Refunded my Deadfire pledge, here's why...

[Boeroer]

I didn't say that it's legit, I said that I can understand his frustration.

[JerekKruger]

But I will miss him. One or two angry posts (still written in a civil matter) will not change that.

 

Same. 

[Jojobobo]

Coming back to address more recurring points as they are really colouring what I originally said here, perhaps Skyrim was a poor example to pick as an "unbuggy" game - not because I feel like I'm wrong - but because a lot of you seem to have an irrational hatred for it. If you look at what I said:

 

I would say Skyrim for one. I know you're going to jump all over me, because has been know Skyrim as a buggy game, but I would say in it's current iteration (Special Editions, what have you) you can play for hundreds of hours without experiencing a single mechanistic bug - at least in an unmodded game.

My point here was therefore, if you compare Skyrim Special Edition side by side with Pillars of Eternity Definitive Edition as games at the end of their patch cycles, Skyrim to me has won as at least I can play Skyrim without finding a mechanistic bug - so talking of how Skyrim looked at its initial release is a bit redundant as that was never the comparison I made in the first place, I compared game editions at the end of their patching cycles and it's there quite clearly in the first thing I said about Skyrim.

 

If you want to make an argument about a thing I never said, that's the literal definition of a straw man. Besides, I disliked the narrative and gameplay direction in Fallout 4 with a passion, if you're saying I'm a Bethesda fanboy I doubt I'll be buying any of their games any time soon either. Buying EA games? That's one of the better jokes I've seen in this thread so far.

 

I just booted up Skyrim, and I see 54 hours was my last playthrough that I was playing in November last year, in which the only bugs I encountered were cosmetic and momentary (Mammoths dropping from the sky, etc.) and I gave up playing because I got bored - Skyrim characters don't have a clean end point in the first place.

 

In starting Pillars up also towards the end of November, I got:

 

• Pink textures all over the place on expansion items and locations, easily more immersion breaking than anything I've ever seen in Skyrim, and meaning many had to wait around for a hotfix. A really serious and ridiculous bug to be present for such a seasoned developer.
• The Company Captain's Cap confusing your own party members and yourself. This was a new item they introduced into the game, yet it was clearly minimally tested for this to occur.
• Korgrak being in two places at once. Not a bad bug by any means, but not one that should be present in a game that has such a tonally serious story.
• And of course, a key Boon being taken away from my character, altering the mechanical state of play, that happened to me 27 hours in.

 

This is in addition to:

 

• The pre-existing figurine bug, where their sprites appear on every map when they are killed when paralysed. This is one of the worst, most immersion breaking bugs I have ever seen in a game, as it's a constant reminder of buggy play. The only way to avoid it is to not use figurines in difficult encounters against enemies that can paralyse you (Adragans, Cean Gŵla) which - ironically - are precisely those encounters when they would offer a large benefit.
• Tooltips being woefully described. Rogue abilities say they offer "+X% damage", but do they boost the thing listed as "damage" on the character sheet? No of course they don't, they boost base damage of your weapon, because everyone enjoys a nice misleading tooltip right? And there's literally load of examples of this.
• Stunned and Prone enemies starting to fight you when they are still Stunned/Prone.
• Random weapon enchantments translating onto spell-bindings, such as Overbearing Prone going onto Flame Shield from the Belt of Royal Deadfire Cannoneer. This belt is now one of the better items in the game for offering a crap ton of attribute bonuses, meaning this bug is only going to become more prevalent in a lot of players games.
• Sluggish, ridiculous load times that have no place inside a modern game.

 

But of course, you're right and I'm wrong. I should delight in ugly pink textures that are one of the worse eyesores that I have personally seen in a modern game, and made White March, the Crägholdt Bluffs and Mowrghek Îen unplayable because for most of those places you couldn't see anything under the sea of pink (certainly what has happened when this bug occurred before, and what I witnessed loading saves in WM locations this time round too) - a bug introduced in a patch they made that wasn't present before (because gosh, that's not worse than a dragon flying backward, is it?). I should be happy when Obsidian have not tested a new item they put in the game so that it is borderline unusable in party play due to it Confusing everyone, and tedious even in solo (where your character is immune to Confuse due to the hat) to hear groans about friendly fire all the time if you're using something like Shod-in-Faith, when it should have been fun to use.

 

I should be happy that Obsidian bugged a nice 27 hour playthrough I had going on (which seeing as it was solo with a Rogue, was undoubtedly longer as you're only saving when you make progress, and some encounters took me a few hours to complete), because after two and a half years of patching they shouldn't have gotten better at this patching lark should they? It's not like that's a fundamentally crappy bug to have in a likely final version of a game. I should be happy that extremely disappointing well documented bugs, such as rubbish tooltips and dead paralysed sprites appearing on every goddamn map in the game, have never been fixed.

 

By contrast, I put in Skyrim, I play for 54 hours. I see a couple of mammoths falling from the sky, one or two dragons having path-finding problems (out of over 100), and I get maybe one crash to desktop in the entire 54 hour run. Momentary bugs, no long lasting impact on the game, no unintended mechanistic gameplay alterations to my character - which is really all I ask for.

 

But yes of course you are all correct, obviously Skyrim is worse. You're saying that my judgement is coloured by experience and wrong, I'd say that many of yours seems to be coloured by your hatred of Bethesda - especially if you're trying to claim the final version of Skyrim is less buggy than the current "definitive version" of Pillars. Personally Skyrim is a way more boring game, it's mechanistically simplistic and not as well written, but does the Special Edition play more fluently than Pillars and not bite you in the ass? For me, yes, a thousand times yes.

 

No developer should ever be wasting 27 hours of someone's time through a bug, especially when the game is at the end of its patching support when bugs like this should not exist, and especially when they've been doing it over and over again all the way through their patching process. I think some of you are thinking I wanted a bug like this in my game - trust me, I did not.

 

 

But I will miss him. One or two angry posts (still written in a civil matter) will not change that.

 

Same. 

Thanks guys, you two are top blokes in my (seemingly terrible if this thread is anything to go by) opinion. No idea what has happened to the above quote, with it looking so weird.

Edited January 22, 2018 by Jojobobo

[Azdeus]

Probably Obsidians forum code staying true to their form

 

I do find it a bit unfair of you to compare the resources of Obsidian and Bethesda though. Beth$oft has alot more money behind their development than Obsidian has and doesn't make nearly as complex games, and ontop of that, they have millions of fans, out of wich thousands are modders that has worked with their engine before and that has continued to make stability improvements over the 5 years time difference between the different games - I'd find your comparison more valid in 5 years time and if Obsidian got a few more millions of dollars for QA.

[Jojobobo]

I do find it a bit unfair of you to compare the resources of Obsidian and Bethesda though. Beth$oft has alot more money behind their development than Obsidian has and doesn't make nearly as complex games, and ontop of that, they have millions of fans, out of wich thousands are modders that has worked with their engine before and that has continued to make stability improvements over the 5 years time difference between the different games - I'd find your comparison more valid in 5 years time and if Obsidian got a few more millions of dollars for QA.

That's a perfectly fair criticism of the comparison, but really as a player I'm here to comment on the product that I'm currently playing, not factor in extenuating circumstances due to the size of the company. It's not my prerogative to be giving a company a free pass when I'm not pleased with their product. Plus, as I have mentioned, while Obsidian are smaller than Bethesda they're not exactly a tiny indie developer either.

 

In terms of stability improvements made by modders, I don't play with any unofficial patches or performance enhancing mods (or mods in general), so I'm only playing with the patches Bethesda have put out there, just as I have been with Obsidian and Pillars.

[Azdeus]

That's a perfectly fair criticism of the comparison, but really as a player I'm here to comment on the product that I'm currently playing, not factor in extenuating circumstances due to the size of the company. It's not my prerogative to be giving a company a free pass when I'm not pleased with their product. Plus, as I have mentioned, while Obsidian are smaller than Bethesda they're not exactly a tiny indie developer either.

 

In terms of stability improvements made by modders, I don't play with any unofficial patches or performance enhancing mods (or mods in general), so I'm only playing with the patches Bethesda have put out there, just as I have been with Obsidian and Pillars.

You're right to criticize their product if you're not pleased with it, but it's a poor comparison you're making, that's all. If I remember correctly the budget for Skyrim was twenty times that of PoE - that is a huge difference especially when you do factor in that PoE systems are much more complex.

 

As far as modders and patches go, Beth$oft takes modders improvements and toss them into the game quite often and utilize it for their own patches. Though I do find myself questioning, if you're not using mods for Skyrim, why the hell are you even playing it? =P

 

Edit; Added quote. Now, I'm off to the gold mines.

Edited January 22, 2018 by Azdeus

[Jojobobo]

You're right to criticize their product if you're not pleased with it, but it's a poor comparison you're making, that's all. If I remember correctly the budget for Skyrim was twenty times that of PoE - that is a huge difference especially when you do factor in that PoE systems are much more complex.

Well I have to go off games I've actually played. I would wager there is an RPG out there from a similar sized company and of a similar complexity with fewer bugs, but I haven't played it as I tend to only have one massive time sink game on the go at once. The comparison isn't perfect, but the general point that RPGs with far fewer bugs that are impactful on mechanistic gameplay (combat, running around in the game world, etc.) exist is a valid one.

 

With the Lyrinia bug, on a different character I could easily start missing Might dialogue checks (as it's a separate source of Might which stacks with other sources and is higher than the Might offered by another prostitute), and so it's impact could easily be felt in the story/roleplay side of the game too outside putting a pin in the mechanistic issues I keep citing.

 

At least you're making a reasonable criticism, rather than the people constantly screaming that Skyrim is still buggy, yet it's me who has actually listed a lot of Skyrim's bugs and how they differ to Pillars' as well as having personally played the games within the last three months, both for prolonged periods of time.

 

And really, who cares what comparison I make in the first place? If you take all of Pillars' problems in a bubble, without comparison to any other game, they would all be still bad enough to make them a huge problem for me. When I'm playing Pillars and encounter a bug, I'm not thinking, "Well this would never happen in Skyrim!" I'm thinking, "Well this totally sucks." I made an explicit comparison because someone asked me to, but RPGs tend to have a lot of variation from one another in the first place so a perfect comparison doesn't really exist.

 

Any comparison I could have made someone would have been up in arms about it for some arbitrary reason, I'm sure.

 

 

 As far as modders and patches go, Beth$oft takes modders improvements and toss them into the game quite often and utilize it for their own patches. Though I do find myself questioning, if you're not using mods for Skyrim, why the hell are you even playing it? =P

Which is something Obsidian could have done with MaxQuest's unofficial patch, with the Charm/Dominate fix being particularly relevant I would say. Even if they didn't have his permission (which I would say he would happily give), there's always the old chestnut of, "We came to the same fix through our own methods." But, they didn't bother.

 

In regards to no mods, I prefer to play games inside of a dev's own creative vision and see what I can do with their framework. The only time I've ever installed a mod is what it wholesale transforms the game into a different one - e.g. when there was a Third Age: Total War (Lord of the Rings mod) kicking around for Medieval 2: Total War - and even then I'll still be playing the unmodded base game too.

Edited January 22, 2018 by Jojobobo

[SonicMage117]

 

I do find it a bit unfair of you to compare the resources of Obsidian and Bethesda though. Beth$oft has alot more money behind their development than Obsidian has and doesn't make nearly as complex games, and ontop of that, they have millions of fans, out of wich thousands are modders that has worked with their engine before and that has continued to make stability improvements over the 5 years time difference between the different games - I'd find your comparison more valid in 5 years time and if Obsidian got a few more millions of dollars for QA.

That's a perfectly fair criticism of the comparison, but really as a player I'm here to comment on the product that I'm currently playing, not factor in extenuating circumstances due to the size of the company. It's not my prerogative to be giving a company a free pass when I'm not pleased with their product. Plus, as I have mentioned, while Obsidian are smaller than Bethesda they're not exactly a tiny indie developer either.

 

In terms of stability improvements made by modders, I don't play with any unofficial patches or performance enhancing mods (or mods in general), so I'm only playing with the patches Bethesda have put out there, just as I have been with Obsidian and Pillars.

These are the Obsidian forums though, we are all Obsidian fanboys here and even Obsidian's bombed games will be glorified and defended here. Obsidian can do no wrong, it's the rest of the world who is doing it wrong. Point being, anything you say at this point will be contested. It's the way of the forum here. Trust me, I have learned it the hard way... especially if you have a thread like this in which people know will get a lot of views.

 

As for Skyrim mods helping performance, I'm not gonna stand here and defend Skyrim just because there are mods available to help certain issues... The game is a newer title and we shouldn't have to download mods to fix what the developers are supposed, that goes for any newer game in which developers are still in business too though. Both Skyrim version on PC hage been the absolutes worst experiences I have ever had in gaming period. Even if the only bugs were broken quests bugs (which no mods exist to fix anyway).

 

Anyway, personally, I'm just glad you were brave enough to write the thread - in the midst of knowing that you would get some sort of backlash to a degree. That's honorable and pretty cool regardless of what anyone says. I also love the reaction and reading everything gets more and more entertaining while on the crapper.

 

Most importantly: In the end, I'm sure the devs read your thread and were thankful for the feedback and even moreso for your honesty to public announcement. That took courage and you were valid to make those criticisms as you have time in the first game and bought the product, though I disagree with judging a new product based on the older model.

Edited January 22, 2018 by SonicMage117

[Boeroer]

Justified criticism because of bugs/bugfixing aside:

we have some really awesome people from OBS here in the forum (AarikD, Cdiaz, aartz, Sking and more) who are doing a great job. Look what they did with the Black Isle Bastards for us and stuff. That's really amazing. People and stuff like this let me forgive OBS the bugs and long loading times.

 

Also, this forum with its inhabitants is pretty nice. Where would I put all that text if not here?  #shamelessToady

Edited January 22, 2018 by Boeroer

[Jojobobo]

Well thanks SonicMage117, but I don't see myself as being overly honourable or anything like that.

 

I think the game's fans (excluding the more level head ones) have really over-inflated what I did here. I got a refund on a (more or less) pre-order of a game as I was entitled to, and wrote an open criticism to Obsidian about why I was doing it. The criticism is full of factual objective points, though whether getting a refund on a pledge is appropriate to the criticism is open for debate. I even said, quite clearly, that is Obsidian's record with bugginess improves a great deal I'm certainly open (but not overly enthusiastic) about picking up more of their games in the future but I would only want to seed a project with some of my own money that I was confident wouldn't have the same calibre bugs in a Pillars 1, which I definitely can't be. I also haven't refunded Pillars 1, as some people seem to suggest I have done.

 

I'm potentially happy to pay for a proven product, I'm not happy for them to use my money in the development of something that has reasonable potential of being riddled with bugs - as if something like Deadfire is just as buggy as Pillars 1 I wouldn't be buying it.

 

This is trying to make Obsidian a bit more accountable for a problem they let get out of hand, and it's a bit of a no-confidence vote on them developing a game with some of my money. Making it with other people's money and their own money I would never discourage. Using my money for development when with this last bug has spoiled a load of my free time (and opened my eyes to the prospect there's a good chance they're never going to live up to the standard I expected them to live up to, of having no permanent game-changing bugs) - no, I'm not going to do that.

 

I realise no one asked me to back Deadfire, but with addition of bugs present in Pillars 1 that have revealed themselves since I first backed and the total bodge of the v3.07 at its first release, I feel like I backed Deadfire under false pretences. If that's not a good reason to want a refund and lodge a public complaint in hopes they change, I'm not too sure what is.

Edited January 22, 2018 by Jojobobo

[IndiraLightfoot]

I must say I admire your stalwart position on this. Since decades back, I've adapted to the fact that almost all games I like include some game-breaking bugs, so getting around such bugs has almost become part of my gaming experience. Weird, I know.

 

This means that I buy and back games that I think I'll enjoy, fully aware that there will be awkward bugs coming my way. Maybe I should reconsider my position on this. 

It's time to punish game publishers with my puny wallet!

 

(Hm, if I did, would I even get to enjoy my favourite pastime that is gaming?)

[Wormerine]

Are there examples of complex games not ridden with bugs? Sure I can think of couple tight, small scope projects, but all longer, more complex games always have a history of bugs (both graphical and mechanical). As long as it seems like devs don’t just ignore problems I can accept game with issues. Maybe we should shorten our RPGs to 20h mark and make it more polished?

[Ethics Gradient]

I've adapted to the fact that almost all games I like include some game-breaking bugs, so getting around such bugs has almost become part of my gaming experience. Weird, I know.

 

Not weird at all!  

 

That's partly how I got so involved over on the Pathfinder Forums here.  I really enjoyed the tabletop version of the game and I commend Obsidian's heroic efforts translating it to digital.  But in an odd way, I also get a fair bit of enjoyment examining the hows and whys behind the app bugging out.  Sometimes you can help find a workaround; sometimes dumb bugs have absolutely fascinating causes.

 

It's okay to put up with occasional bugs and approach them with an open mind.  Expecting perfection is an easy path to constant disappointment in mechanics-heavy games like PoE.

 

If a player kept doing the same things in the Concelhaut fight, and kept getting smashed over and over, they'd probably consider changing their tactics. A player shouldn't have to metagame a game, but if they're doing the same things in PoE and hitting the same bugs, maybe it's also time to investigate a different path forward.

[IndiraLightfoot]

You're so right on this! I'm thinking of Dishonored 1, especially, where several bugs where kept, as they gave players even more freedom and agency.

[Hurlshort]

Fake news. Obsidian has never released a game with bugs ever.

 

 

I have been playing Fallout 2 lately, that game is a buggy mess. Still can't stop playing!

[injurai]

I'm considering requesting my taxes back because the state is still a mess 242 years after it's launch.

[SonicMage117]

Maybe I've gotten lucky but I rarely encounter any bugs in the games I enjoy, whether the game is new or older. I don't know.

 

Are bugs more common in rpg's then other genres? Because that might explain my experience, I don't play as many rpg's, more of 2D platformers, fighters, 3D open world action games, etc. While it's easy to find physics glitches in the open world games like cars flying and ragdoll craziness, it's hard to find game-breaking bugs in them like the ones I found in Skyrim which hinder the experience enough to not play again.

[Jojobobo]

I'm considering requesting my taxes back because the state is still a mess 242 years after it's launch.

No, the analogy would be the state has had a fair but slightly dubious reputation for a long time - due to corruption or a poor economy - and now they want you to fork over money to make a second state very similar to the first one. You agreed to finance this new state when you thought the going was good, but you didn't realise the current state you're living in wasn't what you thought it was to an even worse extent - maybe the head of state has begun making outlandish claims about his big red button, I don't know.

 

On that basis, you're no longer happy to fund the new state, but those back taxes the state can keep. You move to another state.

 

If you're going to make a scornful analogy, do try and make it a good one.

[dixon_sider]

 "I would have thought I would be the exact kind of fan you wouldn’t want to lose from the community"

 

the irony of that statement in this post made me cry laughing 

 

there is a certain point where a company catering to an individual becomes a net loss. judging from your post, it seems like you hit that line a long time ago. constantly fixing the infinite amount of bugs in any game is going to give you exponential decay in value over time. none of the bugs you listed are game breaking. They would lose money fixing them. 

 

what i would suggest is trying to fix the bug yourself. try to recreate the bug, find out why it is happening, and see if there is a way to fix it. I do it in almost every game i play. understanding how to troubleshoot is a very important part of life. use this as a learning experience. the answer may be simple and right in front of you.

 

The fact that you think you are so entitled that Obsidian should manage their priorities around you is absurd and borderline insulting. 

[Ethics Gradient]

Are bugs more common in rpg's then other genres? Because that might explain my experience, I don't play as many rpg's, more of 2D platformers, fighters, 3D open world action games, etc.

 

It's not exclusively an RPG thing, but the greater the degree of freedom you allow the player, the greater the number of interactions that need to be tested to ensure a bug-free experience.  It really depends on what sort of QA protocols developers establish, but it can get nearly impossible to test every possible interaction in large RPGs.

 

Some testers might be running the critical path, others might be doing all the optional quests, others still might explore specific builds in specific encounters.  Ideally, there's be some way to test absolutely everything before release, but in reality, the best we can hope is that the critical path is relatively smooth, and enough random spot-checks have been done everywhere else to ensure the base mechanisms of the game behave as expected.

[GhostofAnakin]

 

These are the Obsidian forums though, we are all Obsidian fanboys here and even Obsidian's bombed games will be glorified and defended here. Obsidian can do no wrong, it's the rest of the world who is doing it wrong. Point being, anything you say at this point will be contested. It's the way of the forum here. Trust me, I have learned it the hard way... especially if you have a thread like this in which people know will get a lot of views.

 

 

 

I disagree with this.  Obsidian and their games takes quite a bit of criticism on here, even though it's their forums.  I just think that it depends on the type of criticism, and whether other companies are held to the same expectations/standards.

 

This notion that people will defend Obsidian, no matter how valid the criticism, just because we're fans of their games is silly.

 

(For instance, if someone attacked BioWare for making a buggy game and used FO:NV as an example of what a stable game should be, I'd call them on it even though that would mean criticizing Obsidian)

[Jojobobo]

(For instance, if someone attacked BioWare for making a buggy game and used FO:NV as an example of what a stable game should be, I'd call them on it even though that would mean criticizing Obsidian)

Look, it's painfully simple:

 

• Obsidian's latest patch introduced pink crap all over the place for Linux and Mac players (like me) on expansion content, which is far worse than anything I have seen in Skyrim, and it took them a fair time hotfix it out. It was a bug they introduced in the game in their patching process (not in 3.06, present in 3.07).
• I last played Skyrim for 54 hours, and in half the time playing Pillars (27 hours) I encounter a serious bug that alters the state of play and lowers my highest possible might on a build designed to do high single hit damage.

 

Maybe Skyrim will also burn me similarly, and I'll stop playing that too, but currently it hasn't - and it also never has, despite Pillars having done so 5 times. If you look at the links in my OP, every single one of those are instances where I have posted in a particular thread reporting an issue. Most of these are issues I uncovered myself through trying to produce a creative and interesting character, which seems to be the worst situation to punish someone for.

 

People accuse me of mental gymnastics, but if someone could care to explain to me how ridiculous pink crap all over the place introduced in what was supposed to be Pillars' final patch is better than any of the immersion breaking bugs ever present in Skyrim, then I'm all ears. I've heard that Skyrim had backwards flying dragons introduced by a patch (but crucially, not their final patch which I'm talking about), Pillars introduced pink messes obscuring large areas of White March maps in their final patch. I guess not being able to physically see stuff on a local map isn't important, is it guys? It's not at all entirely game breaking if you wanted to even play a little of the White March content?

 

I don't know why I'm even trying to fight this anymore, because objective reasoning is stopping to make a single shred of difference anyway, but for posterity's sake in the unlikely event anyone ever chose to look at this thread again here is clear and objective reasoning laid out for all to see.

Edited January 23, 2018 by Jojobobo

[Flouride]

Your expectations are unrealistic. It's simple as that.

 

You expect a complex game to be bug free and not encounter any bugs when they fix stuff. Guess what, when you crush bugs somewhere, something new pops out quite easily. Happens on multiple games, even in Skyrim and other Bethesda games (the scope in both Pillars and Skyrim is just that big). You don't usually even get this long support for a crpg. Look at where Sega left Alpha Protocol and I bet it would have been much easier to fix.

It's only natural once a patch goes live that they will find out more bugs as there are a lot more people playing the game than it is possible for Obsidian to have testing it. It comes down to resources and what they can actually afford to use on Q&A at this point. It is a business after all and not a charity. Like I said in one of my earlier posts, most bugs you've listed are something 99,9% of the playerbase won't even notice.

 

Having pink crap on screen for few days is a nuisance. It means you have to do something else for few days, I don't think anyone's live depends on it. Yea, it is annoying, but it's not like in the current age people don't have other games to play for those few days or other things to do.

[SonicMage117]

This is the best thread ever, please don't stop anytime soon. I want both sides to be immortalized for the ages and I want the siezing war to be never ending!

[Jojobobo]

Your expectations are unrealistic. It's simple as that.

 

[...]

 

Having pink crap on screen for few days is a nuisance. It means you have to do something else for few days, I don't think anyone's live depends on it. Yea, it is annoying, but it's not like in the current age people don't have other games to play for those few days or other things to do.

Probably quite true, and maybe because when I sit down to play a game (any game) I play it obsessively and don't really want to play anything else and really invest time into it I'm quite likely going to come up short - I'm far removed from a casual gamer. Maybe I'm not cut out to play RPGs anymore, as all RPGs are inherently buggy and the player base has to wait around for the devs to catch up and fixed their initial bugged and broken game - and whether the end result of the patching process turns out to work well (Skyrim, in my much already maligned opinion) or not so good (Pillars) for someone like me who really likes to dig into every inch of a game it becomes an exercise in frustration. And most of the games I do really love as RPGs (Vampire: the Masqerade ~ Bloodlines or Arcanum) still had to have years of fan patching to make them good enough - which is when I really started playing them seriously, despite owning them on release.

 

Still as much as people keep saying I expect no bugs, that's far from the truth, as in addition to bugs that I think over-stepped the mark in Pillars as they altered my gameplay permanently and without warning I was still swallowing down many bugs without complaint and even bothering to make bug reports often so that (even if they weren't patched out) the devs could still use the feedback in future efforts like Deadfire. I guess I've never really cared about immersion breaking bugs to a large extent, but gameplay altering bugs as there are and have been a large amount of in Pillars (regardless of how situational they have or have not been, some very, some much less so) are a bug bear to me and do massively put me off a game - as they're effecting the core gameplay.

 

Also, the pink crap was a few weeks too not just a few days, quite a while if you ask me - and then as I said they took a while to fix stuff like the Company Captain's Cap which they couldn't even introduce in an unbugged state following that, and then there's still significant gameplay altering bugs after all of that - all in their "definitive" version no less. You could say I'm splitting hairs, and of course I am.

 

I guess what I really need to do is turn my back on RPGs in general, but as I always expected better from Obsidian (as a backer, and due to their whole company ethos in that they seemingly really care about their games) I was really hoping they wouldn't be the company to put me off the genre but stepping over that line too many times. But, they consistently were throughout the Pillars patch support, and they still are even at the end of their process.

 

As a final point, I would say for VtM: Bloodlines I bought it for £10 down from £40 due to the buggy release (from a game store new, not second hand). If I was paying similar for Pillars or my Deadfire backing then fine, but I'm paying way in excess of that for an experience that while certainly less buggy isn't actually that much less buggy - I certainly got a better experience from Vampire paying way less and knowing it was buggy than for Pillars which should supposedly not be very buggy. Inflation non-withstanding, if an RPG is going to release this buggy and stay pretty buggy, people shouldn't be paying new game prices for them (£30+ for Deadfire, at least on the package I went in on with the bells and whistles).

Edited January 23, 2018 by Jojobobo