Cool Game. When Is It Coming Out?

[abaris]

 

Your experience with New Vegas seems like a pretty severe outlier, that game has a ton issues, especially freezes and crashes, but not being able to get it to run at all, is much less common.

 

 

Yes, but the game wasn't designed for todays hardware and software technology. If I ran it in it's vanilla state, it wouldn't start at all or crash randomly, That's why the modding community came up with a ton of fixes for 64 bit systems and, most of all, the 4GB patch. Result, it starts and runs without any CTDs to speak of.

[Tigranes]

On one hand, people complaining about POE being "buggy" have no idea how buggy the vast majority of games are and have always been - everything from old games to new games, indie games to triple A games. On the other hand, that's not really a great excuse for anybody, Obsidian or otherwise, because bugs suck for everybody who has them. 

 

This leads to a funny situation. All anyone needs to say is "my POE has these bugs I hate it Obsidian you suck" and they would be indubitably right. Who can tell you that a buggy game is OK? It's never OK, it sucks. Instead, a lot of people insist on trying to make up facts out of thin air and say "this is the buggiest game I've ever played", "this game is broken for everybody", and "there are standards for [insert year / budget / number of elderberries in the code]!!!!", all of which are easily disproven by anyone who knows even the tiniest bit about the industry. You'd think people would avoid saying unnecessary things that weaken their own argument. 

 

So, all the nonsense aside, the thing with POE seems to be that it has always done a pretty good job avoiding critical bugs (main quest corruption, deleted save games, random blue screens of death, etc) for the most part, but seems to be plagued with a lot of minor scripting / etc errors, especially regarding abilities, where there's a musical chairs effect and new bugs replace old ones. 

 

Dungeon Siege 3 and South Park were extremely bug-free by any gaming standard, and I think a large part of that was due to Obsidian finally using their own proprietary engine (Onyx). The middleware costs for an Onyx game made it impossible for a Kickstarter game, however, which is a pity. I don't see POE2 using Onyx or suddenly getting a massive budget, so they'll have to find other ways to improve on the bug record. 

[Ymarsakar]

Someone deciding World of Warcraft legendary weapons should be added into Pillars is what broke White March patches.

 

(Half of that is a joke, the other half is serious)

 

Also the snow effects may also be part of the issue.

 

I heard Obsidian was able to hire some more staff and programmers. Unfortunately that means unfamiliarity with Unity can have unintended consequences. For example, the people that worked on the old weapon talents, like draining, would have remembered that there was an endurance draining asset in the bundle folders. But a new hire wouldn't necessarily have known or checked. They haven't talked about the development in as much detail as the base Pillars game during and after the Kickstarter, so it's hard to verify one way or another.

 

Other MMOs like Eve Online have dedicated small teams handling certain core game systems, and some of the legacy code is simply incomprehensible to anybody and cannot be changed without breaking the game, so they just replaced the entire code base and obsoleted the old one, in a phase system. This reduces some of the need for debugging since a small team would be able to debug what they broke easier, vs a huge team of coders under one manager and the left hand doesn't quite know what the right is doing.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Ymarsakar

[srlapo]

 

 

Your experience with New Vegas seems like a pretty severe outlier, that game has a ton issues, especially freezes and crashes, but not being able to get it to run at all, is much less common.

 

 

Hah, google "new vegas save game won't load" and tell me that one wasn't common. Easiest workaround was to load a fresh save and then load the problem save from there. Worked 99% of the time. It was due to some "out of memory" error, fixing some numbers in the cfg file also solved it.

 

As for the other issues you mentioned, they are all fixed by the script extender. That is my point, actually. They were never fixed, you have to rely on a fan made exe to get the game to work as it should. With the fan made script extender exe it is a perfectly stable game that never crashes, even in Win7 64 bits. And I had over 1000 hours of testing to back it up.

Edited October 1, 2015 by srlapo

[sapientNode]

The OP is a bit comical.

 

Then all the people defending Obsidian about their budget which is 2x more than Larian D:OS is also comical.

Then there is the whole generational comments about wanting everything handed to us (again comical)

 

OP it would of been better to actual (if your not just trolling) to post a statement of what you are having issues with so perhaps people could help you or you could send it to the tech forum and they could work on resolving the issue.  I do not even know what the hell the OP is saying to be honest.

 

The game should continue to updated and there are definitely some bugs that seem strange that they passed through even a modicum of testing.

But we also know they are likely pushing away at the next expansion and whoever prioritizes things in a company is going to put the priority on what can make money in the future.

Patching bugs makes them no money.  Unless you look at it from the loyal fan base.  I am in no way justifying this.

 

Truth is the system for making games is absurdly broken from the top down.  Luckily we have kickstarters today so companies have more leeway to create something that is not fully controlled by a producer rather than a creator.

 

Regardless we should hold a flame to them in some way to make sure they don't just dump games on us with no support.

On the other hand I think it is good to look at the overall picture here and to understand that they are likely busted their ass on multiple levels to get things through QA and to be doing the next expansion.

Of course they did raise 4 million which like I said is 4x more than D:OS and 2x more than what D:OS 2 got so they have enough money.  But there are people inside Obsidian that have a much higher pay from their length of experience in the industry likely.

 

I just wish all Games today were built more openly to allow for community fixes or they utilized the community in a organized manner to help test and resolve bugs.

 

Random bitch fests and back and forth nonsense never really gets the attention of anyone who matters.  A logical person would look at this post and just say I guess the OP is having a bad day today.

[tinysalamander]

You just haven't seen bugs in Might & Magic Heroes VII yet *cough*

[Guest BugsVendor]

Games aren't buggy because it is some magical law of game development that you just can't go around.

 

Games are buggy because companies make concious decisions to save resources on testing.

 

It's nice that they keep fixing the game after the release, but it is not because they are saints. It's because it was a concious decision to release buggy beta and fix it later.

 

It was released completely broken, now it's playable but still I check stats every time I pick a talent because they might just not add up.

 

And no, it's not OK to do that.

 

Games will always be buggy it seems because all of you are too narrow minded to understand that it is easy money made on costumers without standards like most of you here.

 

You get crap they deserve for being so blind.

 

All of the arguments like "other obsidian games are buggy too, you didn't know? haha, loser", "many other classics were bugged", "why are you such a hater" and all this stuff is laughable. Completely illogical, not to the point 5th grade garbage.

 

This forum is filled with either obsidian employees, close family of employees, paid pr trolls, poor secretaries forced to write this after work or any combination of the above.

 

Sorry guys, there is no excuse. They made bad decision they got heat for it. Stop striking down topics like this and maybe in the future they will think twice before releasing a pile of bugs. There was a job offer for a full time tester not long ago on their main page. Something tells me they already got the picture.

 

P.S. There were a number of real bugs that were hard to predict in the technical forum like save problems on certain platforms. But most of them are not working talents, stats not adding up and such which clearly indicate that nobody bothered to play the game before the release.

Edited October 1, 2015 by BugsVendor

[Tigranes]

"Completely illogical, not to the point 5th grade garbage."

 

"This forum is filled with either obsidian employees, close family of employees, paid pr trolls, poor secretaries forced to write this after work or any combination of the above."

 

I think it is self-evident which statement is the most improbable and illogical in the entire thread.   

 

Now back to the real world, I think one thing we can all agree on - even people who don't experience the bugs themselves - is that the less bugs, the better, and Obsidian should get flack for each and every bug. The fact that bugs are common and also a normal part of every kind of software development doesn't change that. 

[Ymarsakar]

The beta test with die hard fans and players fixed a lot of Pillars issues before 1.0, but much of it was untapped. For example, per encounter spells were not tested as well due to certain level restrictions or content restrictions. A lot of stat bonuses were changed around, due to balance reasons and lack of extra time.

 

Usually, that's one easy way to fix issues.

 

Once a game gets too popular, they need a different way to collate user input if they can no longer use that model for expansion testing. For Eve Online, that would be the CSM.

[FlintlockJazz]

The bugs might be annoying, but bugs long after release aren't an Obsidian exclusive problem. DA:I came out nearly a year ago, and it still has lots of bugs--especially image bugs--, and I think BioWare said they're not going to patching it any further. At least Obsidian is still trying to fix bugs.

This.  They have constantly been patching it, whereas most games these days get one or two patches and that's it unless it's an MMO.  These other games have bugs that are never resolved, for instance a friend of mine encountered a game breaking bug at the end of 2013 Tomb Raider this very month, that has been known about and yet has never been fixed.  He managed to get around it by looking up how other users had dealt with it, not because of any help or patching from the developers.  If it wasn't for these other users he would never have been able to finish his game.  Bioware games are notorious for bugs, yet apart from DA2 (which I believe has still not been fully fixed) which was an exceptionally buggy game even for Bioware no one seems to bat an eyelid.  I personally have noticed that games tend to increase drastically in the bugs when an expansion is released, with the games that have lots of expansions often being unplayable for the first few weeks, thinking it's a universal issue that occurs due to the drastic changes they make to an already existing game.

[iLurk]

I still need to use a third party script extender exe, an anti crash plugin and an unofficial patch compilation before New Vegas will deign to load a 2 hour old save game (an UNMODDED save game at that). 

Unmodded doesn't have game breaking bugs, At least never found one when I played it. Tons of bugs but nothing that trashes your entire game.

 

script extender and 4gb memory and unofficial patch are the same for any Bethesda modded game. Game will soon crash if you mod the game because of low memory and none of them are bug free. Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3. All of them have unofficial patches. Fallout 4 will probably be no exception.

 

 

Best, worst bugged game ever: Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines. I somehow managed to get the game to start and played it all the way through (by never leaving the game screen), and haven't been able to do it since, even with mods.

There is an unofficial patch that fixes most of problems with the game. latest version 9.4 was released a few months ago. finished the game with 3 characters so far and only bug I noticed is something with the lighting probably and one crash when you fill Fat Larry's store with crap.

[lameover]

OP, did you really play any "early access" game?

 

 

Customer:

"Your game is buggy like hell dam' you devs you'll not get anymore money from me!"

 

Tripple A game forums:

"We've deleted all your BAD comments and bug reports and banned you out from forums. Now shut up and play our great game. Thx for your money."

 

Indie game forums:

"We appreciate your feedback we're now looking into it, please try %some_of_this%. Sorry for the inconvenience"

 

Now deal with it :-P

[Teioh_White]

It would be nice if the game was stable enough I could play the game on Trials of Iron without suffering game wrecking bugs. Most of the issues can be dealt with only losing a zone or two worth of progress with the rolling auto saves, at least.

 

But as mentioned above, it's nice it gets so much work done it. The comparison to Dragon Age games is apt, those get barely any patches done, and often have abilities that will never be fixed. Here, there's at least hope it'll get to plateau eventually.

[Caerdon]

The OP is a bit comical.

 

Then all the people defending Obsidian about their budget which is 2x more than Larian D:OS is also comical.

Then there is the whole generational comments about wanting everything handed to us (again comical)

 

OP it would of been better to actual (if your not just trolling) to post a statement of what you are having issues with so perhaps people could help you or you could send it to the tech forum and they could work on resolving the issue.  I do not even know what the hell the OP is saying to be honest.

 

The game should continue to updated and there are definitely some bugs that seem strange that they passed through even a modicum of testing.

But we also know they are likely pushing away at the next expansion and whoever prioritizes things in a company is going to put the priority on what can make money in the future.

Patching bugs makes them no money.  Unless you look at it from the loyal fan base.  I am in no way justifying this.

 

Truth is the system for making games is absurdly broken from the top down.  Luckily we have kickstarters today so companies have more leeway to create something that is not fully controlled by a producer rather than a creator.

 

Regardless we should hold a flame to them in some way to make sure they don't just dump games on us with no support.

On the other hand I think it is good to look at the overall picture here and to understand that they are likely busted their ass on multiple levels to get things through QA and to be doing the next expansion.

Of course they did raise 4 million which like I said is 4x more than D:OS and 2x more than what D:OS 2 got so they have enough money.  But there are people inside Obsidian that have a much higher pay from their length of experience in the industry likely.

 

I just wish all Games today were built more openly to allow for community fixes or they utilized the community in a organized manner to help test and resolve bugs.

 

Random bitch fests and back and forth nonsense never really gets the attention of anyone who matters.  A logical person would look at this post and just say I guess the OP is having a bad day today.

 

People that don't check their facts and think D:OS had a smaller budget than PoE are also comical...

[Quantics]

I played the game fully. 

 

Twice.

 

On a mac. 

 

Had a very enjoyable experience. Didn't have any game-breaking bug, except the double-click equip bug pre-patch 2.0 

[iLurk]

There was an article about Larian almost going bankrupt making DOS. There was also a post by one of the devs saying that Obsidian paid from their pocket to extend the development time for PoE.

 

DOS had a great combat but falls flat story wise after the first area. PoE story is a mix and combat sucks ass for me. None of them were broken for me at launch.

 

Larian released a patch and sometimes two everyday for 2 weeks IIRC, fixing anything that was reported before taking a long vacation.

Edited October 2, 2015 by iLurk

[Adam Brennecke]

If you have issues please report them. We are doing our best to fix as many issues as possible. A lot of times issues don't get fixed because we don't know about them. 

 

Thank you!