Pillars of Eternity - Beta Patches on Steam

Producer Brandon Adler of Obsidian posted news on the Pillars of Eternity forums with information on how you can downland and beta test any future patches.

From now on, we will be allowing folks to play our beta patches on Steam. This has a two-fold benefit:

• Players get new fixes a bit faster and can check out the new changes that will drop in the next patch.
• Developers get access to information about new bugs that may have slipped into the patch. This will reduce the number of hotfixes for future patches.

We will make a formal announcement to the community when we are going to put the latest patch up for beta testing. We are starting this process with the 1.04 patch.

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More information.

I'd rather not try beta patches. The risk is just to high with the potential introduction of new game breaking bugs. I'd rather just wait to play my games until major bugs are fully patched.

That is losing the opportunity of feeding constructive, lobbying information.

PoE was in beta for months. How could a game supposed to be played in real time with pause be released in the state it was without the influential feedback from the beta players?

In PoE, there are three types of hit/damages: grazed, hit, critical. All use the same colour.
During all those beta months, no voice was influential enough to suggest that using different colours for different types could improve the visual feed back.
Just as if the information was meant to be picked up from the log...
But who has the time to read the piece of information from the log when playing real time?
"UgoIgo" players maybe.

Well, I think the more you let the player test, if that also means you have less testers and QA persons, the worse quality the final product would have.

5 characters.

Update 94: Patch 1.04: The Pillars of Eternity team is still hard at work in stomping out bugs, balancing gameplay, and adding in some additional polish where needed. Patch 1.04, our latest patch that dropped earlier today, has a good amount of these fixes. You can find the patch notes at the end of this update.

For patch 1.05, which we are targeting for a May release, will continue adding these fixes along with some additional new features. For example, we are adding in the ability to change your player's portrait and voice set any time during the game and adding new shaders for Afflictions (like Petrified).

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