Jojobobo

This thread went south pretty quickly due to people targeting each other in personal attacks rather than approaching things with reasoning and logic (I would say Achilles at me, Gromnir at me, me going for 90% inappropriate criticism towards Gromnir). While it's hard to take a step away from rather baity personal attacks especially when they're coming from a few different sources and so say things in the heat of the moment (e.g. what I said Gromnir and then apologised for), maybe at this stage we should all do so - though if you want to carry on don't let me stop you. As I've not heard a, "Oh that optional autosave option Jojobobo said sounds entirely stupid" line yet - I think we can all agree that's probably a good idea for most RPG companies, but (arguably) especially for Obsidian when the bugs come out of left field and could easily be reversed with a previous save (as they also aren't overtly advertised on the UI - and so likely to slip under the radar and people write over unbugged saves) and it's also something they more or less implemented plus patched-in with PoE 1 and Sun-in-Shadow. It's a clean positive outcome from this what can only be described as "colourful" thread, which I think you could all benefit from (I doubt anyone would argue for fewer autosave options in a buggy game, but stranger things have happened - probably in this thread no less).

That's why, what's the point in me making this thread and having people like you abuse me over and over again just to bow out on your insistence. As you've been pretty vile and insulting to me throughout this entire thread towards me, I'm sure as hell not bowing out on your say so. I sincerely hope you talk to people a little better in the future, rather than throwing every insult under the sun at people when you disagree with them. But, you probably won't. All that said, my suggestion of optional on-act/expansion start and every 5 hour autosaves neatly solves any of the issue I encountered - and it's precedented by the Sun-in-Shadows autosave introduced in Pillars 1 so it's presumably not a resource intensive change (at least the on-act autosave as a minimum). If that had been in place in Pillars 1, I would have wasted an hour of time, rather than 27 hours, so I strongly recommend someone here recommend this or Obsidian themselves straight implement it in the unlikely event any of this has been followed by the devs. Despite my levity played as extreme narcissism before, it really is something that should be implemented in all RPGs given their buggy nature. As that's provided a nice solution to this issue, I'm fine laying it to rest, as arguing about bugginess is irrelevant if a solution has been proposed and has a reasonable chance of being implemented. That's all that needs to be said.

Look, look, Anakin, none of that matters now. Who was right and who was wrong has all been blinded by my startling good suggestion: Deadfire should optionally offer autosaves at the start of acts. Heck, why stop there, Deadfire should optionally offer autosaves every 5 hours (either as a full set, or as a rolling three like the current autosave system, and in addition to the current autosave system). This option is separate from Expert mode, however it's ruled out by Trial of Iron as those buggers are already in for a world of hurt and they of course hate save scumming (which isn't what this would be, it's an optional failsafe to protect from bugs). I think we can all agree this is a very very good idea, and one of you should suggest it to the Deadfire forums tout suite. Of course, this will cause a landslide, a cascade if you will, in the RPG industry. Once Obsidian invokes a this super sweet auto-save feature, people can point to the scrappy underdogs that are Obsidian as leaders of the pack in responding to player needs, and get this invoked on a gaming-wide level - so the RPG industry is changed irrevocably for the better. Naturally, this will lead to me eventually being made the Patron Saint of RPGs in 200 years time. I mean I don't want to sound hyperbolic or bombastic, but I think that's really the only way I can see this whole scenario realistically concluding. If the film the Saint starring Val Kilmer has taught me anything, it's that to become a saint you need to preform three miracles. These would be: (1) Being made a saint despite never having been baptised. (2) Having made a positive impact on the games' industry by lodging a complaint. (3) My eye-wateringly sweet builds, posted on multiple forums for multiple games. I would then be immortalised by gamers everywhere, with whispered prayers said to me every night before they go to sleep, as I rightfully should be. There, how's that for a bit of mother-****ing theatre?

Look, I just thought of a simple solution to Obsidian not wanting to appropriately tackle issues that can (in some people's minds) completely bork a save - have autosaves at the start of Deadfire's acts. They introduced this in Pillars because too many people were wandering into the point of no return pit (IIRC), and if they had these sort of autosaves I would still be happily playing their games. Of course, introducing these autosaves is in itself an admission that they can't produce nice mechanistically unbugged games for us all to enjoy - but as everyone seems to think that's a perfectly reasonable acceptable standard for RPGs in the first place - who cares? Most RPGs don't have an act system, so this is a perfect failsafe for fans who do want to avoid bugs and are willing (as I would have been) to replay 8 hours or so (or one or two if you catch it early) replaying content to get to what you wanted. As I'm currently not participating anywhere apart from this personal purgatory, someone else would need to make this fine suggestion on the Deadfire forums. There, I finally suggested a solution and not a problem that everyone (people saying I'm dishonest, attention seeking, dramatic, a Bethesda fanboy) can all agree on. Trivial failsafes for all, my apparent amateur dramatics gone forever, hoorah!

I would disagree, I'm taking the personal rude responses as personal, I'm taking responses such as yours as well intentioned (you also dodged the earlier point about the pink stuff, not calling you out just a comment that this argument is twisting to the points you are finding pertinent). I'm sure people are already questioning a lot of things about me (honesty, rationality, intellect) and I'm never going to be able to change people's minds. I don't expect RPGs not to be bugged, as because I mentioned I have allowed for loads of bugs in Pillars (and Skyrim, and other games) while somewhat happily continuing to play the game. Two hours in Skyrim (not going to comment on FO4, I never mentioned it)? I would have needed to replay 27 hours to get my save back to what it was, as a player who expects to fully explore a game's mechanical systems and expects to be able to play a mechanically optimised character - i.e. expects a mechanically conversant game - as combat and gameplay is a thing in these RPGs right? If it was two hours, I would be singing Obsidian's praises and be relishing their games. But 27 hours in my last playthrough to have a game compromised, and 100 hours cumulative where this has happened - nope. I think I have different standards of gameplay to most people, as I don't mind wasting two hours of my time due to a random bug so long as the gameplay holds up. But I'm not happy to sink 27 hours into a single playthrough, 45 hours into another, and likely another 100 total just to find a game doesn't have the mechanistic rigour I expected it to. I think people like you expect the game to just play, even if it is poorly optimised, and so 2 hours is a big deal to you. Two hours is not a big deal to me at all on a game that has been mechanically optimised well, 27 hours is a goddamn joke. You're infinitely correct that we have different opinions on what makes a problematic bug, and of course I can see your side. I think I expect more mechanical rigour in a game, and when a game promises complex mechanical systems and doesn't deliver on them, I take issue. Skyrim does have mechanistically more simplistic gameplay by a country mile, but its mechanisms work. I could have done your "2 hours" wasted gameplay in my sleep, and this sounds like a putdown but it's really not as I would say we're very different players and expecting wholly different things. Hey, if they fix every bug I've listed here big or small in a proper final patch, I would back their next effort at the $100 mark no questions asked. But as everyone has said, they have other things to focus on and aren't beholden to my whims. While I would love for them to adequately patch Pillars I fully expect them not too (as it is unreasonable), but their final patch was certainly not up to standard - as their patching process wasn't in general either.

I'm not going to get rude about anything, but no. I'll to flesh it out: (1) 3.07 released - pink stuff everywhere, game hotfixed after several weeks, (2) content they introduced in 3.07 bugged (another hotfix, after several weeks), (3) after the final hotfix - bearing in mind point the first 3.07 was described as "definitive" version in the first place - there's still gameplay altering bugs. They released with an issue, they fixed that issue, people complained about an issue, they fixed those issues, and there's still more and more issues, as there has always been for Pillars consistently. Issues on issues on issues, and issues Obsidian themselves have patched into play. The worst "this is final patch, srsly guys" example I've ever seen. I think the playthrough in Skyrim that I had before my 54 hour one was about 90 hours or so - neither with gameplay altering bugs. That means in the time I played on Pillars and found a gameplay altering bug, I could have been playing 5 times as long on Skyrim without one. And besides, as I said above, no matter what game I would have picked people will have given me grief on it anyway. I don't want to leave this thread on a gotcha, as in, "Gotcha, Jojobobo is an idiot, here are the reasons - and Jojobobo never responded so I'm right". I'm fine going for attrition if needs be, but if the details are going to be picked apart I'm not going to settle for misrepresentations of things I've already covered. I've yet to see a single factual argument of Skyrim Special Edition is worse for X reasons compared to Pillars Definitive Edition, and weirdly I could make several myself if I wanted to play Devil's Advocate (you know, it's not like I know Skyrim or Pillars in detail or anything which is why I felt confident to make the argument in the first place). Instead all I hear is, "Skyrim is buggy, Bethesda suxx, Pillars is great, give Obsidian a break they're the scrappy underdog and deserve it."

Probably quite true, and maybe because when I sit down to play a game (any game) I play it obsessively and don't really want to play anything else and really invest time into it I'm quite likely going to come up short - I'm far removed from a casual gamer. Maybe I'm not cut out to play RPGs anymore, as all RPGs are inherently buggy and the player base has to wait around for the devs to catch up and fixed their initial bugged and broken game - and whether the end result of the patching process turns out to work well (Skyrim, in my much already maligned opinion) or not so good (Pillars) for someone like me who really likes to dig into every inch of a game it becomes an exercise in frustration. And most of the games I do really love as RPGs (Vampire: the Masqerade ~ Bloodlines or Arcanum) still had to have years of fan patching to make them good enough - which is when I really started playing them seriously, despite owning them on release. Still as much as people keep saying I expect no bugs, that's far from the truth, as in addition to bugs that I think over-stepped the mark in Pillars as they altered my gameplay permanently and without warning I was still swallowing down many bugs without complaint and even bothering to make bug reports often so that (even if they weren't patched out) the devs could still use the feedback in future efforts like Deadfire. I guess I've never really cared about immersion breaking bugs to a large extent, but gameplay altering bugs as there are and have been a large amount of in Pillars (regardless of how situational they have or have not been, some very, some much less so) are a bug bear to me and do massively put me off a game - as they're effecting the core gameplay. Also, the pink crap was a few weeks too not just a few days, quite a while if you ask me - and then as I said they took a while to fix stuff like the Company Captain's Cap which they couldn't even introduce in an unbugged state following that, and then there's still significant gameplay altering bugs after all of that - all in their "definitive" version no less. You could say I'm splitting hairs, and of course I am. I guess what I really need to do is turn my back on RPGs in general, but as I always expected better from Obsidian (as a backer, and due to their whole company ethos in that they seemingly really care about their games) I was really hoping they wouldn't be the company to put me off the genre but stepping over that line too many times. But, they consistently were throughout the Pillars patch support, and they still are even at the end of their process. As a final point, I would say for VtM: Bloodlines I bought it for £10 down from £40 due to the buggy release (from a game store new, not second hand). If I was paying similar for Pillars or my Deadfire backing then fine, but I'm paying way in excess of that for an experience that while certainly less buggy isn't actually that much less buggy - I certainly got a better experience from Vampire paying way less and knowing it was buggy than for Pillars which should supposedly not be very buggy. Inflation non-withstanding, if an RPG is going to release this buggy and stay pretty buggy, people shouldn't be paying new game prices for them (£30+ for Deadfire, at least on the package I went in on with the bells and whistles).

Look, it's painfully simple: Obsidian's latest patch introduced pink crap all over the place for Linux and Mac players (like me) on expansion content, which is far worse than anything I have seen in Skyrim, and it took them a fair time hotfix it out. It was a bug they introduced in the game in their patching process (not in 3.06, present in 3.07). I last played Skyrim for 54 hours, and in half the time playing Pillars (27 hours) I encounter a serious bug that alters the state of play and lowers my highest possible might on a build designed to do high single hit damage. Maybe Skyrim will also burn me similarly, and I'll stop playing that too, but currently it hasn't - and it also never has, despite Pillars having done so 5 times. If you look at the links in my OP, every single one of those are instances where I have posted in a particular thread reporting an issue. Most of these are issues I uncovered myself through trying to produce a creative and interesting character, which seems to be the worst situation to punish someone for. People accuse me of mental gymnastics, but if someone could care to explain to me how ridiculous pink crap all over the place introduced in what was supposed to be Pillars' final patch is better than any of the immersion breaking bugs ever present in Skyrim, then I'm all ears. I've heard that Skyrim had backwards flying dragons introduced by a patch (but crucially, not their final patch which I'm talking about), Pillars introduced pink messes obscuring large areas of White March maps in their final patch. I guess not being able to physically see stuff on a local map isn't important, is it guys? It's not at all entirely game breaking if you wanted to even play a little of the White March content? I don't know why I'm even trying to fight this anymore, because objective reasoning is stopping to make a single shred of difference anyway, but for posterity's sake in the unlikely event anyone ever chose to look at this thread again here is clear and objective reasoning laid out for all to see.

No, the analogy would be the state has had a fair but slightly dubious reputation for a long time - due to corruption or a poor economy - and now they want you to fork over money to make a second state very similar to the first one. You agreed to finance this new state when you thought the going was good, but you didn't realise the current state you're living in wasn't what you thought it was to an even worse extent - maybe the head of state has begun making outlandish claims about his big red button, I don't know. On that basis, you're no longer happy to fund the new state, but those back taxes the state can keep. You move to another state. If you're going to make a scornful analogy, do try and make it a good one.

Well thanks SonicMage117, but I don't see myself as being overly honourable or anything like that. I think the game's fans (excluding the more level head ones) have really over-inflated what I did here. I got a refund on a (more or less) pre-order of a game as I was entitled to, and wrote an open criticism to Obsidian about why I was doing it. The criticism is full of factual objective points, though whether getting a refund on a pledge is appropriate to the criticism is open for debate. I even said, quite clearly, that is Obsidian's record with bugginess improves a great deal I'm certainly open (but not overly enthusiastic) about picking up more of their games in the future but I would only want to seed a project with some of my own money that I was confident wouldn't have the same calibre bugs in a Pillars 1, which I definitely can't be. I also haven't refunded Pillars 1, as some people seem to suggest I have done. I'm potentially happy to pay for a proven product, I'm not happy for them to use my money in the development of something that has reasonable potential of being riddled with bugs - as if something like Deadfire is just as buggy as Pillars 1 I wouldn't be buying it. This is trying to make Obsidian a bit more accountable for a problem they let get out of hand, and it's a bit of a no-confidence vote on them developing a game with some of my money. Making it with other people's money and their own money I would never discourage. Using my money for development when with this last bug has spoiled a load of my free time (and opened my eyes to the prospect there's a good chance they're never going to live up to the standard I expected them to live up to, of having no permanent game-changing bugs) - no, I'm not going to do that. I realise no one asked me to back Deadfire, but with addition of bugs present in Pillars 1 that have revealed themselves since I first backed and the total bodge of the v3.07 at its first release, I feel like I backed Deadfire under false pretences. If that's not a good reason to want a refund and lodge a public complaint in hopes they change, I'm not too sure what is.

Well I have to go off games I've actually played. I would wager there is an RPG out there from a similar sized company and of a similar complexity with fewer bugs, but I haven't played it as I tend to only have one massive time sink game on the go at once. The comparison isn't perfect, but the general point that RPGs with far fewer bugs that are impactful on mechanistic gameplay (combat, running around in the game world, etc.) exist is a valid one. With the Lyrinia bug, on a different character I could easily start missing Might dialogue checks (as it's a separate source of Might which stacks with other sources and is higher than the Might offered by another prostitute), and so it's impact could easily be felt in the story/roleplay side of the game too outside putting a pin in the mechanistic issues I keep citing. At least you're making a reasonable criticism, rather than the people constantly screaming that Skyrim is still buggy, yet it's me who has actually listed a lot of Skyrim's bugs and how they differ to Pillars' as well as having personally played the games within the last three months, both for prolonged periods of time. And really, who cares what comparison I make in the first place? If you take all of Pillars' problems in a bubble, without comparison to any other game, they would all be still bad enough to make them a huge problem for me. When I'm playing Pillars and encounter a bug, I'm not thinking, "Well this would never happen in Skyrim!" I'm thinking, "Well this totally sucks." I made an explicit comparison because someone asked me to, but RPGs tend to have a lot of variation from one another in the first place so a perfect comparison doesn't really exist. Any comparison I could have made someone would have been up in arms about it for some arbitrary reason, I'm sure. Which is something Obsidian could have done with MaxQuest's unofficial patch, with the Charm/Dominate fix being particularly relevant I would say. Even if they didn't have his permission (which I would say he would happily give), there's always the old chestnut of, "We came to the same fix through our own methods." But, they didn't bother. In regards to no mods, I prefer to play games inside of a dev's own creative vision and see what I can do with their framework. The only time I've ever installed a mod is what it wholesale transforms the game into a different one - e.g. when there was a Third Age: Total War (Lord of the Rings mod) kicking around for Medieval 2: Total War - and even then I'll still be playing the unmodded base game too.

That's a perfectly fair criticism of the comparison, but really as a player I'm here to comment on the product that I'm currently playing, not factor in extenuating circumstances due to the size of the company. It's not my prerogative to be giving a company a free pass when I'm not pleased with their product. Plus, as I have mentioned, while Obsidian are smaller than Bethesda they're not exactly a tiny indie developer either. In terms of stability improvements made by modders, I don't play with any unofficial patches or performance enhancing mods (or mods in general), so I'm only playing with the patches Bethesda have put out there, just as I have been with Obsidian and Pillars.

Coming back to address more recurring points as they are really colouring what I originally said here, perhaps Skyrim was a poor example to pick as an "unbuggy" game - not because I feel like I'm wrong - but because a lot of you seem to have an irrational hatred for it. If you look at what I said: My point here was therefore, if you compare Skyrim Special Edition side by side with Pillars of Eternity Definitive Edition as games at the end of their patch cycles, Skyrim to me has won as at least I can play Skyrim without finding a mechanistic bug - so talking of how Skyrim looked at its initial release is a bit redundant as that was never the comparison I made in the first place, I compared game editions at the end of their patching cycles and it's there quite clearly in the first thing I said about Skyrim. If you want to make an argument about a thing I never said, that's the literal definition of a straw man. Besides, I disliked the narrative and gameplay direction in Fallout 4 with a passion, if you're saying I'm a Bethesda fanboy I doubt I'll be buying any of their games any time soon either. Buying EA games? That's one of the better jokes I've seen in this thread so far. I just booted up Skyrim, and I see 54 hours was my last playthrough that I was playing in November last year, in which the only bugs I encountered were cosmetic and momentary (Mammoths dropping from the sky, etc.) and I gave up playing because I got bored - Skyrim characters don't have a clean end point in the first place. In starting Pillars up also towards the end of November, I got: Pink textures all over the place on expansion items and locations, easily more immersion breaking than anything I've ever seen in Skyrim, and meaning many had to wait around for a hotfix. A really serious and ridiculous bug to be present for such a seasoned developer. The Company Captain's Cap confusing your own party members and yourself. This was a new item they introduced into the game, yet it was clearly minimally tested for this to occur. Korgrak being in two places at once. Not a bad bug by any means, but not one that should be present in a game that has such a tonally serious story. And of course, a key Boon being taken away from my character, altering the mechanical state of play, that happened to me 27 hours in. This is in addition to: The pre-existing figurine bug, where their sprites appear on every map when they are killed when paralysed. This is one of the worst, most immersion breaking bugs I have ever seen in a game, as it's a constant reminder of buggy play. The only way to avoid it is to not use figurines in difficult encounters against enemies that can paralyse you (Adragans, Cean Gŵla) which - ironically - are precisely those encounters when they would offer a large benefit. Tooltips being woefully described. Rogue abilities say they offer "+X% damage", but do they boost the thing listed as "damage" on the character sheet? No of course they don't, they boost base damage of your weapon, because everyone enjoys a nice misleading tooltip right? And there's literally load of examples of this. Stunned and Prone enemies starting to fight you when they are still Stunned/Prone. Random weapon enchantments translating onto spell-bindings, such as Overbearing Prone going onto Flame Shield from the Belt of Royal Deadfire Cannoneer. This belt is now one of the better items in the game for offering a crap ton of attribute bonuses, meaning this bug is only going to become more prevalent in a lot of players games. Sluggish, ridiculous load times that have no place inside a modern game. But of course, you're right and I'm wrong. I should delight in ugly pink textures that are one of the worse eyesores that I have personally seen in a modern game, and made White March, the Crägholdt Bluffs and Mowrghek Îen unplayable because for most of those places you couldn't see anything under the sea of pink (certainly what has happened when this bug occurred before, and what I witnessed loading saves in WM locations this time round too) - a bug introduced in a patch they made that wasn't present before (because gosh, that's not worse than a dragon flying backward, is it?). I should be happy when Obsidian have not tested a new item they put in the game so that it is borderline unusable in party play due to it Confusing everyone, and tedious even in solo (where your character is immune to Confuse due to the hat) to hear groans about friendly fire all the time if you're using something like Shod-in-Faith, when it should have been fun to use. I should be happy that Obsidian bugged a nice 27 hour playthrough I had going on (which seeing as it was solo with a Rogue, was undoubtedly longer as you're only saving when you make progress, and some encounters took me a few hours to complete), because after two and a half years of patching they shouldn't have gotten better at this patching lark should they? It's not like that's a fundamentally crappy bug to have in a likely final version of a game. I should be happy that extremely disappointing well documented bugs, such as rubbish tooltips and dead paralysed sprites appearing on every goddamn map in the game, have never been fixed. By contrast, I put in Skyrim, I play for 54 hours. I see a couple of mammoths falling from the sky, one or two dragons having path-finding problems (out of over 100), and I get maybe one crash to desktop in the entire 54 hour run. Momentary bugs, no long lasting impact on the game, no unintended mechanistic gameplay alterations to my character - which is really all I ask for. But yes of course you are all correct, obviously Skyrim is worse. You're saying that my judgement is coloured by experience and wrong, I'd say that many of yours seems to be coloured by your hatred of Bethesda - especially if you're trying to claim the final version of Skyrim is less buggy than the current "definitive version" of Pillars. Personally Skyrim is a way more boring game, it's mechanistically simplistic and not as well written, but does the Special Edition play more fluently than Pillars and not bite you in the ass? For me, yes, a thousand times yes. No developer should ever be wasting 27 hours of someone's time through a bug, especially when the game is at the end of its patching support when bugs like this should not exist, and especially when they've been doing it over and over again all the way through their patching process. I think some of you are thinking I wanted a bug like this in my game - trust me, I did not. Same. Thanks guys, you two are top blokes in my (seemingly terrible if this thread is anything to go by) opinion. No idea what has happened to the above quote, with it looking so weird.

I thought I'd come back to say I apologise to Gromnir for me being a ****, my personal thoughts or impressions of him have no place in this thread (or really ever being voiced in general). I think personally calling someone dishonest is a pretty large accusation, and one that people wouldn't make publicly outside of the internet very often (or maybe they would, I don't know), and one that shouldn't be made unless your entirely sure that it should be - and so it really pressed a button for me. That said it's not an excuse, I should have expressed my annoyance at his behaviour in an entirely different manner, and I'm sorry to him personally for getting out of hand. I also wanted to address the claims of being "dramatic", seeing as it seems to be dominating the thread (though thank you Boeroer and JerekKruger for saying that is not the case). If you think a company has preformed an unsatisfactory service, so much so that you want them they to be held more accountable for that problem, is there really a way of doing this without a public display? I could have written them a letter, or an email, but Obsidian could have easily ignored that - or seen it as a complete one off. In taking a public stance, there's lots of things you can do - I could have made a blog post, I could have made some sort of YouTube video, I could have started widely circulating my thoughts about them through social media or post stuff like this on GoG forums or reddit. Of the public methods at my disposal I would say this was the least dramatic one I could have taken. If people think sharing an image of the email is "dramatic", I was simply offering proof that I'm not messing around and have done the thing that I said I've done. If anyone has a suggestion of a means to make a company take a complaint very seriously in a less "dramatic" fashion I'm all ears (and if you really do have a good suggestion, then I'm happy to admit this wasn't the best possible way for me to go about raising this problem), but I couldn't think of anything else personally that I didn't think was in some ways even more dramatic. I'm also of the opinion that doing something publicly doesn't by its nature make it dramatic (or attention seeking, or when it boils down to it, other synonyms for the outdated concept of being unmanly and lacking reserve). I'm also not entirely sure what people's issue with this whole topic are in general. I would say the outcomes are: (1) Obsidian were already going to make less buggy games in the future anyway, so this topic was entirely pointless - probably the most likely thing going on here. (2) Obsidian do become more worried about a backlash about buggy content, they take greater pains to put out less buggy games in the future, you as a fanbase get less buggy games. (3) Obsidian ignore the problem and release a badly buggy game with long indecisive patch cycles, and now this thread is here more fans get annoyed about it as the problem is well documented and precedented, which eventually leads into outcome (2) anyway. There's not really any way things don't get better (or remain as good as they were going to be in Deadfire anyway, if the devs had already learnt from past mistakes), so I'm not really sure why anyone is agitated by this thread. Personally I want to be proved wrong and possibly come back to Obsidian at a later date, but if they don't change their ways and suffer some reputational damage as a result I'm fine with that too. I would say that Obsidian is my most favourite company creatively, but my least favourite company in terms of game implementation by still having gameplay altering bugs this far down the line (which is exacerbated by the fact I like their creative vision so much, regardless of how their bugginess compares to games of competitors), so I do hope they can change for the better. Hopefully with this, everything has been neatly wrapped up. If you want to keep calling me dramatic, attention-seeking, dishonest and irrational, then so be it, but that isn't my intention at all.

Well good play to him, but if someone is going to publicly call me out as what amounts to a liar with what is the most pathetic strawman I've ever seen (so much so that a stiff breeze could knock it over) just to get the final word in, what reaction does someone like that expect? Consider me trolled, baited and my points weakened by proxy, which I think is what he was looking for anyway.

You've sufficiently lowered the tone to get me back in, so congrats on that. And yes, I'm really out. Personally, though we've never butted heads as far as I know Gromnir, I've really always unappreciated your treatment of language and general rude temperament - which is surprising considering several non-native english language speakers around here probably a finer grasp of the english language than I do, and yet you are too lapse to capitalise sentences (which I think people do in any language, right?). Further, while you're too lapse to capitalise sentences, you of course need to chip in with your cutesy "'o"s rather than "o"s and "we"s rather than "I"s. If you're going to ruin grammar conventions one way, don't try and redeem yourself in a completely counterintuitive way and go for the apostrophe or weird queenly second-person plural. Are you just here to mock everyone making appropriate use of the english language - native and non-native speakers? I'm really not sure. But of course, "HA! Good Fun!" I'm sure this is enough to get this thread locked at this stage, and that's fine and moderators can go ahead (though even in contentious threads such as this it would be nice if you could try and stop the trolls), but it's nice to say publicly that I really don't like people like you Gromnir - I think you're a bit of a bully. Anyway, onto your more salient points... As I've said, I've got no problem with quitting bad games and buggy developments/developers. It is a vast catalog of games in which I have dumped after some indefinite period of time, 5 hours, 10 hours, perhaps 20 hours. However, even with your recharacterization [sic - I couldn't do anything with this] of PoE play experience to explain playthroughs, you've got to complete play of long [sic - length? Hell I don't know] games plus multiple abbreviated runs totaling [sic] more than 100 hours. Plus how many years posting on poe forums... in a game you're supposed to be disappointed with. There I tried to correct all your grammar to my best extent to let non-english speakers into our conversation, no need to thank me. You can enjoy plenty of things and not find them completely satisfying. I want to play games I find completely satisfying. I played Resident Evil 7 early last year and found in completely satisfying, and then came back and played the DLCs in December last year and found them completely satisfying too. Just because someone does something, doesn't mean they can't be critical of the thing they did. People are married for 8 years and then get divorced, but I guess they were happy all those years - yeah-noooo. Again, my grammar-correct in play (I mean, to the extent I could). No, if you recognise if you notice in the quote you provided I was discussing past tense (but thanks for the very poor detective work). You know, when people talk about transitioning from one thing to another in the past tense, that really doesn't set a time frame. While I make it seem like a gradual transition in that thread, it's more not to embarrass a person by suggesting I launched into hard difficulty fast compared to them - rather than whatever you're trying to paint it as. Some people try to be polite, and some people are entirely aggressive on forums and tend to annoy and upset people, only one of us is each of those things Gromnir. I'm really not following the unintelligibleness of your last point? I played a lot, so I have no right to critique the game? Isn't the opposite true, where people who have tried to dig deep into the game's difficulty have more of a right? I really don't get this. I suppose I should just shut my mouth because what I'm saying about a game isn't what you're saying about a game, I guess? Oh I wouldn't say I'm any more dishonest than someone who has to actively artifice everything that they type into a forum, rather than going off the cuff, but I would say we have very different opinions of honesty don't we Gromnir? If you think this is dramatic, then how is a person supposed to openly criticise a game company's performance that they themselves have not found satisfactory? Personally I would say your opinion that I should just get an refund and do a single post, and then not respond when people try and question and potentially ridicule my reasoning as you have done, is very much backwards. People are allowed to question my reasons, and I am allowed to respond, that is not dramatic. The drama is right here, and of your making, so thanks very much for weighing in with your unpleasant, rude, poorly articulated points as always Gromnir. Heaven forbid anyone who felt like doing the same as me, dare they face your wrath. But, again, "HA! Good Fun!", whatever the hell that means.

No actually one run where I completed the game, the solo Gunslinger Chanter, the rest were incomplete because of bugs for the aforementioned reasons (and so bad experiences when you say I should have been enjoying myself, a 100 hours of buggy bad experiences), because of Obsidian being indecisive on class mechanics and new patches changing the state of play (not necessarily a bad thing, but not exactly a good thing either for people expecting consistent play), or loads where I made a shoddy build and so it became untenable (which is my problem not theirs, but it's certainly exacerbated for reasons of restarting and subsequently playing the Gilded Vale a load of times when you don't want to). Sorry-not-sorry for being consistent and not just giving up when I first should have done on Pillars, ages ago - ironically I wanted to give Obsidian the benefit of the doubt. There's nothing exactly inconsistent here that I've said (maybe I said playthroughs earlier when I should have made it clear it was one playthrough and many, many failed play attempts late game because of bugs - if I was unclear it's not at an attempt at deception, just a simple hammering away at a keyboard due to getting a lot of responses). This a fan forum, and criticism of what I've done I would expect and encourage, but inevitably these things devolve into accusations of drama-whoring and that's where we're at now. My reasoning (I would hope) is reasonably clear, and I've said all I need to say. To borrow from Gromnir, "HA! Good Fun!" Jojobobo out.

I like the pre-emptive rage and threats and accusations at the thing that didn't happen. Anyway fair enough dude. We all have our standards. I wish you good luck with any future company you support. Oh for...how many pre-emptive accusations are you going to make in this thread? Anyway some sorts of bugs bother people and others don't. The bugs you listed I barely noticed but other games they would make me unlikely to play further. Just how it goes. Now, now, no need to be catty. Skyrim is often cited as a buggy game, and some devs do delete criticism. As I mentioned, I don't think Obsidian is one of those devs by a long shot, but it's safe to say this is not a normal length most people would go to in order to make a criticism. I was immediately reassured by a mod and thanked him for it, for me that's no shots fired. Well I thought I had a game I was familiar with, and then noticed another problematic bug for me. I would say you're probably correct though, most people probably knew what they wanted sooner than I realised and so they didn't back it in cases like mine, and I apologise for funding PoE 2 when I had these reservations in the first place. However, I was knocked a little sideways at finding another of these sorts of bugs in a "definitive" version of the game and that's what really gave me cold feet like I hadn't had before, so I did what I had to do.

To be clear, I've not refunded PoE 1, partially because I think GoG might have to foot the bill - and I have had enjoyment out of it - I just uninstalled it and wiped my saves. However it's been so thoroughly bittersweet that I have been highly encouraged to not support the sequel - as if it's of the same level of bugginess this will only get more annoying for me, because they should know better by now when these problems are consistently flagged post release. Therefore, I'm no longer confident trumping up money for a game that has a fairly reasonable chance of falling below my expectations. I don't think my expectations are even unreasonable in the first place, I never expected them to release Deadfire in an entirely unbugged state - and there's plenty of bugs that do personally annoy me in Pillars 1 that have been overlooking for years as they don't have a large impact in the game (looking at you dead paralysed figurine creatures appearing on every map, completely sucks but it is avoidable). But those kind of bugs don't have an ongoing mechanistic impact, and are usually easy to spot and rectify instantly. The bug I encountered the other day was another of the bad kind with an irreversible mechanistic impact if you don't catch it, and I didn't even with back up saves. It was only 27 hours total this time, but with the Fighter/Confident Aim bug it was 45 hours where I may as well have been playing easy/normal instead of soloing on PotD because it was so strong, and with the others I'd say a conservative estimate puts it at 100 hours of total wasted time, yes. EDIT: I guess for some context I haven't put to fine a point on, I 95% of the time solo (PotD, Expert), like I have done in other RPGs I like that also contain companions (Fallouts 1 and 2, Fallout: NV, Arcanum, etc.). While the bugs I've listed probably don't impact your overall party dynamic a great deal, they impact a rather large deal in solo play. And I know the Pillars was never designed as a solo game, but I want the reason why I can't complete the game to be because of the challenge being hard (which has happened on a few of my failed builds, and really it's part of the fun), and not because the character is bugged unsatisfactorily.

Thanks for the well voiced criticism. I wouldn't call it gracious of Obsidian to allow for a refund, it's the business model they chose to use, so if they and other people are operating within the confines of what is agreed I think it's my decision and them facilitating my decision is fairly neutral. Crowd funding is weird in that in some ways your making an investment, and in others you're buying a product - and if you weren't happy with a particular product then typically you're allowed to return it regardless of your country of origin. If we do consider it a product, which I do, then I'm not doing anything untoward. In regards to irrationality, I don't agree with you (shockingly) but I can see how this would come across like that. However, I think there is a distinction between bugs that permanently alter the mechanistic state of play (unless you keep like back-up saves for the entire game, and I do keep back-up saves and I still got caught out) and bugs that you can undo trivially. And believe me, I probably spent about two hours trying to rectify this bug (trying to see if there was any way I could reverse the bug and carry on with play as before) but there just wasn't. Possibly there is an option to open up the console, type in 20 lines of code, and resolve this somehow - but that's very immersion shattering and not something I am at all into. Two and a half years down the line, I just don't think this should be happening, particularly when it's happened so much before.

No problem pal, I aim to please.

As I said, at least all the Skyrim bugs that I can think of are revocable without even needing to reload (Fortify Restoration bug, equipping double helmets, Fortify Marksman potions affecting all weapon types) - just sell the items you made that were crazy strong, even though they sell for a lot money is not of a concern in both Pillars and Skyrim. The only irrevocable bug I can think of is the application of Ancient Knowledge, which rather stupidly offers a bonus to armor rating to all pieces of equipment except Dwarven armor which is was supposed to effect. However, in practical terms many characters hit the armor cap even without this perk - so it's mechanistic impact is minimal if there at all (and it is also very niche it the first place, being a quest perk, etc.). Pillars has introduced an irrevocable mechanistic bug into my character save in the "definitive" version of the game, as it has done on four other separate occasions. If Skyrim had burned me 5 times likes this, I wouldn't be playing Skyrim either. Therefore, no double standard, one standard applied to all companies regardless of size. I'm not going to give Obsidian a free pass just because they're a smaller company, particularly when I gave them some of my money to make the game in the first place. It's obviously a shame, as Skyrim is a more boring game than Pillars and likely Deadfire, but Skyrim never repeatably and severely irritated me either in all the time I've been playing it.

I would say Skyrim for one. I know you're going to jump all over me, because has been know Skyrim as a buggy game, but I would say in it's current iteration (Special Editions, what have you) you can play for hundreds of hours without experiencing a single mechanistic bug - at least in an unmodded game. While Skyrim has had a much longer development cycle than Pillars and more years to iron out its bugs, it's now from my experience as a player mostly bug free. I'm sure you can still bring a wiki list of all its bugs, and go, "Look Jojobobo, look at all the bugs, you moron!" But that doesn't change the fact that in playing Pillars and playing Skyrim for comparable amounts of time, I've experienced a disproportionate amount of mechanistic bugs in Pillars over Skyrim. I'd say it's also bad that the latest version of Pillars was branded as the "definitive version" (which to me sounds like it should be as bugfree as a Special Edition), and yet there's still a bug in it where a significant and powerful advantage got barred from a character I was playing. Further Skyrim I don't think was marketed as an intricately difficult game like Pillars was, so even if there was a bug that offered a mechanistic advantage/disadvantage (of which I can remember remarkably few in Skyrim) I purchased the games looking for different things in their offered experiences. I didn't expect complex difficulty in Skyrim, but I did in Pillars and that was how it was advertised to a degree, so mechanistic bugs are more galling in Pillars for me than they are in Skyrim (and as I said, there are far fewer mechanistic bugs to be found in the first place). Lastly, I payed less money for Skyrim than Pillars at release (somewhere in the UK was offering at the low price of £25 on initial Xbox 360 console release, for whatever reason), and I also didn't crowd fund Skyrim. When a developer needs a game to be crowd funded even to get it off the ground, fans who backed in natural expect the company to be more beholden to them than their regular fanbase - and companies that choose to crowd fund should definitely anticipate this. While Skyrim is a bit more of a contentious example, take something like BioShock Infinite with RPG elements and there's zero bugs at all. It's certainly much more simplistic than Pillars, and I'm certainly not going to be able to approach the level of customisable depth like you get in something like Pillars, however it's also never going to disappoint me due to bugginess. Complaints are by their very nature idiosyncratic, and what annoys someone can seem like nothing to other people. Every time I design a character build in Pillars, I usually spend 3 or so hours preliminarily testing it out through use of the console and getting every detail I want pinned down, and then I'll jump in and play the game - so it's particularly annoying for me to have that thoroughly planned foresight ruined 27 hours in (and it's not an isolated incident, happening four times previously too). I've never played Skyrim and felt like my character has been mechanistically compromised through a bug (and I'm not saying that they're not there, but they're certainly more buried, more specific examples below). That, to me, is the difference. I only played Fallout 4 for 30 hours or so because I found it boring, so I doubt I'll be getting their future titles either. Skyrim is still some fun and most of the bugs in the gameplay require you to go looking for them and by doing unintuitive things (taking a Restoration potion before enchanting, or attempting to wear two different specific helmets at once, for example). These bugs are also revocable without even needing to reload a save. In Pillars I did a normal - albeit rare - thing, and I got irrevocably punished for it as all my saves were after the fact. While rarity of a bug is certainly a factor for forgiving a dev, when you layer it on all the not so rare bugs it for me that came before whcih also had this damaging potential this has become the straw that broke the camel's back.

Just saw your edit. As I said, "for the time being at least" I'm not happy to buy their products, if they get their act together I'd consider buying it further down the line (though, probably not). I just don't have any confidence in backing it now based on their current performance, and all these kinds of bugs I've experience have really poured cold water on the interest I did have in the game. Another point you raise is that, "Obsidian always hammer out bugs for months and even years to come." I don't see that as a plus, as a game shouldn't be riddled with significant bugs in the first place - like Pillars of Eternity or like Fallout: New Vegas - or if they are they should get most of them in one or two rounds of patching, which wasn't the case in PoE. If there's many unpleasant bugs in the game, for me they tend to outweigh its other positive features. It's like making yourself a really nice sandwich, and then eating half of it only to notice the bread is mouldy. While you might have enjoyed the bits of the sandwich you ate at the time, you're never going to remember the experience in a positive light.

I think it's more of a case of that I can play other RPGs and not experience bugs in 100 hour playthroughs, whereas I play Pillars and there's some sort of bug - big or small - in every single playthrough I've had. It's also a little based on what one of the main selling points of the game was supposed to be. With Path of the Damned, Trial of Iron and Expert modes the game was marketed at least in part on the basis of offering a challenging experience (which not all RPGs do market themselves as, I would say) - which was its principal appeal to me. As the game has consistently presented bugs, however big or small, that move the game away from the devs' intended difficulty (either making the game unintentionally harder or easier), the game itself for me has stopped being the game that was advertised and promised. And I know that these bugs are avoidable - but they're only avoidable if you know about them in advance, and personally I never did, and its wasted a massive amount of my time. And even if they are avoidable, my choices as a player shouldn't be based around, "Well I can't take that ability because it's bugged, I need to wait on a patch in four weeks time." It should be based around playing the game in a way that I find to be fun and not having arbitrary limitations imposed on me (by having to avoid bugged overpowered features that I was interested in until I realised they were bugged) in order to play a game based around the difficulty levels that the devs intended. The fact that someone can still stumble into a bug like this two and half years down the line (after stumbling into bugs consistently while playing the game previously) has become very frustrating for me, and I would hope Obsidian finds it a little embarrassing. Whether or not people see this as a proportionate response is a matter of debate, but in its simplest form I am no longer having fun with their games for reasons of their own making, and therefore the sensible choice is to walk away.