why can't obsidian have ONE clean release ?

[Lord Wafflebum]

I think I got a different game from a lot of other people. I'm probably half way through the game and the only bugs I've noticed have been extremely minor. Mostly misaligned text a couple of scripts triggering oddly, but ultimately work out fine.

 

I guess I should be glad I got a different version of the game than all you folks that are having an alleged bug-fest. Thanks for hooking me up, Obsidian!

[Anelor]

I have just eliminated my saves and decided to suspend playing until tangible polishing is implemented.

[complexmath]

I think I got a different game from a lot of other people. I'm probably half way through the game and the only bugs I've noticed have been extremely minor. Mostly misaligned text a couple of scripts triggering oddly, but ultimately work out fine.

 

I guess I should be glad I got a different version of the game than all you folks that are having an alleged bug-fest. Thanks for hooking me up, Obsidian!

 

Most of the bugs people are talking about aren't actually game-breaking so much as experience-breaking.  Stats being increased or reduced from their intended level.  Also, these bugs all seem to trigger based on certain ways of interacting with the game (double-clicking to equip, saving a ton in an area where a companion was recruited, etc).  But so far I've seen very few reports of actual blockers--crashes and the like.  This release is really pretty solid.

[ToolofIsis]

Ya know, there are WAYYYY too many people giving Obsidian the benefit of the doubt around here. If even ONE of these SERIOUS bugs were in a Bioware game, there would be a forum chock full of hate, how ea doesn't care and they just want money and blah blah blah. Dragon Age Inquisition had far less critical bugs, and people were going bonkers. Threatening to sue. But no, It's Obsidian guys, let's just give them a pass because....because.

 

The reason there isn't tons more whining is because people don't like to criticize smaller company's. Could you imagine how you would all react if this were a Blizzard game? Holy crap.

 

THIS GAME IS A BUGGY MESS AND THAT IS THAT. I LOOOOOOOOOOVE this game. I do it's great, but there is no way you can defend this game's technical issues.

 

Aloth just disappears on me guys. HE's JUST  GONE. I travel and he leaves my party and I can't recruit him back. THAT'S HUGE. I also have like, three different stat bugs. It's RIDICULOUS.

 

Just because some of you are playing some magical super happy bug free game, doesn't mean you can tell people who are having issues to "calm down" and "obsidian is working hard" and have that magically make the boatloads of glitches go away.

 

The game IS a bugfest. I hate to say it but it is.

Edited April 1, 2015 by ToolofIsis

[Gaunt_13]

Ya know, there are WAYYYY too many people giving Obsidian the benefit of the doubt around here. If even ONE of these SERIOUS bugs were in a Bioware game, there would be a forum chock full of hate, how ea doesn't care and they just want money and blah blah blah. Dragon Age Inquisition had far less critical bugs, and people were going bonkers. Threatening to sue. But no, It's Obsidian guys, let's just give them a pass because....because.

 

The reason there isn't tons more whining is because people don't like to criticize smaller company's. Could you imagine how you would all react if this were a Blizzard game? Holy crap.

 

THIS GAME IS A BUGGY MESS AND THAT IS THAT. I LOOOOOOOOOOVE this game. I do it's great, but there is no way you can defend this game's technical issues.

 

Aloth just disappears on me guys. HE's JUST  GONE. I travel and he leaves my party and I can't recruit him back. THAT'S HUGE. I also have like, three different stat bugs. It's RIDICULOUS.

 

Just because some of you are playing some magical super happy bug free game, doesn't mean you can tell people who are having issues to "calm down" and "obsidian is working hard" and have that magically make the boatloads of glitches go away.

 

The game IS a bugfest. I hate to say it but it is.

This.

 

Aside from the bugs the game is great and I would love to give this game a 9 or even a 10 if balance issues were sorted out too.

 

But it's more like a 7 because of the current state of the game and sheer number of HUGE bugs that aren't affecting just a small minority of people. Quite literally EVERYONE playing on PC can reproduce the stat stacking bug - that is SOOOOOOO many people, and a large percentage of them won't know about it, yet will be annoyed the game is too easy on Hard, but are actually just affected by this bug.

 

Frankly I'm surprised not many critic reviews have mentioned bugs and adjusted scores accordingly. I guess that just doesn't happen anymore these days and it's a shame, because bad reviews for buggy games are definitely an incentive for Developers to up their QA game pre-release, and for publishers not to rush games out the door before they are ready (obv that wasn't the case in this game but the point still stands).

 

[Archaven]

I think of all sites, ONLY gamespot has yet to release their review. I think they are still waiting for a patch to fix all the hard breaking bugs. Obsidian hurry already! 

[Lord Wafflebum]

I know Kevin Van Ord tweeted that he was still working on it a couple days ago. I think he was pretty busy with Bloodbourne when the review keys were released for PE. I'd guess the Gamespot review should pop up soon?

[Archaven]

I know Kevin Van Ord tweeted that he was still working on it a couple days ago. I think he was pretty busy with Bloodbourne when the review keys were released for PE. I'd guess the Gamespot review should pop up soon?

 

PoE deserves at least a 9. I don't wished that the score suffers to a 7 or 8 due to the bugs. Without the bugs it's really an awesome game at least for me.

[C2B]

Ya know, there are WAYYYY too many people giving Obsidian the benefit of the doubt around here. If even ONE of these SERIOUS bugs were in a Bioware game, there would be a forum chock full of hate, how ea doesn't care and they just want money and blah blah blah. Dragon Age Inquisition had far less critical bugs, and people were going bonkers. Threatening to sue. But no, It's Obsidian guys, let's just give them a pass because....because.

 

 

LoL no

 

Obsidian doesn't get a free pass. And if so Pillars is the only exception for it. (Possibly KoTOr II too)

 

Even South Park was cried on by multiple sides (including kotaku and rps) to be a bugfest. Making extra articles for it.

Edited April 1, 2015 by C2B

[complexmath]

Ya know, there are WAYYYY too many people giving Obsidian the benefit of the doubt around here. If even ONE of these SERIOUS bugs were in a Bioware game, there would be a forum chock full of hate, how ea doesn't care and they just want money and blah blah blah. Dragon Age Inquisition had far less critical bugs, and people were going bonkers. Threatening to sue. But no, It's Obsidian guys, let's just give them a pass because....because.

 

Not really.  In Dragon Age: Inquisition I ran into the gender bug, which I didn't even make sense of until Cassie turned down my male inquisitor for being female (so mid-late game).  Also, the voice screwup when customizing Hawke's face, the missing banter bug, companion quests breaking permanently, and a few others where the result of quest progressions at endgame had no bearing on what I actually did during the game.  All bugs that notably affected my experience of the game story, and all which "should have been found during testing."  And only one of these (the gender bug) was actually fixed before I completed the game.

 

Whether or not people go bonkers over something is really more about their personality than the importance of the thing in question.  It's entirely fair for people to be upset regardless of whether someone else considers the bug the be significant.  Being upset won't change how quickly things are fixed however, though enough vitriol may make it more difficult for devs to filter useful information out of the noise.  What *will* help to fix things more quickly is a detailed description of the problem, ideally verified beforehad as reproducible, and then any follow up questions asked by anyone in a position to help answered promptly, again with sufficient detail that people can act on the information.  Then it's a matter of waiting for the next patch which, aside from a bug that has substantial impact (deleting or corrupting non-game data on the owner's hard drive, for instance), will be released on a set schedule that really can't be changed much, as required time is built in for all sorts of things beyond simply debugging and fixing some code.

[aenemic]

Obsidian has released some very buggy games and there are certainly reasons behind that, but I think it's pretty unfair how people now more or less expect their games to be buggy and will actively search for them. There are other much bigger developers that get away with loads of bugs, small and big, all the time. In time, they will hopefully stop being so heavily scrutinized.

[dirkdivac]

Let's be honest with ourselves here instead of picking sides and getting the flame throwers rev'd up.  The truth of the game is this:

 

PoE is a buggy game, but it is NOT a buggy unplayable mess.

 

Now, I don't pay much attention to bugs/glitches when gaming and even I have found 2 or 3 bugs in the first 4 hours of playing that caused me to reload a save and do something different to stop it from happening again.  That being said, every time I had to reload, I easily found a work around and went on my merry way.  I understand YMMV, but from my perspective, it is a good game that just needs a few patches to iron out the wrinkles.  If the bugs are "bugging" you (pardon the pun) enough to ruin your gaming experience, I suggest you put it down for a few months, find something else to do and come back after it has been thoroughly patched.

[ToolofIsis]

Obsidian has released some very buggy games and there are certainly reasons behind that, but I think it's pretty unfair how people now more or less expect their games to be buggy and will actively search for them. There are other much bigger developers that get away with loads of bugs, small and big, all the time. In time, they will hopefully stop being so heavily scrutinized.

 

People have come to expect their games to be buggy because 8/10 of their games ship buggy. The buggiest game I've played before this one was Fallout:NV. I've played over a hundred games since then easy.

 

It's okay for games to have a few bugs. Even a major one at launch. Whatever. But this game has at least five game brea- wait. let's not say game breaking. Even though they are game breaking, people tend to say things in response like 'well, it's not really game breaking cuz you can still play even though your missing an entire category of stats". Let's call them critical. At LEAST FIVE very critical bugs. Five...unacceptable.

 

Obsidian deserves their reputation as a buggy developer. I love obsidian and to reiterate OMG I LOVE THIS GAME TO DEATH!! but I hope the bugs in this game compact and cause people to criticize them even more for shipping buggy games. It's the only way they will start taking it seriously. They know their reputation and they STILL ship a game like this? COME ON!

[khermann]

The ninja stat stacking is a huge bug. Any developer worth their Aero chair will tell you it only takes one bad bug to ruin a game.

 

A game built on character stats for balance and the designed, intended gameplay that experiences a hidden, ilunintentional stacking modification to those stats is, without question, a game-breaking bug. Can you still play? Sure, but you're not playing PoE, you're playing some other game nobody intended.

 

Drop. Mic.

[illathid]

 

 

Obsidian has released some very buggy games and there are certainly reasons behind that, but I think it's pretty unfair how people now more or less expect their games to be buggy and will actively search for them. There are other much bigger developers that get away with loads of bugs, small and big, all the time. In time, they will hopefully stop being so heavily scrutinized.

People have come to expect their games to be buggy because 8/10 of their games ship buggy. The buggiest game I've played before this one was Fallout:NV. I've played over a hundred games since then easy.

 

It's okay for games to have a few bugs. Even a major one at launch. Whatever. But this game has at least five game brea- wait. let's not say game breaking. Even though they are game breaking, people tend to say things in response like 'well, it's not really game breaking cuz you can still play even though your missing an entire category of stats". Let's call them critical. At LEAST FIVE very critical bugs. Five...unacceptable.

 

Obsidian deserves their reputation as a buggy developer. I love obsidian and to reiterate OMG I LOVE THIS GAME TO DEATH!! but I hope the bugs in this game compact and cause people to criticize them even more for shipping buggy games. It's the only way they will start taking it seriously. They know their reputation and they STILL ship a game like this? COME ON!

Well anecdotes do not make for good statistics. You're having a buggy experience, I am not. Unless we have some more detailed analysis, neither of us can say for certain which is the more common experience.

 

And that's the fact of the matter.

Edited April 1, 2015 by illathid

[C2B]

 

Obsidian has released some very buggy games and there are certainly reasons behind that, but I think it's pretty unfair how people now more or less expect their games to be buggy and will actively search for them. There are other much bigger developers that get away with loads of bugs, small and big, all the time. In time, they will hopefully stop being so heavily scrutinized.

 

People have come to expect their games to be buggy because 8/10 of their games ship buggy. The buggiest game I've played before this one was Fallout:NV. I've played over a hundred games since then easy.

 

It's okay for games to have a few bugs. Even a major one at launch. Whatever. But this game has at least five game brea- wait. let's not say game breaking. Even though they are game breaking, people tend to say things in response like 'well, it's not really game breaking cuz you can still play even though your missing an entire category of stats". Let's call them critical. At LEAST FIVE very critical bugs. Five...unacceptable.

 

Obsidian deserves their reputation as a buggy developer. I love obsidian and to reiterate OMG I LOVE THIS GAME TO DEATH!! but I hope the bugs in this game compact and cause people to criticize them even more for shipping buggy games. It's the only way they will start taking it seriously. They know their reputation and they STILL ship a game like this? COME ON!

 

 

Oh great

 

They are just not taking it seriously.

 

You solved EVERYTHING

 

Let me go back in time and tell every dev and QA department who shipped a big but buggy game that they were just not taking their job seriously.

 

Also NV, NWN2 and Kotor II all had way more critical bugs by your definiton of them.

[complexmath]

No one wants to ship a buggy game.  It sucks to spend months or years of your life on something, only to have people encounter problems when they play it.  I had heard that Obsidian retooled their development / QA process for this game (not sure if this is true, though a postmortem on Gamasutra would be an interesting read), and providing backers with alpha builds should have helped tremendously in sorting out any gameplay or game design issues.  Seems everyone missed a few important things anyway, which given the realities of product development and testing, isn't at all surprising.  Onwards and upwards.

[Fighter]

What does "clean" mean anyway? Without some kind of statistics data to see what percentage of people experience problems. Because on any forum someone always has a problem, goes even for most games that aren't considered buggy.

[aenemic]

 

Obsidian has released some very buggy games and there are certainly reasons behind that, but I think it's pretty unfair how people now more or less expect their games to be buggy and will actively search for them. There are other much bigger developers that get away with loads of bugs, small and big, all the time. In time, they will hopefully stop being so heavily scrutinized.

 

People have come to expect their games to be buggy because 8/10 of their games ship buggy. The buggiest game I've played before this one was Fallout:NV. I've played over a hundred games since then easy.

 

It's okay for games to have a few bugs. Even a major one at launch. Whatever. But this game has at least five game brea- wait. let's not say game breaking. Even though they are game breaking, people tend to say things in response like 'well, it's not really game breaking cuz you can still play even though your missing an entire category of stats". Let's call them critical. At LEAST FIVE very critical bugs. Five...unacceptable.

 

Obsidian deserves their reputation as a buggy developer. I love obsidian and to reiterate OMG I LOVE THIS GAME TO DEATH!! but I hope the bugs in this game compact and cause people to criticize them even more for shipping buggy games. It's the only way they will start taking it seriously. They know their reputation and they STILL ship a game like this? COME ON!

 

 

Well, since we're using anecdotes, I have had close to zero bugs with PoE. And most of the bugs people suffered in F:NV came with the package from Bethesda. There's one huge studio that let a laughable amount of bugs through with their releases, without earning the repution. Hell, the Gamebryo save system has been buggy since Oblivion, through Fallout 3 and again in F:NV. Not Obsidian's fault.

 

Like I said, you will find more bugs where you look hard for them. And people look hard for bugs in Obsidian's games and will continue to do so. And there are reasons for that. But I for one am giving them a chance instead of crying "MOST BUGGY GAME EVER, HOW COULD OBSIDIAN DO THIS" as soon as I see a bug.

[ToolofIsis]

You would be crying that if you had a buggy experience. You're saying you are bug free. Well good. A lot of people are not and it's hypocritical to say people are "crying" when you know if you WERE having critical issues with your game, you would complain as well.

 

Oh, and no one is bug free in this game. If you double click a piece of equipment, you just hit a bug. A bad one. It's that easy. You may not think it's bad, but it's bad.

[sparklecat]

You would be crying that if you had a buggy experience. You're saying you are bug free. Well good. A lot of people are not and it's hypocritical to say people are "crying" when you know if you WERE having critical issues with your game, you would complain as well.

 

Oh, and no one is bug free in this game. If you double click a piece of equipment, you just hit a bug. A bad one. It's that easy. You may not think it's bad, but it's bad.

I'm having critical issues with the game that mean I've shelved it until it's patched.  I'm not complaining about this.

[PBJam]

release was a lot cleaner than many other games i've played

[navlasop]

 

There are no longer any games that ship bug free. There are degrees of bugginess

...

 

There used to games that came bug free, in the old old days, since le internet wasnt really a big thing, and very few had access, so having to patch a game to make it playable would have made it tank.

 

Those games called bug free were not bug free. Even the first Super Mario Bros had bugs, some discovered decades after release.

 

 

Ah well, lets just say that they seemed to be bug free then

[ToolofIsis]

release was a lot cleaner than many other games i've played

 

No. It's not.

[Hoeya]

There are a lot of bugs in any games that are released to the general public. Sometimes the bugs are fairly innocuous, and are quietly patched out, but no game is completely free of bugs. Skyrim was a huge release for Bethseda, and it was chock full of gigantic game-crashing bugs. Get over it, bugs happen.