Let me preface by saying I'm loving Blackguards. The characterization is solid, the writing is often outright hilarious, and the tactical combat itself is finger-licking-good.

That said, I was just wrapping up chapter 4 (or so I believe, anyway), when all my saves broke. Autosave, quick-save, last battle - anything I try loading just dumps me back to the main screen.

I -think- it has to do with the issue of some quest triggers not working properly. I have another save where I somehow started the quest to free Ciliego the carpenter before even doing the quest that puts him behind the bars to start with.

That was a while ago, though, but I did run into two instances just before my saves broke where I could repeatedly launch the same combat encounters. Not sure if it's by design in one case (a "Ritual Clearing" if I recall correctly where you fight three mages and two black ogres), but there was another encounter where a "Prophet" seeks ship passage to "Cyclops Island to spread the word" that certainly did not seem like it was meant to be repeatable.

In both cases I was able to re-fight those a few times. The Ritual Clearing worked four times before I decided to move on with the main quest. The "Prophet" dock encounter was what I think broke the game, as my saves stopped working right after doing it for the second time.

A real shame, since I did not keep any other saves, so... back to the beginning, I guess. Though probably will take a break from the game until another patch or two, just in case.

tl;dr version:

Make sure to keep saves just in case. Don't repeat the Prophet dock encounter (don't remember the village's name, but I think it's titled "Suspicious Figure" or something such).

Really hope this gets patched, otherwise it's been long time since a game gripped me like Blackguards did.

Edit: Forgot to mention, this is for the 2.1.2.8 GOG patch version.

Just verified the problem. The hard way ("hooray for me!").

Doing the "Suspicious Figure" encounter in Chapter 4 Theniran just once completely corrupted all my saves.

Again.

Filled out support form with Daedalic right after making the initial post here, but no response. Pretty bad issue to be left out in the game, though. Hope GOG has better contacts with them, since that's a really nasty one.

Oh, well, so much for completing a single playthrough QQ.

I've just encountered the same bug/problem. Too bad I haven't seen this post before. Would have saved me from losing quite a few in-game hours. Has there been any response from Daedalic or has someone else found a solution to this problem?

No response from Daedalic after a week, so it seems we're SOL.

Crossing my fingers somebody from GOG can make them give this issue some attention, but so far the support response I've received from GOG boiled down to "contact developer and if not resolved in a week we'll do a refund/replacement trade".

But, but... I really enjoy the game. :(

I'd strongly advise writing them a note about this GoneNorc:

http://www.daedalic.de/en/support/?lang_new=en

Maybe if enough people report, they'll finally decide to do something.

Yeah, I guess writing directly to Deadelic is the way to go. Hopefully, they can spare some time from making Blackguards 2 and fix these issues. I also remember the game suddenly exiting towns automatically after visiting and closing vendor windows when doing DLC missions.
It's truly a fun game and I've been having a blast playing it. Too bad problems like this crop up and dampen the experience, but then again it is my own fault for not having enough spare savegames. (interestingly, older savegames are fine, it's just the new ones that don't load)

My own problem is that the only other save I had was one I saved when noticing an issue with the Carpenter (Ciliego) quest triggers.

So short of playing all the way to the end of Chapter 3 again, any testing I can do might be impacted by that problem.

By the way, when did your saves corrupt? The Theniran encounter?

I believe it was the Scream encounter that caused vendors to start exiting to the overworld map, while it must have been the dock encounter that corrupted the savegames. Similarly, the Ritual Clearing encounter could be replayed (logically, it would have been a one time encounter) indefinitely, which all point to several bugs that seem to have eluded the developers.

In general, the game began to act weird when attempting to play the DLC content.

Lukaszmik, I've received a reply from Deadalic after writing to them regarding the issues we both encountered:

"Hi,

I heard of this problem before but i fear that we don't have the capacitys to adress this right now, since we are on a tight time scedule for Blackguards 2. You see if we fixed this now, we would have to do a full Patch cycle including intensive testing. So we won't be able to fix this soon. But i can tell you how to activate the cheat console so you could at least return to your progress easily.
For this, create a new shortcut to the Blackguards.exe and then open the properties of this new shortcut. In the properties add ' -devcon' at the very end of the target line. Now start the game via the Shortcut and open the console in-game with F12. There you can just enter a command and hit enter to activate it. Use the commands 'win' to win a fight where the objective is not to kill all enemies, or 'kill all enemies' to do just that.
I wish i could help you more, but we don't have any time to spare. Fell free to mail me again if you have questions left.

best regards
Marc"

They were very quick in replying, strange that you never received any word back from them. However, it seems that we will have to wait for quite a bit before a patch comes our way. At least they are aware of the problem and admit that they have time constraints. Also nice of them to tell us how to cheat :).

I sent them a second support request yesterday right after my post here.

Received exactly the same reply. Unlike you, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Basically they are saying that they will not fix a CRITICAL issue with their product because they are working or something else. I don't know how long they were aware of the issue, but the phrasing suggest that they took no steps to address it then, either.

Frankly, I just lost all respect for the developer.

Telling somebody affected by such a critical issue that they have to wait until the undisclosed release of the sequel (in 2015, whenever that may be) for them to even consider fixing this problem, is, frankly, bullshit approach.

Yeah,I can't even find the beginning of the carpenter quest, yet I've been told to talk to him. Where is this Alchemist's guild if it's not the Alchemist in the quarter?

More importantly where is the 1.06 patch? Can we use the no-drm one from the Daedelic site?

Same issue with the saves... tried to apply the patch 1.6 as i read on the steam forum they fixed this kind of issue with it... but no luck it won't work on GOG version.
It's a shame and i agree this is a real bad reply from them telling us they have no time. I used to like their games, but this is simply a broken product, real unhappy about the outcome.

Since you already own the game, and saves from its GOG version are compatible with other versions, you can download a pirated version of the game, install patch 1.6, finish the quest, and then transfer your save back to the GOG version.

Maybe try here, in the bottom:
http://www.blackguards-game.com/patches/

I just finished both quests without any issues. Thus, I can confirm that they work properly with the patch v.1.6 installed.

Have these issues been resolved or the game been patched?

I just bought the main game and DLC and now I'm worried about encountering these problems. I wish I would have read this thread before purchasing, as I don't like buying broken games (well, no one does).

If this hasn't been fixed, Daedalic needs to take responsibility (and be more respectful to their customer base). Blackguards 2 is to be released in a few days, after which they won't have a reasonable excuse not to send GOG an update for the original game.

---
EDIT (2015-01-19): For those interested, I wrote Daedalic and they responded with the following...

"yes we are aware of the problems with Blackguards and we plan to do something about it. The Patching process is however complicated and time consuming so i can't tell you when exactly to expect it to be released.

best regards
Marc"