How buggy is Deadfire compared to other RPGs you've played?

[Verde]

In four playthroughs I've only fought the Guardian of Ukaizo twice. First time he didn't show and the last time he is invisible. I have never faced a similar issue in any other RPG. I've also never played a game with so many dialogue or quest breaking bugs.

 

Admittedly I haven't played some of the supposedly buggier RPGs like Elder Scrolls or New Vegas, so I'm curious where Deadfire ranks in others' experiences.

 

Tldr - Deadfire is one of the buggiest RPGs I've played.

Edited August 12, 2018 by Verde

[house2fly]

RPGs are more prone to bugs than many genres because there's a lot of interlocking systems. Deadfire isn't the worst out there but the bugs it has are pretty bad for the audience they're trying to reach- broken save imports and companion relationships are way worse to someone playing for the story than buffs not fading after combat or graphical errors. Why they chose to release it in May I have no idea but it almost certainly cost them a ton of sales

[Wormerine]

I am doing my second playthrough, and I must say in both cases I had a fairly bug free experience.

The first one playthrough suffered from popular issues: scaling didn't work, saves imported badly, relationships and reputations scaled way too fast etc. I didn;t encounter a single quest which would cause me an issue. Some graphical glitches. 

My current playthrough has been bug free as far as I can remember. At the same time I tend to be a good boy and play along with the game and not push boudaries too far. 

[M4xw0lf]

Not very. I remember NWN2, which I played at launch, and that one came with a bit of everything, including plotstoppers. Personally I only had very minor problems in two full runs of Deadfire +BoW, ship ressources disappearing being one of the more annoying ones.

[Starwars]

I just finished my replay of the game, also got the bug where the Guardian didn't show up properly.

 

That is the most serious bug I've had I think. I'd consider Deadfire in the "middle" regarding bugs. I get some bugs here and there but there are most often of no consequnce and merely annoyances. Given the game's size and complexity, especially with all the faction stuff and different systems, I expected a much more broken game but I haven't had any problems in terms of quests breaking or stuff like that. 

[uuuhhii]

gardian of ukaizo heavily buged in 2.0

poe1 and deadfire have many bug

most can be avoided

much better then fnv

[bugarup]

I don't normally play RPGs on launch preferring to wait for at least a wave or two of bugfixes so any comparison would be imprecise, but I'd say New Vegas is (still) buggier. But then, a) there are very few bugs that actually piss me off (e.g. CTDs) and I do not even notice cosmetic bugs like clipping and blurry textures unless someone draws my attention to them, b) if I find the game lacking in other departments I naturally notice more bugs about it (e.g. Skyrim) so all things considering Deadfire is fine by me.

[Tarlonniel]

I don't play many games at launch either, but I've definitely run into some with more bugs than this one, and some with less. As long as I can finish the game with only a few broken sidequests here and there, the initial bugginess doesn't bother me.

[Aridea]

Played at launch. Spent 100+ hours. Maybe there were bugs but I didn't notice them, completed the game without any issues. Nothing game-breaking on my side.

(I don't really consider possible companion conversation bugs as such, so I am not counting them)

 

If anything I've experienced more bugs in Skyrim enhanced edition some time after release.

[Normandy]

Played at launch. Spent 100+ hours. Maybe there were bugs but I didn't notice them, completed the game without any issues. Nothing game-breaking on my side.

(I don't really consider possible companion conversation bugs as such, so I am not counting them)

Same, 2 walkthroughs and nothing major.

I think most buggy game I've ever played was Spellforce 3, it required 12+ patches for me to just finish the main story. Had to stop playing and wait for next patch every time because quests weren't working.

[house2fly]

I did that in Pillars 1 at launch. Went to the Sanitarium, then left, then asked a city guard where the Sanitarium was. Poof, couldn't progress the main quest

[Verde]

I did that in Pillars 1 at launch. Went to the Sanitarium, then left, then asked a city guard where the Sanitarium was. Poof, couldn't progress the main quest

Dang. How do PoE1 and 2 compare at launch?

[house2fly]

Oh 1 was way worse. Crashed in Raedric's Hold, damage over time effects persisted out of combat, if you double-clicked an item to equip it your character's bonuses all vanished. Wrong ending slides would play sometimes, and in the 3.0 patch they made some base game changes that referred to expansion content, causing issues for players who didn't have the expansion. They were pretty on the ball with patching though, and my last playthrough of 1 was pretty smooth

[Verde]

Ah well that certainly provides context. I was lucky enough to pick it up a year after it was released.

[Katarack21]

In four playthroughs, no major bugs. My first playthrough had some issues with companion relationship progression, but nothing game-breaking.

[Tick]

Actually, I think I've had less issues with Deadfire than a typical RPG that I've played. I've seen very few bugs.

 

The only thing I'd say is that while there were very few bugs, the ones I saw really stuck out because they were related to things I care about. E.g. The game handling the order I did quests weirdly sometimes, the companions having conversation bubbles but then having nothing new to say.

[Verde]

Well as I suspected I'm in the minority. Which is great to know.

 

Tldr - be more patient TC

[anameforobsidian]

I've had very few.  Deadfire is one of the more polished rpgs I've played.  Like a previous poster said, the genre is prone to bugs.

[Taevyr]

Deadfire's alright when it comes to bugs. The problem was that most bugs were related to save import, companion stuff, and doing things out of order - which are, for most of us, the most important aspects when playing an RPG.

 

The worst one is the current one where the Guardian of Ukaizo doesn't appear, and even that isn't gamebreaking. It's just really anti-climatic.

[house2fly]

It's entirely possible that there are still bugs related to save importing, we just don't see them because they're not happening in the first hour of the game. I never saw any reactivity related to Sagani or Hiravias, for example. Should there be? Why did the legacy creator ask me about them?

[Dryden]

For me Deadfire was reasonably smooth sailing. Played more polished RPGs at release, but also played plenty worse ones including PoE1.

 

Problem for me was that the (minor) issues I had with Deadfire were really annoying for me. Save import being funky, relationshipsystem not working as intended, companion dialouges not triggering. Small stuff really, but very immersion breaking for me who play these games for the characters, story and world.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

Better than average for a new release. Kingdom Come: Deliverance was much worse, for example.

Hell, a lot of the same bugs in Deadfire were also present in the new Battletech game because they both used Unity.

Edited August 15, 2018 by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

[Verde]

Better than average for a new release. Kingdom Come: Deliverance was much worse, for example.

 

Hell, a lot of the same bugs in Deadfire were also present in the new Battletech game because they both used Unity.

Oh yeah? What was KC: D like upon release?

[house2fly]

Some review quotes for KCD:

 

The fantasy breaks down a bit too frequently under the weight of bugs, though. Some are of the goofy, largely unobtrusive sort you’d expect from an open-world game of this size, like a shopkeeper’s head loading in after the rest of their body. But others are less of a laughing matter because they got in the way of gameplay in significant ways. There seems to be a tendency for staircases to randomly decide, “You shall not pass!” and moving between areas of different elevation in general too often results in getting hung up on invisible walls or even stuck entirety.

Worse, a handful of quests in the second and third acts had either broken triggers or missing quest markers, sometimes requiring me to backtrack to a save I made an hour or more ago and choose a different path through a mission to avoid the roadblock. That’s not unusual for a big RPG, but it’s exacerbated by the fact that just about the only ways to save in Kingdom Come are drinking a rare, expensive type of alcohol or sleeping at an inn or brothel. Autosaves are unforgivingly infrequent. Crashes were rare, but when they did happen the autosave system sometimes set me back just as far.

 

 

 

Like many games with this level of depth and ambition, Kingdom Come is plagued by bugs. The simulation is dense and complex, but also feels like it could collapse at any second. There’s relatively harmless stuff like characters getting stuck on walls or floating in mid-air in cutscenes. But sometimes it’s more severe, like the archery contest where my opponent refused to take his shot, trapping me in an endless limbo. Or the conversation that looped the same three lines of dialogue over and over, forever. Throw in some crashes to desktop and other janky weirdness, and you’re left with a game that sorely lacks polish.

 

 

 

The game feels like a balancing act where everything could spin out of control at any moment if you miss a scheduled appointment to start a quest, or even worse, encounter a bug. Bugs sometimes prevent characters from appearing when they should, making you revisit locations to trigger quests, or revisiting old saves to get things back on track.

 

 

 

When I say there are technical issues with this game, I’m not talking about the odd performance hiccup or framerate stutters. I’m talking about fundamental problems at almost every point.

The pop-in I encountered running on a standard hard drive is some of the worst I have ever seen, although things are supposedly improved by installing it to a solid-state drive. At times entire cutscenes played out like the game was released in 2001, all jagged faces and empty textures. NPC scripting was also not up to scratch. Sometimes the results were funny, like seeing a man floating in mid-air holding a ladder going nowhere. But other times it’s a more serious concern, like the two times I had to reload during key story missions because important characters simply didn’t show up or start delivering their performances.

Running into one or two of these things during a game would be a problem. Running into so many of them so often undermines the entire point of Kingdom Come. It’s presented by Warhorse as an immersive, authentic role-playing game set in a fully-realized medieval world, but at every turn the world is breaking down around you.

 

Phew!

Edited August 16, 2018 by house2fly

[Verde]

Haha yikes!