Well a Prerelease/Beta branch for everyone would be the ideal solution, even if it's not something I'd agree with, because Larian is 450 staff strong, so surely they'd be able to catch the really obvious bugs that this Patch has introduced.
But also, this patch specifically, they could've just not released the buggy portions and focused it completely on the Romances and the general community wouldn't care...
It'd be perfect for mod devs tho.
Given that a bunch of other companies do beta branches, e.g. Paradox Interactive, I can't imagine it being hard to setup. They'd just need to use whatever stable build/branch they use for QA and upload it to Steam's Beta branch system.
Sudden idea, they could do a two Betas, Private and Public, and release the codes for the private one on these forums, although that might kill these forums in the process.
That way you get the most ardent supporters as free labor first, then more the casual people in the open beta.
If they were to do this, they should also develop some sortof ingame bug reporting feature too.
Rollback branches, which can also be done via Steam's Beta function, would be nice for people already knee deep in a run too, given that patch updates seemingly breaks those runs.
And surely they've see what made Skyrim so popular and re-re-releasable is because of the modding community, their silence here is wierd; If they were working on it, it'd be a no-brainer to mention that it's definetly in the works. Bethesda atleast gives a general date for their modtool releases.
As to your last point, to why, who knows, but given that seemingly nothing has fundamentally changed between how they operate in EA and now, they seem to be happy continuing doing things their way.
Honestly, it just boggles my mind, they make a game that people consider to be the "second coming" and make over $1 billion and yet, it doesn't seem that they have put any of that money into the QA Department.
Last edited by Thunderbolt; 22/02/24 11:01 AM. Reason: Last two sentences
