Obsidian, why isn't there any hotfix yet?

[Jazou]

Dear Obsidian,

 

first at all I want to clarify that I respect your hard work and you guys did really create a great game.

This thread is not determined to be a troll or whining thread - instead I want to ask a genuine question:

 

Why isn't there any hotfix yet?

 

I did already ask this question inside the stat stacking bug thread but as I think that my posts probably

weren't read by devs, I wanted to separate this question in an own thread. 

 

Please Obsidian, don't do the mistake to wait for delivering one big update that fixed as many bugs as

possible. Instead please deliver a hotfix as soon as possible so that at least some bugs (or even only one)

get fixed in short time. We don't demand an all-in-one fix for "everything" - just sharing what is already done

would be amazing. Every day there are more players getting into troubles and I'm sure some of the reasons

are already eliminiated and are just waiting for other fixes to provide all of them together within the announced

patch. I have the feeling that the patch got already a bit delayed because you want to fix as many bugs as

possible within this week. But in some situations it's better to satisfy the crowd step by step instead of waiting

to make everyone happy at once. 

 

 

Please note: This is not a rhetorical question - I really would appreciate an honest answer. What are the reasons

to put many fixes within one update instead of providing small hotfixes to the community when there are that kind

of critical/game breaking bugs? Or didn't you fix at least one of them yet? (I wouldn't blame you for that either!)

I just would love to hear an official statement - please give us more info about the actual state.

 

 

Best,

A fan of your work

Edited April 2, 2015 by Jazou

[EricKei]

Devs - Thanks for the update on the update!

 

As for games releasing with tons of bugs --- They shouldn't have more than a handful of significant bugs (this one has a lot of bugs, if only a few truly major ones (save bloating and the associated load time and crash issues, stats disappearing or getting multiplied, etc)) -- but they're obviously working hard to get them squished. I've seen many a game that was in FAR worse condition at launch, and I've seen many that were in better shape. A buggy release is a risk I've come to accept, after having been a gamer for nigh upon forty years. I'm not saying that this is the way things *should be*, it's just the way things *are*. At some point, you need to finish the current build and push that baby out the door. Just be glad we're not still in the cartridge era, when there WERE no patches, period. Once a game went Gold, that was all she wrote.

 

On the other hand, I'll be the first to admit that, had I not backed the KS, I would have waited a few weeks for them to smooth out the bumps before buying this game.

 

As it stands, I'm just running through to play around and experiment, and I'll just start over once the patch drops, as I'll have a better idea of what I'm doing, and will know what I should and should not prioritize in terms of skill/talent/spell selections.

 

Even games that have been out for some time can still have long lists of bugs -- Heck, look at the modern, EE versions of BG1/2/IWD -- still plenty of bugs to squish. Still great games despite their flaws, like this one is. For another, much higher-budget example or two, look at the modern XCOM and Deus Ex: Human Revolution as examples of this same thing -- great games with major bugs. The latter case is especially problematic, as their Director's Cut edition re-introduced a number of bugs that had already been fixed in the base game, due to the DC being based on an older build. In both cases, there are no plans (of which I am aware) to do anything about them.

Edited April 2, 2015 by EricKei

[Malek_Deneith]

What seriously if i have a GoG version and the update is tomorrow i wont be able to dl it till monday? damm that sucks

Tuesday more like it. Monday is Easter so a day off for GoG.

Edited April 2, 2015 by Malek_Deneith

[Wild Card]

Wow...you`re good at twisting the knife you know that

Annyway maybe when i`m finnaly able to play it most of the bugs will be fixed

[Malek_Deneith]

Wow...you`re good at twisting the knife you know that

Annyway maybe when i`m finnaly able to play it most of the bugs will be fixed

Takes some practice, thanks But eh, I have GoG version also so that means my playthrough is on hold until then also. Playing with 80 accuracy Kana feels too much like cheating.

Edited April 2, 2015 by Malek_Deneith

[OfDnDFame]

 

 

The patch is currently being crunched on by QA. If everything checks out, then you'll probably get an update by end of day tomorrow.

I'm sorry I have to say this, being a guy, who owns all of your games except DS3, but:

 

You completely mismanaged this situation. You take a look at how many people play the game concurrently on steam, and you realise it has dropped a lot. It is obvious why.

 

Every moment you delay putting out a fix for the very serious bugs, is time you lose more and more people, and thus money. You are known to be a developer, who puts out buggy and sometimes unfinished games. Do you really think you can pull this behaviour again at such a fragile point in your history? Do you think your reputation can survive this? Who can take your games seriously on launch day anymore? I know this was the last time I bought a game from you upfront.

 

Or is it that you got the high reviews, so you can chillax now?

 

It has been a week now, and loads of players will simply give up on your game, and never finish it. Frankly, as much as I love it, I only have time to finish it now, and most probably I won't get back to it later. Tick-tock. Because you are making it impossible for us to get back at it. Hotfixes should have been out 24 hours after release. You now say maybe tomorrow evening. At this point, this is a joke, and you are a joke, mate.

 

 

So they should just release something without testing it?

 

No, they should have sleepless nights and crunch out a fix for the most major issues, and work on the smaller issues later. There are game breaking bugs in this game, so the decision of having these fixed but not released until they bundle it up with more fixes is a begginner's mistake. Perhaps the producer here is a beginner, who knows.

 

I have shipped software, which cost and scope wise were in this range. We had bugs on day one, it happens, we didn't sleep AT ALL until the people who payed money for it got the working product in return. It took hours, not days.

 

There are no excuses here. No critical bug at this point in time should take this long to fix. So either they are incompetent or lazy, take your pick.

 

I'm not a kid anymore. I buy a product, I expect it to work. If it doesn't work, I return it. That is how things go normally. I don't care, if it's a game, I don't care if it wasn't caught by QnA, and I shouldn't care. I payed, now I am owed. And it seems by the time they will have deployed the fix - monday at the earliest for us GOG folk - it will be too late for me, because I will no longer have time to play. I had time now. I made my schedule based upon the release date, because I don't play many games anymore, and have to time it right.

 

So at the end of the day, they royally shafted me.

 

Understand this: it's not only about the price, it's about the time I put in to it, that is now lost. They took my money and time, and I am completely within my rights to be upset about this. So stop with the excuses.

 

As for the producer: I seriously doubt his competence, since he made the decision to not put out any fixes they had. People should lose their jobs for such stuff, and make no mistake, Obsidian lost a good chunk of money with the delays. Every minute the chance of more negative press is rising, and people willing to buy are dropping. This decision makes sense only in stupid-land.

 

Obsidian, pull yourselves together, and put out the patch. Today. It's sad that you need an outsiders to explain to you, that it is YOUR own best interest to have it out yesterday.

[cdd]

well if the GoG patch really takes 4-5 days longer than the regular (steam) patch then that's the last time i have bought anything from GoG i guess

[Wild Card]

Or playing with 117 deflection Eder

Gog is very good in spite of this...i`m a big supporter of gog so ill continue to buy things from them. but to each his own

Edited April 2, 2015 by Wild Card

[Malek_Deneith]

well if the GoG patch really takes 4-5 days longer than the regular (steam) patch then that's the last time i have bought anything from GoG i guess

To be fair it's hardly their fault this particular time. Obsidian works in different timezone than GoG does so by the time Obsidian releases their patch GoG staff will be home enjoying their holiday break.

[OfDnDFame]

well if the GoG patch really takes 4-5 days longer than the regular (steam) patch then that's the last time i have bought anything from GoG i guess

This is not GOG's fault, to be completely honest.

[sparklecat]

Why are the developers so lazy?!  I demand they go without sleep until the game is fixed for me! 

 

 

Get over yourself, go demand your refund for your non-working product, and learn to not expect games to be bug-free on release.

[Wild Card]

Though it is kinda of sad that you must always expect major bugs on releases nowadays...i mean some of the bugs that PE has are by no means some simple typo`s .

 

Thank you Darren, it`s still a great game and you guys are going to make it better still. I think that`s where a part of the frustration comes from...the game`s good and ppl want to play it

Edited April 2, 2015 by Wild Card

[Darren Monahan]

 

well if the GoG patch really takes 4-5 days longer than the regular (steam) patch then that's the last time i have bought anything from GoG i guess

This is not GOG's fault, to be completely honest.

 

 

It's just a matter of how the builds are published on GOG versus Steam. GOG handles the publishing of the builds themselves, so we turn over a full build to them, and they generate patches. As mentioned before, they are in a different timezone, and we're getting very close to the weekend. We'll get the build to them as soon as we can, but we also don't want to release a build to them that hasn't gotten at least a run of testing.

[cdd]

does anyone know whether savegames from the GoG version are compatible with the Steam version? if the patch is released tomorrow and the GoG patch would take until next week, i would probably just buy the Steam version for the patch and continue my playthrough with that

[El Zoido]

Nvm...

 

Anyway, I hope GOG is a bit faster this time around. Didn't they want to fix it through their Galaxy client by now?

Edited April 2, 2015 by El Zoido

[matthewfarmery]

WOW! that is a long list, and a lot of bugs been squashed, going to do a ranger at some point so I can enjoy that class, without the pet vanishing.

 

awesome work!!

[DocDoomII]

Holy moley that's a long list of fixes and tweaks

[El Zoido]

 

It's just a matter of how the builds are published on GOG versus Steam. GOG handles the publishing of the builds themselves, so we turn over a full build to them, and they generate patches.

 

So I guess hosting a small incremental patch yourselves is out of question for technical reasons and we will a) have to wait for GOG and b) hope that they offer an incremental patch instead of requiring us to download the entire 6+GB again?

 

P.S.: Nice list, keep up the good work!

Edited April 2, 2015 by El Zoido

[navlasop]

Meh. I hate to whine, but a hotfix, just fixing the most critical bugs would have been preferred.

Most critical meaning double click equip, stat bug, and raedrics hold crash IMO.

Anything else can come later.

 

Usually when only fixing one or two bugs, the QA and testing part is done very fast, since they know exactly what code was changed and what it could effect.

Disclaimer: Not been coding for the last 10 years, so my knowledge might be outdated, heh.

 

Edit: Just saw the tenative patch notes, and okay, okay, its fine i can wait for that big patch list

Edited April 2, 2015 by navlasop

[Darren Monahan]

We really are working hard. I've been reading some other threads and they're definitely getting me down, but I hope our commitment to keep releasing patches, responding to those of you via support, and regularly fixing as much stuff as we can shows for something in the long run.

 

I know this is going to sound like I'm whining, but RPG's are really some of the most complex pieces of software to write because of how many different ways people can do things, and we wanted this game to offer a huge amount of options. We only have so much money to spend on our resources, be it QA or whatnot, and we've spent a lot of our own money too trying to make it as fun and robust as we can. One of the unfortunate things in our industry is having to set a release date so far in advance to make sure everything comes together in the retail markets, etc.

 

These sound like excuses which I understand if they're interpreted that way, but we really really do care about this game and wanting it to be as good for everyone as possible, and hopefully we'll prove that in the coming weeks as we continue to fix and improve things.

 

Thanks for listening!

 

Darren

[Malaclypse]

 

 

 

The patch is currently being crunched on by QA. If everything checks out, then you'll probably get an update by end of day tomorrow.

I'm sorry I have to say this, being a guy, who owns all of your games except DS3, but:

 

You completely mismanaged this situation. You take a look at how many people play the game concurrently on steam, and you realise it has dropped a lot. It is obvious why.

 

Every moment you delay putting out a fix for the very serious bugs, is time you lose more and more people, and thus money. You are known to be a developer, who puts out buggy and sometimes unfinished games. Do you really think you can pull this behaviour again at such a fragile point in your history? Do you think your reputation can survive this? Who can take your games seriously on launch day anymore? I know this was the last time I bought a game from you upfront.

 

Or is it that you got the high reviews, so you can chillax now?

 

It has been a week now, and loads of players will simply give up on your game, and never finish it. Frankly, as much as I love it, I only have time to finish it now, and most probably I won't get back to it later. Tick-tock. Because you are making it impossible for us to get back at it. Hotfixes should have been out 24 hours after release. You now say maybe tomorrow evening. At this point, this is a joke, and you are a joke, mate.

 

 

So they should just release something without testing it?

 

No, they should have sleepless nights and crunch out a fix for the most major issues, and work on the smaller issues later. There are game breaking bugs in this game, so the decision of having these fixed but not released until they bundle it up with more fixes is a begginner's mistake. Perhaps the producer here is a beginner, who knows.

 

I have shipped software, which cost and scope wise were in this range. We had bugs on day one, it happens, we didn't sleep AT ALL until the people who payed money for it got the working product in return. It took hours, not days.

 

There are no excuses here. No critical bug at this point in time should take this long to fix. So either they are incompetent or lazy, take your pick.

 

I'm not a kid anymore. I buy a product, I expect it to work. If it doesn't work, I return it. That is how things go normally. I don't care, if it's a game, I don't care if it wasn't caught by QnA, and I shouldn't care. I payed, now I am owed. And it seems by the time they will have deployed the fix - monday at the earliest for us GOG folk - it will be too late for me, because I will no longer have time to play. I had time now. I made my schedule based upon the release date, because I don't play many games anymore, and have to time it right.

 

So at the end of the day, they royally shafted me.

 

Understand this: it's not only about the price, it's about the time I put in to it, that is now lost. They took my money and time, and I am completely within my rights to be upset about this. So stop with the excuses.

 

As for the producer: I seriously doubt his competence, since he made the decision to not put out any fixes they had. People should lose their jobs for such stuff, and make no mistake, Obsidian lost a good chunk of money with the delays. Every minute the chance of more negative press is rising, and people willing to buy are dropping. This decision makes sense only in stupid-land.

 

Obsidian, pull yourselves together, and put out the patch. Today. It's sad that you need an outsiders to explain to you, that it is YOUR own best interest to have it out yesterday.

 

 

So you want bugfixes created by overworked, sleep-deprived developers? Is this what your experience tells you will lead to the best outcome? 

 

Because to me, it sounds like such an approach will only lead to more problems. 

[Darren Monahan]

Meh. I hate to whine, but a hotfix, just fixing the most critical bugs would have been preferred.

Most critical meaning double click equip, stat bug, and raedrics hold crash IMO.

Anything else can come later.

 

Usually when only fixing one or two bugs, the QA and testing part is done very fast, since they know exactly what code was changed and what it could effect.

Disclaimer: Not been coding for the last 10 years, so my knowledge might be outdated, heh.

 

The thing is, some of the big issues are actually fairly nasty and time intensive to fix and test (especially ones that involve fixing people's save games retroactively), and we have a number of other people on the team who are able to fix other issues.

 

Also, there was probably about a week of other fixes included in this patch that were done after we locked down our 1.02 initial launch build. We didn't work up until it shipped on things - we have a lockdown process that we go through, and then the rest of the team keeps checking in fixes so those also got incorporated into 1.03. There are already a few things fixed for our 1.04 patch, but it's not safe to dump them all in without at least a few days' testing.

[InsaneCommander]

Thanks for letting us know!

 

I'm loving this game and I really appreciate all the options we can choose.

[Malaclypse]

We really are working hard. I've been reading some other threads and they're definitely getting me down, but I hope our commitment to keep releasing patches, responding to those of you via support, and regularly fixing as much stuff as we can shows for something in the long run.

 

I know this is going to sound like I'm whining, but RPG's are really some of the most complex pieces of software to write because of how many different ways people can do things, and we wanted this game to offer a huge amount of options. We only have so much money to spend on our resources, be it QA or whatnot, and we've spent a lot of our own money too trying to make it as fun and robust as we can. One of the unfortunate things in our industry is having to set a release date so far in advance to make sure everything comes together in the retail markets, etc.

 

These sound like excuses which I understand if they're interpreted that way, but we really really do care about this game and wanting it to be as good for everyone as possible, and hopefully we'll prove that in the coming weeks as we continue to fix and improve things.

 

Thanks for listening!

 

Darren

 

No worries. 

 

The only reason people are so upset is because you succeeded in making an amazing game. It's  so great that it almost hurts to have to wait to continue playing!

[OfDnDFame]

Darren, don't misunderstand my posts. I love Obsidian games. You are my favourite studio, and what I said and am saying is not intended to hurt you.

 

I truly hope you can get these stuff out by the holiday, because people have time to play now, and you don't want to lose them, and you don't want them to give negative feedback on your game on other sites causing others not to buy. And people will have time to whine, when the weekend is here.

 

I haven't taken my dire opinion to other sites, because my aim is not to hurt this otherwise great project, but there is a lot of negativity on many sites.

[Dragosani]

The question is, why so many bugs went into final version?

The answer is because so many bugs ALWAYS go into the final versions in these types of games.  Most of you'll who remember BG and BG Ii either didn't start playing it on release or are blinded by the awesomeness and nostalgia factor and rightly so but seriously those two games alone had as many if not more bugs then POE.  Some were extremely game breaking.  There's a lot of code in these types of games and it takes a while to correctly fix things.  You literally have to wade through lines and lines for hours just to find one little thing and even then a so called fix may break a million other things.  Ask all the fans who worked on fan fixes for BG, BGII, IWD I and II, NWN I and II and they'll tell you the same thing.  Have some patience and quit acting like no other game ever has bugs.  Jeez, just be glad developers care to actually make good games.  Hell even the best gaming companies have tons of bugs.  Bioware always did, so did Blizzard and so does CDProjekt Red.  The first Witcher was unplayable until they released the EE for it and then it became one of the best games of all time.