BUG: With Death enabled in Game Options, any party member dying makes saved games created after this moment unloadable. 

 

Background: While trying to get around the artificial limitations on creating a custom party, I killed off the default NPCs by using the "death" option in the Options menu. This freed up party slots and allowed me to finally create a full custom party. However, once I tried to load a save made after this, turned out the save was broken (wouldn't load, stuck at the PoE logo loading screen). After some investigation, I discovered that if any of the default party NPCs dies permanently and is removed from party, this makes all subsequent saved games unloadable.

 

Please fix this.

 

After some experimenting, here's more info on this bug.

 

It is apparently due to the dead party members not being removed from party properly. Even though they disappear from the game screen, their "placeholders" are still there "behind the scenes". Sometimes, when loading a game, I can even glimpse these "dead" characters being loaded, only to disappear once loading is complete. Once, the dead party members were visible as translucent shadows ("ghosts") which had their own green circles, but could not be controlled by the player.

 

This leads to all sorts of buggy behaviour with new adventurers hired in their stead, up to and including unloadable saved games. In other cases, the new adventurers (hired instead of dead ones) disappear, leaving you only with the player character and the surviving default party members.

 

I tried playing Expert Mode with permadeath always enabled, this didn't solve the issue.