[Change in Steam Depots]

Hello, everyone. We are currently planning on releasing 1.05 tomorrow. As part of the 1.05 patch I am going to be making some (somewhat) significant changes to the Pillars of Eternity depot structure in Steam.

 

A depot is a collection of files that we can assign to different packages. When you purchase a game off of Steam you are actually purchasing a specific package that is a collection of depots. The depots contain information about where to place the files from the Steam servers to your local machine.

 

The reason for this change is because we originally set up our depots so that there was a base depot, and a depot for each OS. Depending on your OS, you would receive the base depot and the depot for your OS. We thought this would work out, but due to differences in the Mac build it is difficult to maintain and will become more difficult with more content being added. The solution is to move the files that were in the base depot to the OS-specific depots. This should be a one time thing as this new structure will scale well in the future.

 

We have done testing on our new depot structures, but due to how Steam works, we won't know if everything is perfect until we push the changes live (which we are coinciding with 1.05).

 

The practical effect is that you shouldn't notice much of anything change. The depots just tell Steam what to download and where to put it. Since the new depots aren't changing any of that, you shouldn't have additional data to download (past the normal patch data). It is possible that Mac may try to download additional data for a 30 - 40 minute period in the morning (until the full changeover is complete), but we will try to minimize that.

 

Thanks for your (future) patience.

[1.05 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

 

 

 

The attribute points of Companions still cannot be altered after recruitment

 

This is a huge concern because those attribute affect their gameplay

 

Can someone tell me if I am missing something?

 

It's only allowed when you first recruit them.

 

I think Anaeme is referring to their attributes like Might, Reflex, etc.. You can't change their base attributes, you basically get them at level 1 with enough XP to level up to your PCs level, whereas before it automatically levelled them from 1 up to your PCs level. And because their base attributes are already decided before level 1, you can't alter them. It would be great if we could though - I believe this feature has been added to make the companions more viable for harder difficulties by giving you the option to change their build, and therefore also giving the option to alter their stats would feed into this.

 

 

I can't see this happening. Letting people level them up in a specific way is much different than letting players completely reroll their companions.

[1.05 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

 

Did you roll back the Cypher nerf with this one?

 

I noticed my Cypher is up to full strength again.

 

What do you mean by "up to full strength"? Do ciphers start at 1/2 max focus at the start of the battle?

 

 

I don't think so. There was a fix to Greater Focus, though. You may be seeing that.

[1.05 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

BAdler, any idea on when this patch will be out of beta and be officially live?

 

I'm kinda of hesitant to start a new party until it goes live.  And my internet connection isn't particularly lightning fast, so I'm hesitant to download the beta version now only to have to DL the official version all over again in a couple of days.

 

Curious minds wish to know.

 

Thx.

 

Could be as soon as today. Once we get official word one way or the other I will let you guys know.

[1.05 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

The latest beta patch (564) is now available on Steam. Thanks for all of the hard work. We really appreciate everything you guys do for the game.

[[1.05] The Man Who Waits - Still Broken]

We have a fix for this we just checked in. I will put up a new beta tomorrow that should have this fixed.

[1.05 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

Just a heads-up that a new beta patch is available. Fixed a few issues that were introduced in the previous beta patch.

[Pitching/Who do I contact?]

So... something disasterous happened about two weeks ago and I lost all of my work and have avoided working on it since.

 

I am really sorry to hear that, Osvir. I know that is a pretty big blow, but I hope it won't stop you from working on your game.

 

You probably already know this (and I am not trying to rub salt in the wounds), but backing up your data is essential when you are working on larger projects. Starting this practice now will prevent future heartaches and frustrations. I use Git and Github for my own personal projects. It is cheap (about 7 dollars a month) and pretty easy to use. It also lets you share your work with collaborators in a quick and easy way.

[WTF is wrong with Obsidian?]

I know that most of you know this, but I will reiterate...

 

Making games is hard. Making complex RPGs is even harder. Take it from a person that has worked on a few different styles of games, these sprawling RPGs are insanely complex in comparison. Systems are weaved into a bunch of other systems and even the tiniest change can cause a wave of instability throughout the game.

 

The thing that lots of people forget is that a game is a special piece of software. What I mean is that we can plan out a game completely - all of the design, art, programming, audio, etc. - and it can be executed perfectly... and the game may still be horrible. Proper planning and designing are essential in making great games, but it won't get you there alone. Lots of our ideas sound great on paper, but in practice they fall flat. Making great games require myriad adjustments and changes.

 

Sometimes these changes are minor and don't require adjustments to a previously implemented system. Those are the best kind of changes. Other times you need to make sweeping changes to a system that have long term, rippling repercussions. We try to avoid those types of changes, but sometimes it is the only way to make something fun. As a real world example, there were some classes in PoE that went through some pretty drastic changes from their original designs. This happened because, once we started using the classes in an actual game environment, we found they weren't as fun or useful as we wanted. We could have left the original designs in place (and maybe it would have given us a more polished experience), but it might have made a game that wasn't as fun.

 

All of this isn't to say that the project's management team is without blame. Far from it. None of these decisions are made in a vacuum and for every planned feature we change, we should be taking it out of something else - either a time buffer or another feature (or, if you are lucky, you can get more budget/time). That means if we want to revamp one of our classes, the responsible thing to do would be to see how much it will cost (in resources and time) to implement these changes and pull that from something else. It is a constant push and pull and I will be the first to admit that I can always do better in this department.

 

Overall, I was very pleased with what we accomplished on the limited budget and resources. Nowadays games of this size have budgets anywhere from three to ten times what our team was working with.

 

The important thing is to take the lessons learned from PoE and move it forward into our future projects. Much easier said than done, though.

[The reason why a lot of va isn't voiced?]

This is incorrect. Due to the limited funding the project had, we were unable to fully voice the entire game. There were close to 25,000 lines of dialog written for the game. Our original VO budget was for about 6,000 lines. We went over budget a bit, but not by a large amount.

 

To fully voice everything we would have needed about four times the original budget. To do that we would have needed to reduce scope in other areas to make up the cost.

 

That said, in the future we will probably try to do what we can to get more voice acting budget.

[1.05 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

Hey, everyone. You can find the latest patch notes here. The beta is now officially live on Steam.

 

IMPORTANT: One thing to note is that there is a change to the saved game system. This means that once you load the new beta up, your saves will be converted to use this new system. This will prevent them from being loaded up in an older version of the build. Before the saved game conversation takes place we make copies of your older saves and place them in a folder named "1.05 Save Games Backup" in your saved game directory. If you need to access your older saves, this is where they are located.

[1.04 Patch is Live]

The 1.04 (540) patch is now live on Steam. It is currently going through the QA process for GOG and Origin and should be available on those sites in the next day or two.

 

We will be posting a backer update regarding the patch later today or tomorrow.

 

You can find the patch notes for 1.04 here.

[Patch 1.04 Notes Now Available]

1.04 is now live on Steam. It is currently going through the QA process on GOG and Origin so it should be posted in the next day or two for those sites.

[1.04 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

We have just pushed the latest 1.04 beta patch live to all Steam users. 540 is the official 1.04 build. We will be sending out a backer update later today or tomorrow to announce it.

 

Thanks for all of your help in testing. We hope to get a 1.05 beta patch live in a couple of weeks.

[1.04 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

Hey, everyone. We were just about to push the patch live and we got a report from a user about stacking health. We have not been able to reproduce the issue on our side, but we are double checking to make sure that we don't introduce this patch live if it has this serious issue.

[Patch Betas on Steam]

Any idea when will 1.04 be officially released???

We are looking into releasing it tomorrow, but it may not go out until Wednesday or Thursday.

[Patch Betas on Steam]

You can find a copy of the 1.04 patch notes here.

[Patch Betas on Steam]

As a user of 'beta' patches for Gal Civ III, once you Opt in to Beta pacthes you will always get them. This is a great idea, thanks!

 

Yup. Once you do this process you can jump between the beta patches and your normal game no problem. We actually use this same process to distribute QA builds to people around the world (and in the office).

[Patch Betas on Steam]

Excuse, my poor English i guess.

 

I asked for STEAM Achievement ("succès" in French).

 

No worries. I just wanted to make sure that I answered your question properly.

 

The achievements should be running in these builds. It is possible that we might introduce an exploit that would allow a player to cheat achievements, but it is unlikely at this point.

[Patch Betas on Steam]

Thanks !

 

Are the STEAM succes always "running" with it ?

 

I am not sure what you mean? Are you asking if the patches will change frequently?

[1.04 Patch Beta Live on Steam]

Hey, everyone. The 1.04 patch beta is live on Steam. If you are unsure of how to join the beta, here are some instructions for you.

 

You can find the 1.04 patch notes here.

 

Here are some current known issues that are specific to the patch:

• Unable to pan the camera using arrow keys or mouse scrolling while the game is paused. This issue is fixed on our side, but the current patch will not have those changes.
• Patch isn't listed as 1.04. It still says 1.03.

 

We will add to this list as more items are reported and verified.

 

Thanks, everybody.

[Patch Betas on Steam]

Patch Beta Testing

From now on, we will be allowing folks to play our beta patches on Steam. This has a two-fold benefit:

• Players get new fixes a bit faster and can check out the new changes that will drop in the next patch.
• Developers get access to information about new bugs that may have slipped into the patch. This will reduce the number of hotfixes for future patches.

We will make a formal announcement to the community when we are going to put the latest patch up for beta testing. We are starting this process with the 1.04 patch.

 

Limitations

• Right now we are only running this beta on Steam. The reason is that Steam provides a simple way to get folks into the beta. If any players know of any games that ran betas on GOG, please let me know so I can investigate.
• These patches may be unstable. We will be doing work on the patches and they haven't gone through a full QA cycle so unexpected things can happen. To be safe, I would avoid using any saved games that you do not want to get corrupted. If you do want to use those saved games, it is at your own risk.
• These patches may stay the same over the entire testing period, but that is unlikely. There might be frequent build changes, so expect to have to download multiple builds over a testing period.

Bug Reports

More than likely you are going to find bugs in these patches and you will need a place to report them. You can report these bugs by going to our new forum for patch beta bugs and support. One thing I ask is that you only report bugs that are specific to the patch beta. If the bug happens in the currently patched base game you should report it in our regular tech support forum.

 

For information on how to report bugs, please look at this post.

 

So, how do I get started?

It's actually pretty easy.

1. Completely quit out of the Steam client.
2. Restart the Steam client and navigate to the Library tab.
3. Right-click on the Pillars of Eternity entry and click on Properties.
    
4. Navigate to the Betas tab in the Properties menu.
5. Enter in the code "BETAPASSWORD" (remove quotes) and click on the Check Code button. 
    
6. Click on the dropdown list and select the "beta" branch. Once selected, close out of the Properties menu.
    
7. You should notice that your Pillars of Eternity game will now have "[beta]" after it. This means that your game is in the beta branch. Steam should queue an update for this branch.
8. You can now play the new beta branch of the game.
9. If you would like to switch your branch back to normal follow steps 3 and 4 to get back to the Beta tab in the Properties menu, then choose "NONE" as your branch. This should revert you back to the release version of the game.

 

Thank you to all of the folks that decide to play the patch beta and help report issues. Your help is invaluable and we really appreciate your dedication.

[1.03 Hotfix: Doors not opening due to Fog of War]

Hey, everyone. We just put out another hotfix on Steam for an issue where some people were running into doors that wouldn't open after they had been manually closed. It didn't affect many areas in the game, but we wanted to make sure we fixed this in case some people got trapped.

 

The problem had to do with a bug in the hotfix calculations. It was causing some areas to think they were still under the Fog of War when they weren't.

 

Please let us know if you see any other problems like this.

 

This hotfix has been submitted to GOG and Origin, so we hope they will be up in the next day or two.
 

Thanks!

 

Brandon

[1.03: Hotfix for Problem with Adventurer Hall Companions]

We have hotfixed the problem with adventurer hall-created companions not being able to unlock doors or chests. This should work correctly now. Without getting into too much detail, it looks like adding and removing a companion in the Stronghold can cause its voice set to be stripped. This was causing a null reference exception when they tried to unlock items.

[How can I teleport myself back to the main map from Breith Eaman?]

Dear Devs.,

 

You guys did a very good job on the game, very impressive and fun to play.

 

This is also one of the reasons I had to make an account and slightly complain:)

 

I reached the Theos in Breith Eaman and defeated him and since there was no save game after I defeated him, I reloaded my game and tried to get out from Breith Eaman. But unfortunately I didn't have that option. The reasons why I wanted to get back on the main map were:

 

 

1) I wanted to finish the rest of the character quests

2) I wanted to buy all the special weapons and explore different build as well as different armours

3) Wanted to buy all the ingredients so I can enchant all my armor and weapons

4) Wanted to finish the epic quests which I never had a chance to even try

 

Please let me know if there is a way to get out from Breith Eaman (The Pit). I really want to explore all the things before I restart the game and play it with more knowledge by my side. Or if there is no solution now maybe you can put just a teleport icon, to the main map, in the beginning of Breith Eaman.

 

Thank you very much in advance.

 

Hey, there should be a save that gets created before the end game. You will have to reload that particular save. I don't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but you should see it as a save that is made right before the point of no return.