I've been researching a little bit more.
The official forums are more or less devoid of the usual "THIS IS A BUG" crying. Mot people seem to play the game regrdless.
There *are* bugs, however :
International, English-language thread :
http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread.php?tid=5098
German-language thread :
http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread.php?tid=5097&page=1
Additionally, Wikipedia says :
A number of copies for the non-Steam version of the North American release featured an issue with the Disc Detection Software that made it impossible to play the game after installing due to the game not recognizing the presence of the disc in the drive. As of July 29, 2010 this issue is still unresolved; Kalypso reports that it is a known issue and expects to release a fix shortly, though it has missed several projected dates. [8]
Source :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciples_III:_Renaissance
Two (German) reviews speak of "comfort-bugs" or "comfort glitches", which means that these are bugs, but they are not essentially game-breaking, like an overly complex skill tree, inventory cannot be sorted and so on.
Three German reviews praise that this game is "refreshingly grim", where one could translate the German ord of "düster" as "grim", "dire", "gloomy" etc. . I'd just say it's "dark & gritty".
There is a German degrating word of "klickibunti", which has been transferred from Linux systems, where a part of the administrators actully despise windows for being 2klickibunti", which means (I try to translate it) "clickycolourfully". It IS meant to degrade something by people who consciously espise anything that is a) colourful and b) easy to use. To them, a REAL Linux system should be devid of both. Hence the degrading word of "klickibunti", which has become some kind of "hate-word".
So, they say that Disciples III is "refreshingly grim" compared against the "klickibunti" games of HOMM and King's Bounty.
Okay, on with the bugs. There are very few records of that, except the above mentioned "comfort glitches".
The above mentioned bug thread do mention quite a lot of bugs. Quite a lot.
But no-one says that these bugs are "game-breaking" or so. The people seem to play the game regardless.
Maybe it'sd because thre are so very few games of this kind so that they all take this game like a wolf pack that' almost died of tarving. Whih could explain the relativaly little "cry-outs" about bugs.
Or they are deleted soon enough.
Someone in the official German-language forum says that he has been playing the russian version of the game, and it had been bugfree.
The
interesting part of what h says is the following : He guesses ( ! ) that AFTER THAT "someone" might have been "tinkering" with the "graphics and the animtions" … And that he doesn't understand why, because, as he quotes it, "never change a running system" …
And someone else guesses that by or with working with the animations, the bugs might have come back into the game …
Someone from Kalypso, the publisher, called Dennis" says that the German version is 1.06 - which - as he says - "includes all russian patches".
Someone in the German forum rather presents to players his workarounds to bugs - how they can … well, work around them … - and is kind of downplaying the small but numerous bugs, instead on insisting on the bugs being fixed.
People who are playing the game definitively appear to be hard-core. They know and exploit the "rules" so much hat they are able to win.
One reviewer says that the "learning curve" is easy in the beginning, hard in the middle, and "biting into the desk" at the and, and he concludes : "This is how it should be."
Well as a conclusion, I'm almost even more irritated than before. Fact is :
- the bugs do exist
- they are mostly small
- but a horde of them
- players are playing the game regardless
- the game doesn't get negative points in tests because of these myriad of bugs
- the international version has a serious disc detection problem, which is still unresolved by now
Meanwhile I still cannot make out any difference between German and International versions of it.
The only interesting thing seems to be that the russian version appears to be relatively or almost completely bugfree. Which could mean that the developers had put their focus on this version first, regarding the development of patches.
And, by the way, at least one add-on is definitively planned …
Edit : Most reports are that bugs appear in the German version from act 4 on ...