Prima Strategy Guide + Obsidian Guidebook

Originally Posted by azarhal
The Guidebook is a lore book with concept arts and lots of text and feels a bit like a PnP campaign setting book. The Prima Strategy Guide is the one with the walkthrough and the one that contains errors (mostly related to balance that changed until the week prior to release).

Does the Prima guide also contain a bestiary (with pictures) and complete lists for weapons, spells, etc.?

If so, I'll probably still get it. If not, then I'll just get the lore book.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Does the Prima guide also contain a bestiary (with pictures) and complete lists for weapons, spells, etc.?

If so, I'll probably still get it. If not, then I'll just get the lore book.

Yes. The preview on amazon shows pages of the bestiary and requirement pages. I don't know the level of details for the spell page though.

Ah.. thanks. I wonder if all the listed stats for those things are correct.

Strategy guide is nice to read as your load screen times transition from 2 seconds, to 5 seconds, to 10 seconds, to 30 seconds, to 2 minutes.

Some of the quest info is a little thin. Like the consequences and rewards section at the end of some side quests. The intro material at the beginning is good though.

All spells are there. Not sure bout items and enemies, as that would spoil things for me.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Ah.. thanks. I wonder if all the listed stats for those things are correct.

I doubt it.

Well, I will definitely get a refund for the strategy guide if it's completely full of errors. I will check some stats in the game and compare them.

But come on, JDR, get both of the books like me! It will be interesting to have both of us tallying up errors instead of just one person doing it.

Originally Posted by azarhal
I suspect the errors match the manual errors though, for which Obsidian released an errata list (that is incomplete might I add).

Wow! I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Even the manual has endless errors, smh.

Originally Posted by Fluent
Well, I will definitely get a refund for the strategy guide if it's completely full of errors. I will check some stats in the game and compare them.

But come on, JDR, get both of the books like me! It will be interesting to have both of us tallying up errors instead of just one person doing it.

Originally Posted by Fluent
Wow! I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Even the manual has endless errors.

Its the curse of physical goods as most kickstarters fail in some way. The best option seems to be like Harebrained Schemes, and only release the game digitally.

Or, go the old-school route and have a deadline that says "no more changes to core mechanics from this date forward" and stick to it.

I love the game, but it's a damn shame that the manual, strategy guide and probably the guidebook as well will have countless errors. Whereas my Diablo 2 strategy guide is probably immaculately correct, and that game was made a long time ago.

Originally Posted by Fluent
Or, go the old-school route and have a deadline that says "no more changes to core mechanics from this date forward" and stick to it.

I agree it looks like Obsidian made changes after they made the manual and books. They could of fixed the small errors, but it would of delayed the physical goods.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
I agree as it looks like Obsidian made changes after they made the manual and books.

Exactly, and that frustrates me immensely.

I think when games have a release date they should be pretty much finished at that point, and all manuals/books/guides should be written shortly after that.

Patch the bugs all you want but leave the core elements alone.

Yes, they were tweaking it up to the last couple months. Apparently the printers (or authors) are not nearly so agile. Amazing, since its just a few words and a mechanical printing process, rather than code that needs to be tested.

Are printing resources really that hard to schedule? I doubt it. Incompetence (or cheapness) is probably responsible (and perhaps not Obsidian's fault). Or they had these things printed for the original release date, and when it slipped, rather than modify and reprint they decided to screw us…

Note that I've seen this happen with other recent guidebooks. Being out of date, that is. Post launch patches can even do that. But I'd rather have the patches than a perfectly accurate guidebook.

I like the patches, too, especially for bug-fixes, but I don't care for the patches that greatly alter the sort of changes to core stats and stuff like that. IMO, that stuff should all be taken care of for the most part. If there is some really glaring issue, then sure, patch it, but just judging by the manual errata, simply too many small things were changed. It's a shame really, but it is what it is, I guess…

I think they took too long responding to the community input for modifying the mechanics. Obsidian should have gotten that right first, rather than content.

@Thrasher: Looking at the digital copies of the Prima Guide and the Collector's Book, one can see on page 6 that the Collector's Book is "First Edition: November 2014" and the Prima Guide is "copyright 2015" as per page 512.
So the guide was probably printed this year while the book might be a bit older (or they did not update the page with the version info).

Fully agree with you that patches > guides. With this game it may be a bit more of a pity than with others though since all of the very detailed and potentially very helpful tables in the Prima guide are probably obsolete by now.
But that was to be expected going by other KS projects. Hell, Divinity Original Sin is getting a whole new story in an upcoming patch (OK, slight exaggeration but it has been getting and continues to be getting some pretty massive changes).
Or Wasteland 2 which is also supposed to be getting lots more changes including the introduction of perks which will effectively turn it into a wildly different game.
I definitely would never separately purchase a guide for such games. Just like with MMOs, chances are the guide is plagued by day zero obsolescence.
Besides, the Internet and dedicated fan sites have long made guide books completely obsolete per se. In fact, this whole giant clash of obsolescence is so strong with these things, it makes you wonder why no black hole has developed from it all yet .

I guess I'm one of those old-school loonies that believes a game should, at some point, be considered finished. All these patches and new content is like George Lucas adding ridiculous new CGI scenes to movies that should have been left alone! Bah, humbug!

Release your game and call it a day, for fucks sake. It should be finished on release day, not have this scheduled patch crap going on.

The sad state of affairs we currently have in gaming is that release dates mean absolutely nothing. The games won't be playable completely for at least a few weeks, if not months, sometimes YEARS after the release! What a joke, man.

If you're patching to fix new bugs, then by all means do it. If you're patching to re-balance your game, you're ruining for us obsolete people who want a game to be finished and enjoy it as a total package, not a constant work-in-progress for the next 2 years.

At some point you have to call it finished.

I try to wait a year before playing games. I can't always as some games I just want to play too bad.

Even if the game doesn't have a ton of bugs it's likely that it will have more content or rebalancing. Waiting just gives me the best and most complete version of the game.

I can't think this is what dev's want but it's what they are teaching consumers.

Ironically the dev we all praise is to blame for it, imo. CDPR started it all with their witcher enhanced edition. I could be totally off base with that but this sort of thing really seemed to take off after that.

Oh, and here's what I posted about the strategy guide in another thread.

I have the collectors edition hard cover book in my hands now. I collect strategy guides for the games I really like.

It's your typical guide, hardcover, 511 pages, bestiary, items, races, classes, builds, etc. I haven't looked too much in to it. it looks like the first 125 pages is rules, races, classes, skills, talents, spells, etc. I'll probably read up to that and then stop as the walk through, bestiary, items, etc are after that and I don't want to see any of that prior to playing at least once.

I think it's well worth the money if your a fan of the game. Also it's the only one of my strategy guides with my name in it since they list all the kickstarter backers in it. (not sure if it's everyone or just after a specific pledge tier)

Saki, as you know, I am probably one of the worst culprits on waiting for games to be patched / upgraded / extended / DLC'ed before buying them. Not only to get the full finished game experience, but to save money.

This one, though, I knew would be innovative (which it turns out to be) and more engaging from a story / lore point of view than anything in years. So I couldn't wait.

Waiting wouldn't have fixed the guidebook though. If anything, it would have made it even more obsolete. However, probably a lot cheaper too.

Publishers hardly ever go back and update their guidebook. Only if lots of good DLC is added. They did that with the Oblivion book, but I haven't seen an RPG since that got the special upgrade treatment from Prima.

That's why I said I try to wait. We all have those games we just can't wait on.

The ironic part of it is, I, too, very rarely play new games on launch. The only reason I was covering Pillars so early was to do some coverage for the 'Watch, and it just happened to turn out to be an amazing, nay, a legendary game! Unfortunately, it's also teaching me a valuable lesson about playing games on launch these days. The release date is simply a day and number that means nothing, and the game won't truly be "finished", if ever, at LEAST for a few weeks or months later.

Oh well. At least I know now.

And thanks for the thoughtful post, saki! I appreciate it. I'm still excited for the guide, but part of me is still seething that it's going to have errors! Hah. Maybe they will have a "GOTY Ultimate Error-Free Strategy Guide!" released next year…