KingNee

I just want the little **** to gtfo my backpack.

Any game in history is 100% bug free when compared to the abomination that was Empire: Total War on release, true.

My own definition of game breaking is more lax than that. If I'm 15 hours in and I'm finding the game boringly easy even though I'm playing on hard and I then find out that my overpowered-ness is caused by a bug from 8 hours ago... then yes, very much game breaking to me. Same deal if I play for 4 hours in a session before I notice that the locust bug left weird stats in my "active stats" overview. I had to reload an old save and replay a ton of stuff. Ruined the experience or at the very least took me right out of the game. Bugs like these can be found by anyone looking on their very first playthrough of the game. 10 people with differently configured computers, playing through the entire game, would have found these bugs. So I dunno wtf QA have been doing. Maybe there were thousands upon thousands of bugs and they narrowed it down to 200 and then collectively quit. Maybe Obsidian was implementing hacks right up until release so no one got to properly test the release version? In any case, only Obsidian is to blame.

This. You could have had the ladies beating you up to have sex with you in groups and you threw it all away.

To all the "I almost completed this game and found ZERO bugs"-posters. Please stop.If you almost completed the game and didn't have A SINGLE bug, then you're simply blind or you actively go out of your way not to break the game. I'm in the third act and while I avoided the double click and stronghold bug, I got the annoying locust one and tons of others. I have at least 10 screenshots of bugs THAT I NOTICED and took screenshots of and that's not including the audio cutting out and bugs like that. Please just stop, the game is highly enjoyable but it DOES have tons of bugs, some small, some huge. Whether or not that's all right is another matter, but the bugs are there.

I only took it so it wouldn't get sacrificed.. is there like an orphanage or something where I can drop it off in a basket, ring the doorbell and run like hell?

Make sure you fix this as well. Even without the visual effect, these stats will stay under "active effects" forever.

The active effects overview is messy, imho. Just click the stat and it will tell you what items are affecting it:

If you click the individual stat (click or hover, don't have the game opened right now) it will tell you what bonuses you have from what items. It's not perfect but it's there.

Did this as well and then noticed I had 5 greyed out "suppressed" stats on my main :/

I locked up one guy as well, he stayed there for quite a while, I told the dungeon keeper to whip him good. Nothing much came of it, I was offered 200 cp for his release, opted not to and later he escaped. After that big load of meh I stopped taking prisoners.

Wow, I never even thought of that when I optioned to kill him instead of sending him to prison. I hope it's not a bug for your sake.

Joke's on you, it's only delayed for a couple of days. Details here:

I laughed at the kid and the knife story, definitely a nice touch even if I sorta saw it coming.

No? Steam timers only look at their overlay, they don't know about this stuff unless it's sent through their API. So all they see is the same thing; how long has this application been running.

Even if it's just a mail here, a youtube video there, a skype chat / steam chat or whatever they all add up to hours upon hours in a long game such as this. I think it's wrong that an ingame timer is displaying what I would call "operating system information" such as "for how long has this application been running", that's NOT game time. That's system information. I want a game timer that's an actual game timer and it's depressingly simple to make for these guys.

What problem? Seriously, I can't see any reason why they'd devote resources to doing something like this in the first place - why would they want to have two timers running, one for total time and the other for active only time? It's not something the masses are clammering for, so it'd be spending resources on programming something, even if it's simple, that they could be spending on programming bug fixes or something else that more people would use. Who said they should drop everything and fix their timers? No one did. They shouldn't even have other timers than what I'm suggesting. "How long you've had the application open" -timer is useless for everything except maybe obscure bug hunts for stuff such as memory leaks. "For how long have you played the game?" is what matters in any discussion about game length and right now the timer is lying.

It's not a hassle at all, it's just an inactivity timer that would solve the problem. And plenty of people leave games running in the background all the time, even for hours, yes. Who exists a game to reply to a mail or something like that? That would be silly. When the developer shows a screen grab of having played 58 hours, how long was he tabbed out? A real number would remove the need for all those extra explanations and questions and doubt.

A fairly simple reliable way would be to have the timer pause recording if there's no in-game input inactivity for more than, say, 2 minutes. That would leave room for reading stuff and similar but any keyboard input or mouse movement you made would unpause the timer. At least then there'd be some truth to any of the numbers people give right now as to how long they've played, how long the game really is. When I complete it, the game will claim I've played for 150+ hours or something silly like that. What good are the timers when they are lying?

I guess there's no accurate number unless you never alt-tab, never leave the game running while doing other stuff and so forth. A pity. "Why?" you may ask, it's simple really; If someone asks me how long it took me to finish the game(when I do that at some point) I have no answer to give them other than "I'm not sure, probably something something." I see someone saying it took them 40 hours to finish, my ingame counter says 63 and I'm far from finished, I have no real clue if 40 was fast or slow or normal, other than estimates from other players. There should be a proper counter so when you ask someone and they say "48 hours", you'll know that number to be true.

if you were REALLY a middle aged woman you'd know that Torment should be first on that list. I kid.. (but really, torment should be first on that shortlist)

Yes and no. The game pauses when you alt tab, I alt tabbed a lot, now it says I played 63 hours where I suspect that at least 30% of that is me not playing at all. So now when I want to know for sure how long I've actually played, there's no believable number to be found. So basically a number where it "stopped counting" when alt-tabbed.

Thanks but do you know if this takes pause into account? If I start a new game and pause it for 20 hours and then save, will that save say I've played 20 hours?

Steam records "game is running" -time as time played, even when the game is paused. I ALT-Tabbed a lot while playing because I had to do other stuff so now I can't trust Steam's timer at all. So is there a console command or something that will show me actual UNPAUSED game time in real hours?