing it "safe"). The problem was discovered, as usual, after having chosen the character and played through quite a bit of the game. Excitement level going down again, but I immediately try a new run (not as pumped anymore, though). ATTEMPT 03 --> Let's try this again with the same class, avoiding the bugged skill this time. Cool, no problems there anymore... but now I accidentally lock myself out of a main quest. Great. By this point, the only thing I can think of for a long time is "**** this game, it's not worth it". ATTEMPT 04 --> With the release of the White March pt. 1, my excitement went back up, but now I was weary and wary. What if the game is still unstable? What if it still has bugs? What if the new patches are still creating NEW BUGS? Well, all of that was happening. Basic stuff was STILL being fixed, new bugs STILL being introduced, a bunch of **** had recently changed A LOT. This is when I had made that first post at the top, and with good reason. Waited a few weeks after that post, then played a little bit of the game, rushing to The White March content, but, even though I was digging the world, the characters and the content, it still pissed me off that a patch came out with this line: "Mourning Gloves no longer give permanent buffs". I wasn't pissed because they fixed that bug, I was pissed that at this point in the game's life, they were STILL PUTTING OUT THE SAME KIND OF BUGS THAT HAPPENED BACK IN 1.x. This is EXACTLY the same bug that my very first Rogue character had (permanent buffs/debuffs being permanently applied), the only difference is that now it was applied to an item rather than an ability. Guys, this is EXTREMELY SLOPPY, it's a freaking basic programming mistake that even second-level CS students would be ashamed to make. Quit the game for about a year. ATTEMPT 05 --> Just this week, decided to ONCE AGAIN try and brave this game. Spent literally days researching all the changes from 3.04 to now, and a few from 2.x to now that I had missed (like the Athletics change, I had not noticed it changed during attempt 4). Scoured the web to try and find up-to-date info on builds, skills, etc, which is by the way almost impossible: the game changes so much so fast that its wikis are never up-to-date, player guides ditto, even forum threads can't be trusted because a lot of them go back 1 or 2 years ago. I hadn't bothered reading the Deadfire patch updates (3.07 and 3.07.13etc), because, well... it's just a couple of new items to promote the sequel. They couldn't possibly have introduced new bugs, right? RIGHT??? Oh, wait, let me guess... Patch 3.07.1318: "Fixed an issue with the Company Captain's Cap confusing party members when they cast a buff/heal spell". They fixed a bug introduced in the patch 3.07, which brought only four new items. And, again, the bug is EXTREMELY BASIC **** THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE GOTTEN PAST EVEN A MONKEY. Yes, I *am* being rude. This **** is EMBARASSINGLY basic programming. Do you test the items/abilities AT ALL before shoving them out the door??? You know why I nag on you people? Because somehow, despite all your ****ty code, you have superb worldbuilding, story, ambience and characters. I *WANT* to like this game, goddamn it, but it's just too much of a ****show with bugs, random balance changes and post-release overhauls. Maybe I should come back to Pillars two years from now? Five? Ten? Fifty-seven? Maybe by then you'll have stopped messing around with it and the community will finally be able to know exactly how the game works, exactly which skills and items are bugged and which are not, exactly how powerful each weapon/armor is. Maybe then we'll no longer have these constant surprises, with patches fixing one thing and breaking another while simultaneously randomly nerfing/buffing items. See you in a couple of years. Hope you finish your game (Pillars 1, that is) by then, because I *actually* want to play it. The sequel (which I *also* want to play) I won't touch until at least 10 years from now, because previous experience has taught me that "release date" means something closer to "open beta" for you guys.

Thank you all for the information. I'll wait a couple months more to see how it goes then.

See, I started playing this game shortly after it came out and even progressed quite a bit, but then ran into several game-breaking bugs, such as a temporary rogue buff permanently giving me skyhigh attack and negative defence, a ton of skills not working correctly, being locked out of some quests when I shouldn't have been, etc, etc. Sure, the patches came and fixed those, but often also changed the way a certain skill previously worked for balance reasons, which sucked as it meant I restarted my game twice as much: once for running into a game-breaking bug, then another time because in a later patch one of my skills was nerfed badly or a broken skill that I hadn't chosen before (due to being broken) was fixed and buffed to high heavens, making it ridiculously attractive. So I decided to take a long break and wait until the game was more stable and the patches started to be just of minor things, like a few visual effects on spells not activating all the time, maybe a sound effect or two bugging out occasionally, etc. Then and only then I'd go back to play it (because it eventually got tiresome restarting the game all the time due to either another severe game-breaking bug or another skill that was nerfed/buffed with a newer patch). But here we are, much later, and the update notes for version 3.01 don't inspire much confidence. According to the notes, the patches are still implementing significant balance changes, as well as fixing severe bugs, such as locking players in a certain location, accidental deletion of items, equipment accidentally granting buffs they shouldn't grant, etc. ---------------------------------- So I ask: do you guys know if the game is now finally finished for good? Is 3.01 the final, ultimate version of Pillars, or at the very least the last one to alter balance and fix the really severe bugs? Or is it wise to wait another year or two to be safe? I will most likely only play this game to completion once, as it's enormous, so I really want to make it count and ONLY play the final, most polished version (it's not an MMO or online game, so the constant balance changes in particular are REALLY grating). I've already bought the game + expansions a long time ago and don't mind waiting if necessary, so please give me an honest answer.