Bugs

Remenissions · March 2014

Hello, I'm writing this for the beamdog employees to view.
First off, I'd like to say that I like the new ideas that were put forth into the game. A few new NPC's, few new quests, etc.
Secondly, I'll state it plain and simple: You have taken on an old, basic game. It is not like anything most employees (or players for that matter) are used to. Most people never even heard of Baldur's Gate except for seeing it's console counter-part in a display case several years ago. It's basic, it's easy, and the original version (officially patched) works flawlessly. Leading me to:
My third point. I bought BG:EE about a year ago and it took me 4 tries to actually play it through. I can play through BG1/TotSC pretty easily and with my only frustration being the countless deaths I face on hard difficulty. (I've been playing Baldur's Gate since it was released, I bought BG2:SoA and ToB the night's they were released so I find it necessary to challenge myself.) But what took me so many tries, was the frustration of the countless bugs (and for one of the tries because a bug made the game crash every time I tried to load my saved game). I understand completely. Games have bugs like this... in BETA TESTING. Bugs that literally take it to the point of either not being able to complete a game, or making it mentally exhausting is completely unthinkable once they have exited beta testing and are purchasable.
So, I finally was able to finish, and uninstalled. I figured since it IS an old way of coding, most of your employees not knowing how to add content without there being a slew of bugs would be expected. So I gave you the benefit of the doubt and figured I'd reinstall after awhile to give you all enough time to get it working smoothly. So 9ish months later I reinstalled and gave it another go. It still isn't smooth at all. All of the bugs I faced, are still there. In your logs, you say you've fixed them, but then I go looking on the internet, and all that you've done is when faced with 4 ways to go about a situation, you make 1 work. That doesn't make it smooth. That is half-ass'ing it because you have someone sit on a bug trying to fix it for a week, and they can't figure out how to get it to completely work, so they just do what they can. Understandable, but not when you're promising players that their money was well spent.
At this point you have few options. Either:
A. Start firing people that don't get the job done right. Which no one wants to do, but if you can't do a job, then don't take the job.
B. Start telling customers BEFORE they accept a purchase that it is full of bugs for the time being, and that your company is "doing what they can" to resolve them but STOP promising them fixed because 2 years of lying is unacceptable to anyone, for any reason.
or C. Start from scratch. You're editing old software and trying to make it do new things. Which is why it is hard to do. You can't have your 90's DOS computer trying to run anything even as old as counter strike. It just doesn't work. So you can build a new game from scratch, using new coding, to make it look at work exactly like Baldur's Gate does. Yes, this is very time consuming, extremely even. But as a company you're just giving yourself a bad reputation. The whole "Oh wouldn't this be great? Oh well we've kinda made some mistakes, but we're going to fix them, don't worry!" sounds pretty similar to a presidential election/term.

Remaking the program would not be impossible. Black Isle was a smaller company then you, and had next to no funding. They all worked their normal jobs, then had the second job of making a good, well-built game. The game eventually let them quit their normal jobs because they put real time and effort into it. They were passionate about it. Don't go taking something that someone was passionate about and not do everything you can for it. That's messed up, and quite frankly disrespectful.

Remenissions · March 2014

Oh, and as for the people who have been glorifying the game on the forums, they are indeed trolling. Many have even been caught in their own words. So stop "just do what you're doing" and look to satisfy every customer. Not the ones who give you false hail.

Remenissions · March 2014

I already have numerous times along with many others. And it helps them think about starting to go into the right direction. Instead of the wrong one they've been playing us through.

EDIT: Oh I did forgot to also mention, original Baldur's Gate has 0 problems with multiplayer. Yet there has yet to be any evidence that a BG:EE multiplayer game has been able to stay connected for longer then 4 hours. And as far as alt-tabbing making the game crash? That is something that's supposed to be fixed in alpha testing. FFS.

Heindrich · March 2014

You seem to be playing a very different game to me.

I got to Ch.5 of BG 1 Vanilla, and the main bug I faced was when you go into a cave and your party gets turned in the opposite direction, which is really annoying for squishy spellcasters.

I then switched to BG:EE last July (not because of bug) and the only bug I encountered was the Identify Scroll quest in Candlekeep, which has been fixed in v1.2

Multiplayer is a different story, admittedly (but perfectly playable) but singleplayer BG:EE is one of the least buggy games I've ever played! Honestly 80 hrs of my first playthrough, which was pretty completionist, and I only noticed 1 bug!

ps: Just my own experience and opinions, I don't work for Beamdog.

elminster · March 2014

The original was hardly flawless...even when it came to multiplayer.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/Baldur039s-Gate-1-and-2/All-Baldur039s-Gate-Game-Technical-Support-Self-Help/Help-with-BG1-multiplayer-on-a-LAN-8964828-1.html

http://www.gog.com/forum/baldurs_gate_series/problems_with_baldurs_gate_1_2_multiplayer

atcDave · March 2014

Yeah I remember pretty frequent CTDs with the earliest version. And I still had a dial up modem back then; patches took forever to download!
EE sure had some problems at first, but its been patched pretty quickly and has no serious, game breaking issues at this point.
I admit I can't speak to multi-player though, that never interested me.

Dee · March 2014

Remenissions said:
Black Isle was a smaller company then you

This is just not true. You make some strong points, and we are working to improve things, but let's not say things that are false. The teams that originally created these games were much, much bigger than the team that is revitalizing them now. That isn't to say that there is no room for improvement here, but try to get the facts straight.

Remenissions · March 2014

When Black Isle made Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1&2, and Baldur's Gate 1 they had 17 total members. 8 of which were just for marketing/management. That leaves 11 people for story/coding/dynamics (infinity engine creation, which bioware took credit for when Black Isle was bought out by them)/bug fixes. I do have my facts straight and I have done my research.
“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

deltago · March 2014

Remenissions said:
I already have numerous times along with many others. And it helps them think about starting to go into the right direction. Instead of the wrong one they've been playing us through.

EDIT: Oh I did forgot to also mention, original Baldur's Gate has 0 problems with multiplayer. Yet there has yet to be any evidence that a BG:EE multiplayer game has been able to stay connected for longer then 4 hours. And as far as alt-tabbing making the game crash? That is something that's supposed to be fixed in alpha testing. FFS.

Really, you've mentioned it numerous times going through the proper channels?

Lemme check your profile real quick to see which bugs are making this game unplayable for you.

So if you mentioned them you probably made a discussion about it, lets see here, 7 discussions, one is a closed poll, one is about LFG, one is in the modding section. Huh. This topic here seems to be the only one where the word Bugs is mentioned.

Perhaps you mentioned them in someone elses post. Lets go through your discussions:

OK, you mentioned two carry over bugs from Vanilla (so much for that being flawless)
You posted in a bug about ring of free action (which iirc was fixed)
Oh, I see you were complaining about the patch status back in August when they wanted to make sure everything was fixed, learning their lessons of prior fast patches. You got that thread closed too, good job on that.
And then a whole bunch of talk about looking for people to play with you.

So this begs the question, WHEN and WHERE did you mention these things numerous times?

~

Now if you are looking for positive feed back, open up your BG:EE documents folder and look for the folder entitled "crash" This is a dump folder containing documents that Beamdog needs to isolate the reason why your game is crashing when you Alt+F4. If you send it to them, (either posting it in the bugs forum) or through their support email, they will look at it in a timely fashion.

elminster · March 2014

Troodon80 · March 2014

Remenissions said:
When Black Isle made Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1&2, and Baldur's Gate 1 they had 17 total members.

Why do you keep referring to Black Isle as 'creating' Baldur's Gate? They were a division of Interplay, they assisted BioWare as their producer. They did develop Planescape: Torment but, as far as I am aware, a restructuring occurred prior to Fallout 1 and 2 where it is listed as just being 'Interplay Entertainment.' No mention of 'Black Isle' in the manual or credits.

As I have said to other people: if your bug report has not yet been looked at or resolved, do please send me a PM with links and I will see if they are currently being dealt with. No need to resort to calling people liars.

Dee · March 2014

If you look at the credits, starting around page 21 (edit: 19, rather) are the people from the game's original development. Interplay has eighty people credited between artists, programmers, on-staff QA, sound editors, and designers. Bioware has seventy.

Between Beamdog and Wizards of the Coast, there are forty names for the Enhanced Edition. And of those forty, twelve weren't part of development until after the first game was released. So that leaves 28 people, eight from Wizards of the Coast and twenty from Beamdog.

Again, I'm not trying to make excuses for any problems you might be experiencing, just trying to offer a more realistic perspective. 150 people created the original Baldur's Gate. 28 people enhanced it.

Rewolf · March 2014

Imo the multiplayer is way better then in BG1 Vanilla. I remember trying to play it with some friends back in the days on a LAN Party...one of them was an IT worker and it took him ages to actually get a proper set up and that's not even talking about doing it outside a LAN party. With EE, we just hooked all our pc's up on the router and we were done.
I also have no problems with ALT+TAB and tbh I can't see how that stops you from finishing the game (though I do agree that if this is a recurring bug, that something so widely used should have been fixed earlier).
I don't mind people complaining about faults/bugs etc, but at least give a clue or hint as to what you're complaining about or what should be fixed, because now your post just reads like a post of whine without any base to me

deltago · March 2014

Remenissions said:
When Black Isle made Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1&2, and Baldur's Gate 1 they had 17 total members. 8 of which were just for marketing/management. That leaves 11 people for story/coding/dynamics (infinity engine creation, which bioware took credit for when Black Isle was bought out by them)/bug fixes. I do have my facts straight and I have done my research.
“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

Where are you getting your information from? Black Isle was NEVER bought out by Bioware.
Black Isle WAS NOT the creator of the original Fallout. Interplay was, with Tim Cain (one of the founders of Troika) creating that engine. They took over the franchise once he and others at interplay bolted.
The Infinity Engine was created by Bioware under the title battleground: infinity.
Black Isle did not make Baldur's Gate, they published it. There is a difference here.

If you do have your facts straight and have done your research, please point me to where you are getting them.

Skaffen · March 2014

Troodon80 said:
As I have said to other people: if your bug report has not yet been looked at or resolved, do please send me a PM with links and I will see if they are currently being dealt with. No need to resort to calling people liars.

@Troodon80 @Dee To be honest, I can feel the frustration of waiting for the bugfixes since basically November. Yes, the game is playable but there are some pretty serious bugs esp. in the new content and nothing seems to be progressing with regards to fixing them / releasing the fixes.

I have tried to make a plea for prioritzing on a BG2 patch before focusing on Android here:

http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/comment/470078

Top of my head the following bugs come to mind, all of which I have encountered personally and all of which take away from a positive gaming perspective esp. on the ipad since for most of them workarounds will require the non-existing console. Probably there are fixes for quite a few of them, but none are released as far as I know.

-Missing Watcher's Keep (about 50% of my games affected)
-Hexxat Romance not progressing
-Vorpal circus tent bug on ipad (particularly bad for newcomers, instant-kill on first quest...)
-Rasaad ToB quest bugged (had to redo the last fight 3 times because of script triggering issues)
-Yaga-Shura Focefield bug on ipad
-Cespenar not talking to you after forging the shadow dragon armor
-Dorn quest the patron gating in infinite times after the fight against the warparty
-Infinitely repeating dialogues in the underdark
-Game crashes if you exit underdark with drow items
-Dorn quest truesight, glitterdust spell etc. not working
-Unkillable Yaga-Shura

We also have 3 different patch states of BG2 out, ipad, windows and Mac Steam/Beamdog, Mac Apple Store -> no multiplayer possible across platforms.

This is also affecting me, my son is desperately waiting for the promised multiplayer but ipad and mac can't play together.

Again my plea: do a 2 week scrum and get BG2 on one patch state across all platforms and fix the most glaring low-hanging fruits, then continue on the android version and BG1 patch (total waste of resources at the moment compared to BG2 since it has had many more patch cycles).

shawne · March 2014

"We are working to improve things" has been Beamdog's motto since last April. Meanwhile, in the face of a large number of bugs directly related to the new content in BG2:EE, the priority of the day is window sizes. *shrug*

Skaffen · March 2014

@shawne Exactly - I am not saying that they are not working and putting in a lot of efforts, just that it's focused on the wrong things from a paying customer's experience. And the reviews show it...

Remenissions · September 2015

Well that ban was fun. But seriously, you forum mods need to get your facts straight, and how dare you for using elminster's name when you lack any wisdom or intellect.

Skatan · September 2015

Remenissions said:
Well that ban was fun. But seriously, you forum mods need to get your facts straight, and how dare you for using elminster's name when you lack any wisdom or intellect.

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