My actions in the warehouse weren't reflected in the next scene with Alfred.
There are spoilers in this post.
EPISODE ONE SPOILERS.
In the warehouse, after I interrogated the gang member, Alfred said I had nearly beaten him to death.
Trouble is... I didn't do anything to him at all. I applied minor pressure to his arm. I never hit him with the pipe. I never broke said arm. After I waited for Gordon and spoke to him, the game acknowledged my choices in providing prompt, reading: "Gordon noted your nonviolent methods."
As soon as the next scene loaded, however, Alfred was saying that I had acted like an animal, and that I'd hospitalized the man. None of his admonitions, nor any of my response options, made any sense at all. I literally did nothing to the remaining gang member whom I interrogated aside from scaring him.
Apparently I scared him straight into an intensive care ward. Scared him right to the feet of Ereshkigal. Apparently, according to Alfred, I beat him to half to death... with my gravely voice.
This strikes me as a not at all insignificant bug for such a heavily story-based game, one which alters itself based on your behavior.
I'm very, very disappointed.
This simply shouldn't happen.
Comments
Luckily I hit him in the ribs and broke his arm. Makes more sense, I assume.
yeah exactly. i said the same thing in another post. it bugged me. i was like; errrr....no i didnt ! (beat him almost to death)
Yeah, I'm hoping they fix this bug soon. Really want to know how that scene is supposed to play out.
I noticed the same thing. A bug I guess. I hope there won't be anymore mistakes like that in the future episodes.
Was it confirmed it was a bug?
Either that or shitty writing.
My vote isn't the latter.
I just noticed the Codex has my response to Viki Vale wrong as well.
The game suggests that I refused to give her a quote. I gave her a quote; I've been nothing but accommodating in my dealings with her.
This careless sloppiness is getting absurd.
This is the equivalent of a beta version and it was the first game they tried a new program with, it's bound to have bugs.
Yes. Someone at the forum (i forgot his name, sorry) asked telltale directly about the issue and they confirmed it was a bug. Alfred is supposed to have three dialogue's depending on your choice :
Brutal/Batfleck Interrogator Batman : "You nearly KILLED that man"
Neutral Interrogator Batman : "You beat that man half to death"
Nonviolent Interrogator Batman : Bugged to heck.
The bug is basically that the game does not process your nonviolent choice and automatically assumes you picked the neutral option.
I don't think it's reasonable to call this beta.
Beta testing happens before release, assuming the developer is conducting itself professionally. Bugs are one thing. Bugs are launch crashes, what have you. Weird graphical nonsense. For the first few days, their Game of Thrones game would load only showing me the bottom-right part of the screen, I couldn't even change the graphics settings. A few days later, it was sorted. Their Borderlands game wouldn't keep my saves until I manually changed and labeled a save file. Also sorted out in a few days, that's fine as well, to an extent. It's actually expected of Telltale and some other developers at this point to have bugs which other developers seem to avoid as a matter of course.
It's hard to program for a myriad of different hardware options, I get that. Telltale isn't a massive studio, it's going to be even harder for them. I acknowledge that fact.
A conversation-tree based game triggering radically-incorrect scenes and text is a new level of poor quality-control. This isn't about a new engine. This problem could have been caught by three playthroughs of the game in their testing department. Probably during the actual beta testing phase.
This leaves me to think that it probably was, but they decided it was minor enough that they would release it anyway and just patch it later.
If they wanted to release their game before the story was fluid and functional, then they should've labeled it "early access" so I'd have known to ignore it until it's actually a completed and ready product.
I've bought every Telltale game since Walking Dead and been immensely pleased with all of them until now.
This is the first one which is so starkly un-ready for market in its basic presentation of an interactive story narrative.
I don't have a lot of time for games. I certainly don't have a lot of time for re-playing them.
Unfortunately, this has simply trained me not to be a day-one purchaser of future Telltale titles. I'm simply going to have to wait an arbitrary period of time and hope their games in the future reach a readied status after those few months.
It's just bad business to release something with naked flaws. Crashing is something PC users are familiar with. When the actual story of your game isn't stitched together correctly with the scenes triggered by that story, and you release it anyway, that's poor business practices in action.
The problem is that telltale has become a costumed to fan feedback on any issue. Bigby's eyes when in mid-wolf form in Wolf Among Us were re-edited after the game was done when comic fans reminded TT that they were supposed to be red and not yellow. They even show them that way in episode 4 recap of the battle with the Tweddles. There are many missing blood splatters or the voice acting for dialogue choices. Telltale depends on their fans to point mistakes like these out.
The only other time a glitch like this happened was in GOT where Gryff, depending on the players choice, would either be fine or have an eyepatch. The glitch canceled out the violent choice and made Gryff be entirely normal even if you viciously beat him. When the finale came out the glitch was fixed and Gryff not only came out with his eyepatch but he appeared that way since the start to anyone who made that choice in future playthrough's. If telltale missed that, it's very possible they missed the glitch with Alfred ,especially considering it was three separate versions. I have no doubt telltale will fix it in the near future.
I have no doubt they will fix it either, as I'm sure none of us do.
However, I think you slightly missed the point that the guy above you had stated.
Simply playing through the game a couple of times would've obviously revealed this bug.
It's almost as if this game was not even tested. At all. Either that, or Telltale needs some new game testers. It's not like testers are crazy expensive.
Hell, Telltale. Need a GOOD, OBSERVANT game tester for your games? I'll gladly do it for $20/hr if you guys want to send me an early release of each upcoming game/episode.
Anyway. Fact is, I noticed this the very first time I played this. I slammed the guy against the wall even, but didn't break his arm or hit him, and Alfred was like "You nearly killed that man!" I even noticed the "Gordon noticed your nonviolent approach" DIALOGUE, and the fact that this contradicted Alfred's reaction. ON MY FIRST PLAYTHROUGH.
What I'm getting at is this was extremely easy to catch. Which leads me to believe that Telltales game testers either 1) are like 5 years old
Or 2) don't really care about or enjoy the game they're playing, and therefore not paying attention.
The only other conclusion I can draw is this game wasn't even tested. At all.
I also had / noticed the bug where the game states I declined to make a statement about my family's ties with Falcone. ON MY FIRST PLAYTHROUGH.
Hmm. Are these games really just not tested?
Telltale, I'm not being sarcastic at all. I really would love to work with you guys. Should I send my resume?
They are. Regardless of the final product tt games are tested prior to release. Voice actors themselves sometimes test the game. In fact telltale recently test played episode 2 in front of a live audience at PAX. There are only 4 scenarios that can explain them not seeing the bug.
1) All the testers picked violent and/or neutral. Unlikely but it still remains possible.
2) They assumed it to be part of the game and didn't question it.
3) Like you said they simply did not care about the game.
4) They were somehow distracted and failed to notice it.
I agree with the likelihood of numbers 3 and 4 for sure. However, I highly doubt they assumed it was just part of the game. As I said, it's pretty blatantly obvious man! It's like, you guys literally get into a huge conflict with each other and in the two different scenarios he states that you could've killed the guy, or that you literally hospitalized him.
It's like, how in the hell did I hospitalize him? On my second play-through, I didn't even slam him against the wall. I didn't hit him with the crowbar. Literally all he got was a slightly twisted (but clearly not broken) arm. Actually, it was more like a damn Indian Burn than anything.
In response to 1. If the testers only played through the game once, and only went with one single approach, well. That kind of proves my initial point. They're bad testers. :P If I was asked to test a game that had multiple paths/scenarios/different outcomes, how in the heck would I be able to give a report about the game's state of readiness if I didn't go through each and every scenario? I swear, I hope these testers aren't getting paid. And if there aren't paid testers, perhaps Telltale may want to invest in that.
Anyway bro, thanks for the reply. I agree. There is something afoot.
Thank you for actually respecting my point. Though the forum is starting to feel weird with so many sensible people to discuss with.
Also if you want telltale to actually notice you as a potential tester you will need to do the following.
1) Live near the studio or at least in the same country.
2) Contact someone who works for telltale.
If you don't know where to start contact one of the forum moderators. The Forum Guideliness thread should be a good place to find one.
Don't make Batman a wuss next time. Punch that guy and everything will be fine.
I didn't even notice. I hit the guy's ribs with the pipe, so I'd imagine that would cause some internal damage.
I've had the same issue on two different runs of Episode 1 on PS4, both with the Alfred bug and the Vicki Codex bug, when in the case of the former I did nothing but intimidate the sniper. Also I don't seem to be able to view my choices in game during the credits or in the menu, and I get an error when I refresh. Can see some of my choices on the site here though.
Very immersion breaking to have Alfred tell me off after I was completely non-violent to the sniper. So much for "Most branching story Telltale has ever done"
Still hasn't been patched yet and ep. 2 is out. Drat!
So I noticed a couple changes to EP1 after EP2 released. If you were merciful with the dock shooter Alfred says yoiu beat him half to death rather than nearly killed him. Not as big a change as people hoped but it never bothered me that much anyway.
If you got the loot from Catwoman, Jack Ryder says you got the stolen items whereas before he always said you failed.
EDIT: Accidental double post.