Leaving aside the bugs and awful balance, which are ordinary for indie devs, the problem with the release is that the game had (and still has I think) numerous buggy or incomplete questlines that they simply must have known about before release. I don't think any of the rival groups questlines and events (coyotes and the like) work properly.
Coyotes worked fine for me (really loving the game, actually) - I suspect that part might break if you've already stumbled across the Coyotes HQ and managed to kill him early (they've tried to 'soft' gate it by making it sufficiently far away that you're unlikely to get there in the a.m. unless you go directly there (as you would once Regina gives the location and tells you that half of them are asleep/hungover in the morning), so it's likely to be heavily guarded if you stumble over it by accident. Thing is, some players will still save-scum to push through it early (I did that with the mercenaries in Austin Outskirts, and I suspect that will break something later on, especially given what those guys are keeping up on the roof), lots will use spoilers to get there early and there's also players from the beta who know where it is and head straight over, turning a very unlikely occurrence into a common one.
I'm not at all surprised by the bugginess - I'm surprised it isn't worse. The scope of what the game tries to do is incredible, and I mean that in both a good and a bad way. They've tried to combine a fully open map, with no hard gates, with a
time mechanic. I can't remember the last time a game of this kind attempted to use a proper time mechanic - I don't mean the superficial day/night cycles and wandering NPCs that are used to create the illusion of time, but to actually have the plot and all in-game events progress with the passage of time instead of the player's quest progression. And I can't think of any prior example of a game that attempted that with a fully open map (yes, Wiz 7, but that only affected which NPCs had the maps - it's still a traditional 'dungeon sits around waiting for the player to show up' game at heart). I strongly suspect that this is because most developers would view it as an utter nightmare to design. I'm not even sure that it's
possible to prevent quests from breaking in a game where the player can travel anywhere on the map from the start, future quest bosses are already in the world and can be found/killed early (instead of spawning when the player is 'ready' for that quest), all friendly NPCs can be killed even if they're quest-givers later on, and game events progress with time. That's why developers close off player options - it's to keep the number of variables manageable, and because it's the only way you can stop the player from breaking the game by screwing with future quest NPCs (either you gate the player so they can't reach Marshall Streeter, or you make him unkillable until the player is 'supposed' to kill him).
It's the kind of design that seems awesome when you're inventing a game in your head, but you'd have to be utterly insane to try to implement it.
And I'm glad that there are still some developers who are incompetent enough to attempt it. I've got lots of 'sensible' games to play, and very few glorious failures. My tolerance for game-breaking bugs in this sort of game is probably much greater from having started on crpgs in the early 80s, when such bugs were relatively common even in major professional releases (in crpgs, that is). It was the flipside of all the innovation going on - the industry still had the attitude of trying to push the boundaries in order to make that 'cool game that you have in your head', instead of always making something they knew could work (as a comparison, arcades were the industry's flagship back then, and so those games
had to work 100% of the time). Once home gaming took over from the arcades and blossomed in the 90s, they had to get serious about consumer protection law, and so they couldn't get away with releasing broken games anymore. Most folks' memories of pre-internet games not being massively bug-infested tend to come from that period. Overall, it's much
much better that games work, than it was when you could sink 6 months of your childhood into a crpg, only to have your saves corrupted because some idiot developer 'just had to try this cool new idea' (and if I ever find the guy who thought it was a good idea to set the early models of C64 so that its default setting was to format any disk that was in the drive when the computer was turned on, I will fucking burn him alive...). But right now, I'm bored with games playing it safe, and I'm enjoying having a game innovate on mechanics, instead of treating mechanics as something there to hold up the graphics and pad the playing time.
.
