Legacy of Bhaal bonuses breaking on reload
Ark_Tolei
Member Posts: 69
I'm having a weird bug where specific creatures are losing all their bonus hp when I reload my legacy of bhaal file. Sometimes loading up an earlier quicksave seems to fix it, sometimes it does not. Exiting and restarting the game does not fix it, and the difficult setting itself remains unchanged (I ran into a random encounter on the way to the ogre while trying to fix it, and the xvarts had the correct bonus hp, but the ogre did not)
Has anyone who participated in the beta run into this issue and found a consistent solution? I can't continue my livestream run until i fix this ogre and have a consistent method of fixing bugged out enemies in the future.
Has anyone who participated in the beta run into this issue and found a consistent solution? I can't continue my livestream run until i fix this ogre and have a consistent method of fixing bugged out enemies in the future.
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Comments
There are several brown paperbag bugs related to the difficulty settings.
No developer has returned to that topic since then to acknowledge the problem. Or (hopefully) they are busy debugging their code.
If I had to guess, it would be my interpretation that legacy of bhaal mode is being turned off and then back on at some point during the process of loading, and that creatures that have already been "loaded" at some point are being loaded with incorrect values.
Just to clarify, someone in another thread mentioned that the release patch is the same as the beta patch, and I just confirmed that's the version that's live for me. Is the live version supposed to be 2.0.62.2?
I realize Beamdog has a lot on its plate but this is an entire difficulty setting and should have been a bit more of a priority. People took days off from work to play their beloved game on Legacy of Bhaal mode. We don't have any interest in the lower difficulty run through
As I said in the other threads - if anyone finds a quick and dirty way of fixing this please let us know so we don't have to wait for beamdog to fix it!
First of all, you're preaching to the choir about this bug not getting the necessary priority. However, I think that will change when enough players realize that LOB mode is effectively nonfunctional in the release version of 2.0.
Let's review what this bug actually does. Assuming you're in LOB mode, the monsters in the saved game actually have the correct stats for LOB. The problem is that the engine fails to apply those stats to monsters that were in an active area when the game was saved. Instead, it applies the default stats from the CRE file. By active area, I mean an area that contained a party member when the game was saved.
In other words, if you save a game, any monsters in your area will lose their LOB stats when you load that save. The default stats will then be perpetuated when you save the game again. This is a bug in the engine itself as far as I can tell, so player solutions are limited.
However, since you asked for quick and dirty work arounds, there are a couple of things you can try. The first one is to simply not save when you're in an area with monsters. Imagine this scenario if you're a thief or monk type:
1) Sneak up on a monster.
2) Hit it.
3) Run away to another area you've already cleared.
4) Save the game before the monster enters your current area.
5) Re-enter the area with the monster.
6) Hide in shadows.
7) Repeat ad nausem.
This obviously gets tedious, especially if you're soloing at low level. This technique is completely impractical in enclosed areas with a poorly positioned exit.
The second workaround is to use a mod that simulates LOB mode, which is the method I'm using for my solo LOB run. I've greatly modified the HOFemu mod, which has been posted on this forum. It simulates LOB mode by changing all of the CRE files to give them the improved stats. This method seems to work fine, although the stat changes in the mod may not accurately reflect LOB stats. Furthermore, I'm not completely certain about which creatures are unaffected by LOB mode. My mod does exclude things like recruitable NPCs and illusory monsters, but there may be other exceptions.
I know this bug didn't exist in beta versions prior to v2.0.61.0, because I played in LOB mode just fine until that upgrade. All I had to do was manually set BD_Nightmare_Mode to 1 and GameDifficulty to 7 in the saved game. If Beamdog were to make an earlier beta available while the commercial version is being fixed, that would be the best temporary fix as far as I'm concerned.
TEST
New Game - Run with main character into mephit room - mephit spawns - ctrl+m to verify 125 hps.
Quick Save
Load Quick Save
Check First Mephit - verify 15 hit points (normal difficulty)
Check Second Mephit (newly spawned after load) - verify 125 hps.
I continued to test the ogre magi and the goblins to confirm same behavior. If you save you nerf them if you are on the same map.
CURRENT WORK AROUND
Do not load a game unless you absolutely have no choice - and ideally only from saves that occurred in areas where you have already cleared everything.
For example I made my party and started my clear of Irenicus's dungeon and encountered only LOB versions. Autosaves will happen but as long as you don't load I think it will be okay. I plan to make hard saves before i exit any area so as not to pollute the area I'm going into, in case I must load.
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I read the information on redmine about the bug and it seems they are a bit confused about the details. Your assessment seems correct and I hope this has been communicated clearly to the team. With any luck this will be an easy situation to remedy.
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/49808/legacy-of-bhaal-mode-workaround#latest
@chaos286
Thanks for the redmine ticket. Odd that it is five days old, and yesterday developers still didn't seem to believe the symptoms discussed here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/729191/#Comment_729191
Are there better responses in the redmine ticket? Or are they aware of such issues but don't want to waste time communicating?