There are no games that I know of that have no reported problems. Somebody somewhere on some kind of hardware/software has a problem.

That's not very helpful when you want to play for a game you paid for but you can't, is it? Perhaps they should let us play the game till the end and then pay for it. Of course that wouldn't be fair, but neither is what is going on with some of us that bought the game and can't play.

It is the nature of the beast. It would be wonderful if you could buy software and absolutely it would work for you. But we don't live in that kind of universe. Also, if you buy French fries from MacDonalds you might find a hair on them.

As I said, I will just not buy from them again till certain conditions have been met. I have plenty of other games which are not broken, from other developers.

French fries do not cost the same and in my almost 40 years, I never found a hair in them. Also a hair is not something which physically stops you from eating the rest of them. McDs or not.
I tell you what though, if I get spoiled food from a place, I don't go back to it again and I sure let know my friends to know to avoid it.

Have a great life, sir.

You too. :)

I got a reply over there

"We are still working on the patch and we'd rather take a little more time and do it right, so please be patient, as we want it to be out just as much as you guys want : ) "

OK, let's just wait till the next patch.

It pisses me off because I FRAKING LOVE this game.

Hi, sorry for not responding earlier. We were not able to reproduce the problem. It seems the problem is exclusive to the GOG version. As you may be aware GOG accidentally released a pre-release version originally and our best guess is that patching from that one to either release version has caused the problem (this should not happen with any of the later patches). Starting the scenario over (AFTER patching to the latest version) should take care of this. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2 years later, and I have the same problem in the Scars of Freedom-DLC.

Are you sure? According to the change long the bug was fixed 3 years ago?

This bug was never fixed. I just got it myself at the final masked man scenario mission. I'm using version 1.5.

And I read a thread where the devs talk about this bug in emails from them that were quoted on the Steam forum for this game and that the devs promised to fix; those comments were made in 2018 but yet they never did fix this bug of April 2023 when I'm writing this post now.

This game is literally a scam since it has a game-breaking bug that the devs years ago promised to fix, yet apparently they never will actually do so.

EDIT: I just tried to load from a quicksave which was from the end of the mission before the final masked man mission. Then I beat that second-last mission again, then I was able to start the masked man mission since my new autosave replaced my old autosave.

However, then I exited the game and when I tried to load from the checkpoint, the final mask man mission again failed to load.

And it also made the problem even worse now, because now none of the campaigns will load for me, and they all give me a black screen instead.

So yeah, I now quadruple-down on my claim earlier in this post that this game is a giant scam!

The DLC doesn't have that bug.

However, the DLC is also a lot worse than the main game, and the DLC has no Fate Trader, so therefore you are stuck using crappy & unfun garbage weapons for the whole DLC, and none of the cool & fun & unique weapons that you've unlocked from the main game are accessible in the DLC.