Man, "integrity" in this context is such a loaded word. Integrity as per what standards, ideals or vision? What defines a game's "integrity" exactly? I would venture a guess at saying that the creative team behind a game have an experience and idea in mind that they want to deliver to their audience, and it's that vision that defines "integrity", i.e. acting in accordance to that vision and not making compromises driven by other contrary influences and whatnot (sales, audience reactions, whatever)... But if so, when balance is fixed because Josh Sawyer, the creative director himself, sees that the game is too easy in the state it is being released as early as three days prior to its release and wishes the experience to be a challenging one at higher levels of difficulty, how are these changes not in keeping with the director's vision and thus the "integrity of the game"?
It is worth considering that in the time of release and even pre-release, there was an initial observation in cohhcarnage's stream that Deadfire seemed too easy and a quick admission by Sawyer that upon release they focused on other elements they felt were more immediately concerning for the game's release and left balancing to be worked out through later patches, and that the game at the state of release was indeed too easy; all of this was then corroborated by players who voiced these same concerns, and it was alongside the length of the main quest pretty much the biggest criticism the game was facing at that moment (again, let me reiterate, this was a point brought up by Josh even before most people got to play it, so it's not like the devs weren't already anticipating and recognizing a problem there). This is worth keeping in mind because these issues absolutely inform the decisions the devs did in future patches, and what they also would do as well as want out of their game. They're obviously interested in making the game challening, especially at higher difficulties, and to that extent having certain low-to-mid level abilities be so overpowered they'd single-handedly determine the course of any fight is an issue, and one that acts against the devs' intentions.
To this end, I'll address this which I find a very problematic argument:
So I'll give an example for the spell that most immediately comes to mind from my first playthrough as something of a "win button" almost, and that is Devotions for the Faithful. In its release state, if I'm not mistaken, the spell would grant a whopping +8 might and +20 accuracy to all allies within the cast area for 30 seconds, and decrease the enemy might and accuracy by the same amount. This is a massive power swing in favour of one party. The spell was obviously nerfed and cut to half of all the buffs and debuffs we see above (+/- 4 MIG, +/- 10 ACC), and it's still a pretty damn powerful spell in its current iteration, or so I find at least. All this for a lvl 4 priest ability, by the way, so it's not like we'd only get to experience it late-game either.
So, I spammed this non-stop in my first playthrough. It was OP, without a doubt, and it basically turned a veteran playthrough into a cakewalk (I hear PotD wasn't particularly harder either in this state). To me, this was an issue because the game was ultimately rewarding me for abusing a single mechanic over and over, and effectively removed strategic depth from my experience playing it and whatnot. So personally, I'm all for this having been nerfed. But let's say it wasn't nerfed, and instead the power of other abilities were buffed so as to match up in power to this ability, or offer more equally viable choices for slamming my enemies. That's fine, now instead of a single "win button" I have several, it's a matter of choosing one and watch my party steamroll through the opponents. ...In veteran mode, which I deliberately picked for the game to challenge me (otherwise why would I pick "hard mode" in a game?).
Obviously the issue would be that the encounters aren't strong enough, and as said before, the idea as early as Day -3 was to rebalance the game's difficulty and turn it into a much more challenging experience than it currently was, because enemies were undertuned and so on. Now with the above solution, instead of some abilities being overtuned, all of them are, which is some form of "balance" I guess... But enemies are even easier than they were before. So in order to make the game challenging, we have to buff the enemies so that they can actually stand against the barrage of OP spells and debuffs we may throw their way. Let's go back to Devotions for the Faithful. We don't want to nerf Devotions for the Faithful because that makes the game "less fun" for players ("fun" is entirely subjective by the way - I personally find it more fun to be challenged in these games, so for me all balance adjustments to make the game more even and challenging actually make the game more fun, not less so), so instead what we do is we buff the enemies to compensate for the power that is removed by the spell. Now all enemies across the board start off with +10 accuracy, +10 deflection, +4 might and maybe some extra health and stats to offset your might buff too (Pathfinder: Kingmaker balance strats btw - also why the game's combat is so ****e). Now Devotions of the Faithful is "balanced", but all enemies are *way* stronger against parties or combat situations *not* using Devotions for the Faithful, as they too are subject to enemies whose stats are compensating what OP abilities you *may* have at your disposal. Suddenly Devotions of the Fathful is not only less effective and rewarding per powergamer standards, but also made into a necessity for everyone else. Now you *have* to carry a priest, and you *have* to use the spell lest you severely handicap yourself in these newly balanced fights.
And this doesn't even take into consideration that an enemy priest might use that OP Devotions for the Faithful on *you* instead, suddenly making that gap even greater.
The point here is that at the moment you decide to buff everything around the OP abilities to make them into the new "balace", not only do you run into trouble like the above example but you're still nevertheless NERFING that OP ability through recontextualizing it in a system were its stats mean less than they used to. Power is relative to the power of everything around it, and if that context changes, so does the power the untouched element previously had. And if that's the case, why not just nerf the ability?
This is, of course, an example and a rather far-reaching one - but similar things can be applied across the board all the same. Fireball too powerful? Better to nerf its damage/penetration than stack more armour against fire on all enemies across the board. Soul Annihilation one-shotting things too easily? Nerf raw damage instead of stacking more deflection on all encounters. Totally-not-Haste too OP? Better add contrasting penalty to it than increasing the enemy action speed. And so on, so forth.
On any given patch, the rules are thoroughly consistent, lest there be a bug interfering with the same. As MaxQuest, I believe it was, said earlier, you can opt into not downloading new patches at any time, and play through the whole game in one single version regardless of new versions being released in the time it takes you to complete it. If the change in certain values and the odd mechanic or interaction here and there are enough for you to feel the whole game "plays absolutely differently" from patch to patch, you can always opt out of it if you wish. Otherwise, the core rules and mechanics of the game have pretty much remained the same across its several releases. The rules as such have remained consistent even when patches have eliminated exploits and altered values to bring the game closer to how it was intended to be played in the first place. As others have mentioned, this isn't unique to Deadfire, or Obsidian games, or, heck, even video games for that matter. This is just the natural evolution of games, to become more like the ideal of what they aim to be.
Whaat? Do you seriously think there's going to be more content? I mean, I believe it's fairly established the last patch will contain the final God challenge, but apart from that, I'm quite sure that's it, no more official Deadfire content ever. Unless...
