Xenavire

I mean, I am not disappointed exactly, it's launch day of a game that already went through periods of instability, so I wasn't expecting it to be flawless. But it's buggier then I expected, almost as though the wrong build was uploaded. As long as patches are coming, and doesn't take weeks/months for the nastier bugs (like crashing, or stats from enchanted items seeming to not work in some cases), I'll be satisfied to wait a little longer to enjoy it properly.

Simple question, hopefully with a simple answer. I've run into multiple bugs and a complete crash with maybe 6 hours of gameplay (I can list them if necessary), but I just want to know if bugfixes will be happening for the switch port, or is this a case of "it is what it is"?

Unless I'm mistaken, there are a number of bugs in the switch release. I was testing with a ring of deflection (+5 deflection), which seems to do absolutely nothing, and isn't being suppressed as far as I can see. I'm also seeing inventory items having broken icons (either a distorted mess, or duplicating another items icon), distorted text, and the whole game just crashed entirely minutes ago trying to enter a cave. I own and have played the PC version for several hundred hours, having none of these issues, so I can only assume something is wrong with this build and they'll be patching it soon. I'm also annoyed that they didn't bother to include touch controls (admittedly difficult, so I forgive them), and no space pig companion (they made it available to everyone on PC, and being cosmetic only, it wouldn't do any harm to include it on consoles.)

Between the two, I prefer Deadfire. Pillars was great, don't get me wrong, but Deadfire gave me the one thing that Pillars couldn't - a feeling of freedom. The exploration was never bad in Pillars, but there was never much to find - the furthest places off the "beaten path" you could go were relegated to side quests, and frequently very small or lacking any particular oomph. Plus the final act was so horribly cramped, I felt like backtracking for anything was more of a chore than just gritting my teeth and making that push for the ending. Deadfire cured that rushed feeling for me - a significant number of locations had some bite-sized adventures, and several locations had something quite significant, and all the while you are making some kind of progress. The bounties helped keep things interesting, and I didn't feel pressured to commit to rushing the story at any part (barring perhaps the intro, before having a working ship, but that can be forgiven.) Add the plenty of interesting side stories (Neketaka alone feels like it has almost as much content as Pillars had before DLC, assuming you know where to look), with better mechanics and deeper character customisation, and there is no contest for me. As for which had a greater impact, I have to give it to Pillars. I would have no investment in this piratey adventure without the grim, serious narrative of Pillars. It helps to have the ironic twist that I always played a faithful of Eothas, making Deadfire this amusing game of cat and mouse.

Sorry if I misunderstood, but I assumed your point was to do with the timeline of the ports (that because they aren't being done in-house, that they will be faster.) If it was just idle conversation, then yes, I believe I have heard that too. And I agree, what has been said by Aarik lines up pretty well with my estimation for October/November. I still hope I'm wrong of course, especially since I had originally planned to get a switch on my birthday, and Pillars a few weeks later (I have the switch, but Pillars is clearly far from a console release).

Without a finalised build (and forwarding whatever fixes may be needed assuming there are patches between then and the release), the ports can't go anywhere. So unless there is already a finalised build, and assuming anything else will be patched in later, the console ports could be well underway. But I doubt there is a finalised build yet, and won't be until TBM is done. So the bottleneck here is still Obsidian getting things to a certain point. It really wouldn't matter if Obsidian was doing the ports themselves either, because the real work needs that specific build to be ready.

If they call it a day after this patch, I'll be genuinely flabbergasted. Think for a moment how many patches they have needed after every release (main game and DLC) in order to fix new or longstanding bugs - and we haven't even heard yet if they consider TBM out of beta yet. There is zero chance this is the "last" patch. Not when they are dropping such a large patch on us - when we see a decrease in issues being fixed by patches, and patches become extremely scarce, that's when we can expect patches and updates to cease. But not now, not when they still haven't finalised a version to be ported to consoles. There is just too much going on for this to be the last patch. However, assuming TBM is coming out of beta, this may be the last bit of new content. We may only ever see fixes after this.

I really hope they are further along with fixes etc than I am expecting. I want so badly to be optimistic, but I know more than I want to about game development, and I'm expecting at least three more major patches for the TBM to be "finished". I'll be so happy to be wrong though, hopefully only a few hours left to find out.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong too, but I've been a QA before for a digital only game, and the delays there were sometimes quite extreme (and that's only talking about times where there was a set release date). So not even taking into account actually producing a physical product, if the next build isn't flawless, and they haven't already ported most of the game files over to each console in order to fast track QA, we have months of waiting, at the minimum. Luckily I long since tempered my expectations (the moment the release date went from known to unknown, I knew it would be coming late this year, if not next year), so I'm ready for it - I just hope Beamdog can fast track the ports they are working on for switch, because I do have an itch to scratch, and unless Obsidian decides to make me a happy boy by porting Pillars 1, I know it is going to be a while. Fingers crossed that I'm being overly pessimistic though.

I love the optimism, but I highly doubt the next patch will be adequate, and considering they will be making physical copies, I can't see the launch being any faster then 10 weeks after a stable release candidate build is ready, at the minimum. We are talking about porting to multiple platforms, multiple rounds of QA, the actual production and shipping, and whatever grace period stores need to actually get the product advertised and on shelves. As much as I want my switch copy to be ready and shipping today, I cannot see any hope of the game releasing for consoles before October, best case scenario. I'd find it more realistic to expect it mid November. I'd love to be horribly wrong, but it certainly won't be ready for the summer release window, meaning they will probably aim for the winter release window instead, which would be an excellent time to launch console versions.

I think if there are "low sales" (and I admit, I don't keep tabs on sales, I just buy the game and play), part of the reason could be people waiting for console versions. I'm sure more than a handful of players ended up buying it twice, or buying in once the console version of part one was released so naturally some would wait and get a complete console version (especially if anyone else is as excited for a switch version as I am. Pillars on the go!) So all the delays for console versions may be causing a deficit in sales - which is being exacerbated by the turn based mode, as that seems to have pushed back the release dates indefinitely.

To put it bluntly, buggy games are a fact of life. Even Nintendo, one of the most thorough companies I have ever seen with their QA, has bugs riddling their games - take a look at something like Super Mario 64. Other than a few fairly minor bugs people stumbled upon, it seemed on the surface to be an excellent example of good QA at the time it released. Fast forward to now, and the number of bugs and issues that have been found and are actively being used to speed-run through the game is fairly staggering. I've worked in QA. I found some crazy **** both during development, and after launch, and I imagine anyone that has worked in QA could say the same. The smallest kinds of fringe cases get overlooked, even with dozens or hundreds of people QA testing, and the reasons for that are numerous. And the older a game gets, the more likely that overlooked section of game or edge case is going to rear it's ugly head and either be infuriating, hilarious, or exploitable. You are unlikely to ever see a perfect game. All the greatest games had issues, lurking somewhere beneath the surface. But Deadfire, for all of it's complexity, is in a relatively good place (granted, its taken a while to get some of the more egregious bugs sorted, but I have encountered very few in recent memory, turn based beta aside, and I haven't encountered anything that broke the game in RTwP, which is a victory in and of itself.) As long as Deadfire continues to see support and they continue to squash bugs, I think that they are doing an excellent job. Crowdfunding doesn't really factor into the decision to support a game long beyond the backer fulfilments,so here's to hoping they continue to support it well into the development cycle of Pillars 3.

It sure makes their lives easier to do that, I agree. But patches exist, so any number of changes could be made to it post release - the downsides for them as developers would be quite significant though, so I completely understand their decision. I just hope it doesn't take too long, just got my switch, and I'd love to be playing Pillars on it. Wish they could release the first Pillars for switch too (an easy day one buy, despite me having that complete on PC), because it's certainly going to be a shame to never be able to bring over an organic set of consequences from the first game.

Yeah, I was hyped when they had the listing for May (my birthday is next month, and I'm getting an early birthday present of a switch this coming Saturday, so the timing would have been perfect.) But I think the issue holding things up is that they decided turn based would likely be the preferred method of play with a controller (and they would probably be right, if that is indeed what they are thinking, it would be so easy to make mistakes in RTWP using a controller). So, logically speaking, waiting for the ideal mode to be completed before shipping makes a lot of sense. I hope it doesn't take too long though - I can't really get into turn based on the PC so far (although that's more a case of many skills being worth far more or far less, and it's a steep learning curve for something that's likely changing.) Fingers crossed the next update makes it significantly better.

One answer to ticks is to give those kinds of s0ell effects their own initiative, and they fire at the time their initiative dictates (I'm not sure how difficult that would be to balance, however.)

I think having combat divided into turns is a little rough considering how poorly everything scales, and that having discrete character rounds makes more sense, but this is a good point. I'd like to offer a middle ground - that regardless of how much dex they have, they have a hard limit to how often they would be able to move/act in a turn. Particularly fast characters might be able to get a second full round action or free action, but no or half move actions (abilities could allow for movement, but dex shouldn't turn a character into the flash.) So maybe we could keep the concept of a turn, but allow some additional actions by the very fast, up to a point, giving us the illusion of a turnless game. It would need to have extremely well balanced restrictions, but I think it would give players a bit more freedom (and make speedy casters much more viable, letting them start and finish a "full turn cast" at the end of the turn they started, rather than losing their next turn.)

I think they definitely need to look at free/swift/full actions, because combat does feel rather limited and too open at the same time, depending on what you have built your character as. If you have a bunch of free actions you can go ballistic (these should largely be swapped to swift actions, meaning you get one of them a turn while retaining an attack.) Potions and certain non-weapon thrown items could probably be swift actions too. Just as importantly, the breakpoints and turn durations need to be looked at. I don't think there is any "persistent" effect that should last only a single round, so I feel that every effect should start as "X+1" rounds. Whether int modifies the X or the entire round amount would need to be looked at however. And as for int - I think that it should be a flat turn increase per Y amount of int, ideally. The AoE modification is perfectly fine as-is, but I think every 4 or 5 (balance needs to be careful here) points of int would add a round to an effect. I personally feel that 5 int would be perfectly acceptable (adding 2 rounds of an effect at 20 int is fairly potent). Certain effects might need an upper limit (the invisibility effects from the rogue skills, for example, are meant to be brief, and extending it by 4 turns (to a total of 6 if we used all of my suggested tweaks) is certainly not brief. In fact, thinking about it, they could balance each category of duration by a different int modifier (brief could take 6 int per additional round, medium could take 5 int per additional round, and long could be 4 int per additional round.) But I definitely felt like I was wasting my time running int builds when I was playing, so any changes to number of rounds or the scaling would be excellent.

I'm reading this and all I can think is that they should just add a fix that creates a balance for both modes - make a gun take a round to reload (potentially crossbows and arbalests too), but implement a new choice of skill at level up that makes the reloads faster (halves the time in the RTwP, makes it one round with TB), meaning most enemies would hit hard but slowly with guns, yet you could (at a reasonable level) make yourself much more dangerous than them - and it would make guns somewhat stronger in RTwP. It might be possible to slowly add similar skills to all weapon subsets, giving them extra attacks if they have high initiative, with an initiative penalty for the following turn. (Modals maybe?)