I want to love this game (E:V), I really do, but I'm at a loss. I've done all of the quests gained and cannot find anybody to set me off on something to get the game rolling again. To be clear, I have NO quests available at all. I have been roaming the entire map, Skjern, Skjern Forest, Erling's Farm, Ribe, Marsh, Skerninge -- those (and the campsites) are the only areas unlocked. During this roaming, trying to find a lead, the timeline keeps running out, dumping me to the 'Game Over: you are at the end of your rope' screen. It's infuriating! I understand this game is buggy as hell, but WTF gives? Am I missing something in my noobieness?

In case it matters, attached is a composite of all the quests I've found and finished.

Uhh, I am glad to have started a new Eador campaign :)

Now I wait until all the bugs are patched before I start playing.

You could also easily replay the Tomb Raider quest in such a way that you wouldn't have to deal with Oddkell at the end. Personally I just massacred the whole village, and I didn't have any issues afterwards. Although the English part of the campaign is quite a bit buggier than the beginning, so you might want to wait for a patch anyway.

Frankly I'm amazed the devs thought it was acceptable to release the game in such a buggy state. I love both their expeditions game, but they'd better get their act together imo, since a reputation for making really buggy games can be seriously bad for sales.

That would require forethought, in the sense of having saved games at key points -- I don't. Besides, if it gets buggier (jeez!) there's no point -- I'll wait. Clearly they never expected it, and at least they have the integrity to admit their error, unlike some companies (*cough* Bioware, *cough* Beamdog...)
Quote:
"...after three rounds of closed beta testing and a month of intense internal QA, we thought we'd fixed all quest bugs. We were clearly wrong"

It's not exactly news that beta testing + internal QA isn't enough to get a complex game in a good state for release, though. Hearts of Iron 3 was a perfect example.
The fact is that most people treat beta-testing as a free preview instead of actual testing, and internal QA isn't reliable for the same reason writers don't edit their own books.

Professional QA testers exist for a reason, and I don't think it was a smart move to completely skip on that. Of course they're a small company and probably operate on a shoestring budget but still...
It'd have been smarter to go back to KS for more money for professional testers instead of releasing a buggy mess imo.

And they honestly thought they had it covered. They made a mistake and they owned it. I applaud them for that.

Agreed that the devs have handled this mess with the appropriate combination of deep embarrassment and vigilance.

I'm not surprised that they thought the beta testing would find the bugs though, because frankly I'm surprised the beta testers missed so much!

It'd be interesting to find out how many beta testers they actually had in the end, and how many of them actually took their responsibility seriously (since it was a closed beta).

I could be mistaken but I don't believe that the platform allows you to "go back to KS for more money".
Projects are all or nothing and excluding strech goals there's really no mechanic for scaled funding there, especially funding after the fact. As do I. Having been around tech and games for many years now I've had the chance to see many products (not just games) ship with various unexpected bugs. Even with the massive budgets that AAA games command you still get bugs and issues with basic features that require patching of the shipped build (look to the recent EA-Bioware release of Andromeda for one recent example).

Making best efforts to ship a stable build, being honest when there are bugs, and fixing those bugs in a timely manner, are what makes a studio worthy of customer trust. It's the companies who try to pretend their first build is perfect and act as if they are incapable of any shortcoming that are the real problem.

my two cents