Your Feedback, Our Answers and What Happens Next
Hi again, Talisman fans. :TalProToad:
First of all, our team want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has supported and shared feedback on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition since launch.
We also want to fully acknowledge that it’s not been the smooth start we hoped for, and that’s why we want to publicly acknowledge that we’ve heard you all loud and clear, whether your feedback has been positive or negative. We’ve always strived to be as transparent with you all as possible as a studio, and we’re making this blog post ensure we continue doing that.
Across our Discord, the Steam forums and more, you’ve all had a ton of different questions about Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, and we’re going to answer the most common questions now. We’re not going to shy away from the hard questions, because we think that would not be fair on you as our audience.
Also, even though a large amount of these questions have been answered directly to the people who have asked these questions, we wanted to gather them all in one place so that if people have questions, they can check here first to see if it’s already been answered.
[h3]You can find the full FAQ below:[/h3]
When are fixes coming?
Right now, the priority for our team is to work on bug fixes, especially the ones that result in crashes. We’ve narrowed down the cause of the most common crash issue thanks to the help of our community and the hard work of our development team, and we’ve rolled out a fix for the issue already.
You can expect a series of rapid updates to be deployed to the game soon, as we fix these key issues.
We’ve already released 2 patches which fix common community reported issues - and we plan on continuing this until those issues are resolved.
How did you release a game with bugs?
We know that in an ideal world, every game that is released would be entirely bug free. Some of our team members here at Nomad have spent enough time in the games industry to remember the time when patching your game after launch wasn’t even an option!
Even knowing that patching is an option these days, we always do our best to make sure every single game we release is as bug-free as we can make it. With the size of our team, thrashing the game as much as it can be thrashed goes a long way, but there are still going to be issues that we miss that come to light in the public release.
Between our QA team and rest of the Nomad Games staff, we’ve managed to play thousands and thousands of games of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition from start to finish - which has meant that we’ve been able to iron out tons and tons of bugs over the past few months. However, in 2 days more people have played games of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition (on a much wider range of hardware setups) than we ever could in the time we’ve been developing the game.
If an issue only crops up in every 10,000 games, there’s a good chance that our testing team will miss it, because it’s so rare. If 10,000 games get played in a week by Talisman players, chances are that someone is going to find it.
I'm getting a 'save crash dump' error whenever I try to get into a game - what should I do?
If you can, grab the crash dump that has been generated and send it in an email to [email protected]. This will help us work out why your hardware is either struggling or not working with Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. The more information we have, the better we can be positioned to fix these kinds of issues - so we massively appreciate all the information that you can share.
If you need to find your crash dump, it should be located in your default Steam directory, under: \Steam\steamapps\common\Talisman5
Why isn't the game cheaper?
We understand that pricing is always a consideration for players. This isn’t just a re-release of the original game - it’s a reimagined experience adapting a brand-new edition of Talisman, with improved graphics, additional content like the Deck Editor and a revamped game engine to handle the 5th Edition rules. These updates reflect the time and effort our team has invested to bring this version to life, and our goal with Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is to create a game that will offer hours of adventure, replayability, and enjoyment.
We’re also going to be adding free feature updates to the game as time goes on, adding even more value to the Talisman: Digital 5th Edition experience.
Why have you made this game easier than 4th Edition?
When we talked to Avalon Hill and Games Workshop as they were designing Talisman: 5th Edition originally, one of the common elements of Talisman that was mentioned was the average amount of time spent playing a single game. We also confirmed this, sharing information about the average time it takes for players to complete a game of Talisman: Digital Edition from start to finish.
Knowing that the length of time an average game took was a common complaint among players, Talisman: 5th Edition was designed to speed up the time it took for an average game, while keeping the same experience players have grown to love. Changes to how the game plays were made with speeding the game up in mind (for example, there are now far fewer ways to miss a turn), not making the game easier. Talisman: 5th Edition still offers the same challenge it always has, it’s just a more streamlined experience, which means that veteran players might mistake that for ease.
Why isn't this free for Talisman: Digital Edition owners?
A good question, which is related to the “why isn’t the game cheaper” answer above.
We fully understand that people have invested a lot of time and money into Talisman: Digital Edition in the 10+ years it has been available. While this is a brand new title, we always knew that a large amount of our audience would be existing Talisman: Digital Edition fans. With that in mind, we had many internal discussions here at Nomad about how we provide those existing players with something to say thank you for their support.
After much discussion, we decided on our previously announced plan to remaster classic Talisman: 4th Edition expansions, and bring them over to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition entirely free of charge for people who already own those expansions.
We went with this plan, as it allows us to provide value to players who have already purchased Talisman: Digital Edition content, giving them access to the remastered and rebalanced content we’re working on at no additional cost to anything they’ve already paid.
Why aren't there expansions or extra content included at launch?
A simple question with a simple answer - we don’t want to overwork, push and demand more from our team than we expect of them.
We’re a small studio founded by experienced game developers, all with experience in the AAA games industry, with first-hand experience of being overworked, pushed and crunched to do more than they should in too short a time. One of the main reasons that Nomad Games was founded was so that they could get away from that kind of environment, and that environment is something that hasn’t left the industry over the past 10 years.
Our team have been working hard for over a year on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, and they will continue to work hard on the game - we’ve already published a roadmap for our planned upcoming content and further development on the game.
Also, because of the size of our studio, we’re keenly aware of our financials at all time. While we of course get ongoing sales and income from our other existing titles, it’s through making sure that new, paid content is being released by our team that enables us to pay our hard-working staff. If we wait until Talisman: Digital 5th Edition has expansions before launching, that’s more time without us being able to support ourselves through the income of that new, paid content.
Why are there less house rules than in 4th Edition?
When we originally started designing Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we did so with two things:
Because of these two things, we didn’t want to just bring across all of the house rules from Talisman: Digital Classic Edition. With all of the legacy code in the Talisman engine stripped out, many of the things that specific house rules relied on to work were now missing - meaning we’d have to rebuild those house rules from scratch.
We also knew that there were a lot of issues with how we’d previously designed house rules to work, due to years of legacy code bloating up the feature, so we redesigned how house rules work behind-the-scenes.
As part of the roadmap we published pre-launch, we also announced that we’d be bringing more house rules to the game in a free, future update. This is because setting ourselves up to have house rules work better in the future took more time than we thought, but we’re confident that in the long-run, it’ll be worth it for both us as developers, and for you all as players.
Why isn't there text on the cards anymore?
With the release of the physical 5th Edition of Talisman, the cards in the game were redesigned to have more of a focus on the stunning artwork on them. Using the new design of the 5th Edition cards as a basis, we designed the Talisman: Digital 5th Edition cards to showcase the artwork in a way that did the hard work of all the artists at Avalon Hill justice as we brought them to life.
While this was our focus, we understand that for some players, usability comes before showcasing artwork, which is entirely fair. We’re going to be looking at ways to offer players the ability to choose between the modern look that we currently have, and one where text is featured more prominently.
My stats seem wrong, why?
We’ve had a much bigger influx of new players than we expected, which has meant that the servers we use to track player statistics was overwhelmed with requests. We’re going to be looking at the statistics tracking system we use soon to ensure everything is running as it should - it’s on our list of things to sort!
I'm getting a 'Lost connection to server: HandleDisconnect' error - what should I do?
Good news! We recently rolled out a patch that hopefully will have fixed this issue - if you’re still getting this error though, please email [email protected] with as much information as you can, and we’ll do everything we can to help.
Are you going to change the yellow lines on the board?
Yes! This is feedback we heard strongly during our debut developer stream, and in the update that we just rolled out, we've reduced both the intensity of the dividing lines, and also reduced the bloom generally across the game.
The dice are pre-seeded, make them like they were in Talisman: Digital Edition!
If you’ve followed the development process for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, you’ll know that we stripped back the Talisman engine to the absolute bare-bones to build the game back up again.
Part of stripping back the engine meant taking the dice system back to how it was when we originally launched Talisman: Digital Edition, where the dice would be generated before the game started. We recently rolled out an update that adjusts how the dice behave, to bring them more in-line with the experience players expect from the current version of Talisman: Digital Classic Edition.
We’re also going to be looking at other ways we can give players more options when it comes to dice generation - but more about that in the next question.
The dice are rigged still, why are they still rigged?
This is something we’ve discussed, debated and argued with players in all our games for the past 10+ years. Not only that, but every single digital board game developer we’ve ever spoken to has had the exact same issue. Negative pattern recognition, gambler’s fallacy and more combine together to make it feel like the dice are against you when you get bad luck.
There are many high-profile examples of titles tilting the odds towards the player, because as humans we’re not very good at recognising the difference between ‘true’ randomness and what we define as ‘fair’ randomness. It’s for precisely this reason that we added a house rule that will make your re-rolls always be a different number, which we hope will mitigate some of the dice rolling frustration!
In the future, we’re going to be investigating other, optional ways we can lean the odds into the players favour, to better align with what people ‘expect’ the dice to do. Ironically, this would mean we were actually rigging the dice at that point, but if people would feel happier with the ability to optionally toggle on such a mode, we’d be happy to offer it.
I rolled a 1 but it counted as a 6, why?
In the physical version of Talisman: 5th Edition, the Talisman symbol now represents a 6, instead of a 1. This caught out many of the Nomad Games team when we first started playing 5th Edition, so we understand the confusion!
When is 5th Edition coming to other platforms?
When it’s ready to! To answer this question properly, we’re going to be focusing on just the Steam version for the foreseeable future until we’ve incorporated community feedback and requests, and then look into other platforms.
Every character can now choose their alignment, why even have alignment at this point?
Alignment being chosen at the start of the game is something that was introduced in the 5th Edition rules changes, in order to give players more options with how they wanted to play the game. This choice is only made at the start of the game, and during the game follows all the same rules as 4th Edition did, so changing your alignment in the middle of a game carries the same weight, choices and tactical decision.
[h3]What Happens Next?[/h3]
Now that we’ve gone over the more common community questions, one question still remains - “What’s Next for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition”?
Firstly, our priority is going to be fixing any of the bugs, crashes and other issues that have been reported by the community. We’ve already rolled out two patches (you can read the patch notes for the latest one here) that fix a number of community reported issues, and we’re not slowing down anytime soon. Our team are going to keep working on updates, and we’re also going to be putting out a player feedback form so that you can more directly give us your feedback on the game.
We massively appreciate your patience, love and support, and can’t wait to show you what we’ve got planned for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition.
First of all, our team want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has supported and shared feedback on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition since launch.
We also want to fully acknowledge that it’s not been the smooth start we hoped for, and that’s why we want to publicly acknowledge that we’ve heard you all loud and clear, whether your feedback has been positive or negative. We’ve always strived to be as transparent with you all as possible as a studio, and we’re making this blog post ensure we continue doing that.
Across our Discord, the Steam forums and more, you’ve all had a ton of different questions about Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, and we’re going to answer the most common questions now. We’re not going to shy away from the hard questions, because we think that would not be fair on you as our audience.
Also, even though a large amount of these questions have been answered directly to the people who have asked these questions, we wanted to gather them all in one place so that if people have questions, they can check here first to see if it’s already been answered.
[h3]You can find the full FAQ below:[/h3]
When are fixes coming?
Right now, the priority for our team is to work on bug fixes, especially the ones that result in crashes. We’ve narrowed down the cause of the most common crash issue thanks to the help of our community and the hard work of our development team, and we’ve rolled out a fix for the issue already.
You can expect a series of rapid updates to be deployed to the game soon, as we fix these key issues.
We’ve already released 2 patches which fix common community reported issues - and we plan on continuing this until those issues are resolved.
How did you release a game with bugs?
We know that in an ideal world, every game that is released would be entirely bug free. Some of our team members here at Nomad have spent enough time in the games industry to remember the time when patching your game after launch wasn’t even an option!
Even knowing that patching is an option these days, we always do our best to make sure every single game we release is as bug-free as we can make it. With the size of our team, thrashing the game as much as it can be thrashed goes a long way, but there are still going to be issues that we miss that come to light in the public release.
Between our QA team and rest of the Nomad Games staff, we’ve managed to play thousands and thousands of games of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition from start to finish - which has meant that we’ve been able to iron out tons and tons of bugs over the past few months. However, in 2 days more people have played games of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition (on a much wider range of hardware setups) than we ever could in the time we’ve been developing the game.
If an issue only crops up in every 10,000 games, there’s a good chance that our testing team will miss it, because it’s so rare. If 10,000 games get played in a week by Talisman players, chances are that someone is going to find it.
I'm getting a 'save crash dump' error whenever I try to get into a game - what should I do?
If you can, grab the crash dump that has been generated and send it in an email to [email protected]. This will help us work out why your hardware is either struggling or not working with Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. The more information we have, the better we can be positioned to fix these kinds of issues - so we massively appreciate all the information that you can share.
If you need to find your crash dump, it should be located in your default Steam directory, under: \Steam\steamapps\common\Talisman5
Why isn't the game cheaper?
We understand that pricing is always a consideration for players. This isn’t just a re-release of the original game - it’s a reimagined experience adapting a brand-new edition of Talisman, with improved graphics, additional content like the Deck Editor and a revamped game engine to handle the 5th Edition rules. These updates reflect the time and effort our team has invested to bring this version to life, and our goal with Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is to create a game that will offer hours of adventure, replayability, and enjoyment.
We’re also going to be adding free feature updates to the game as time goes on, adding even more value to the Talisman: Digital 5th Edition experience.
Why have you made this game easier than 4th Edition?
When we talked to Avalon Hill and Games Workshop as they were designing Talisman: 5th Edition originally, one of the common elements of Talisman that was mentioned was the average amount of time spent playing a single game. We also confirmed this, sharing information about the average time it takes for players to complete a game of Talisman: Digital Edition from start to finish.
Knowing that the length of time an average game took was a common complaint among players, Talisman: 5th Edition was designed to speed up the time it took for an average game, while keeping the same experience players have grown to love. Changes to how the game plays were made with speeding the game up in mind (for example, there are now far fewer ways to miss a turn), not making the game easier. Talisman: 5th Edition still offers the same challenge it always has, it’s just a more streamlined experience, which means that veteran players might mistake that for ease.
Why isn't this free for Talisman: Digital Edition owners?
A good question, which is related to the “why isn’t the game cheaper” answer above.
We fully understand that people have invested a lot of time and money into Talisman: Digital Edition in the 10+ years it has been available. While this is a brand new title, we always knew that a large amount of our audience would be existing Talisman: Digital Edition fans. With that in mind, we had many internal discussions here at Nomad about how we provide those existing players with something to say thank you for their support.
After much discussion, we decided on our previously announced plan to remaster classic Talisman: 4th Edition expansions, and bring them over to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition entirely free of charge for people who already own those expansions.
We went with this plan, as it allows us to provide value to players who have already purchased Talisman: Digital Edition content, giving them access to the remastered and rebalanced content we’re working on at no additional cost to anything they’ve already paid.
Why aren't there expansions or extra content included at launch?
A simple question with a simple answer - we don’t want to overwork, push and demand more from our team than we expect of them.
We’re a small studio founded by experienced game developers, all with experience in the AAA games industry, with first-hand experience of being overworked, pushed and crunched to do more than they should in too short a time. One of the main reasons that Nomad Games was founded was so that they could get away from that kind of environment, and that environment is something that hasn’t left the industry over the past 10 years.
Our team have been working hard for over a year on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, and they will continue to work hard on the game - we’ve already published a roadmap for our planned upcoming content and further development on the game.
Also, because of the size of our studio, we’re keenly aware of our financials at all time. While we of course get ongoing sales and income from our other existing titles, it’s through making sure that new, paid content is being released by our team that enables us to pay our hard-working staff. If we wait until Talisman: Digital 5th Edition has expansions before launching, that’s more time without us being able to support ourselves through the income of that new, paid content.
Why are there less house rules than in 4th Edition?
When we originally started designing Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we did so with two things:
- An entirely stripped back Talisman game engine.
- Knowledge that we wanted to focus on fully adapting Talisman: 5th Edition first, and then we would build upon the game for a long time.
Because of these two things, we didn’t want to just bring across all of the house rules from Talisman: Digital Classic Edition. With all of the legacy code in the Talisman engine stripped out, many of the things that specific house rules relied on to work were now missing - meaning we’d have to rebuild those house rules from scratch.
We also knew that there were a lot of issues with how we’d previously designed house rules to work, due to years of legacy code bloating up the feature, so we redesigned how house rules work behind-the-scenes.
As part of the roadmap we published pre-launch, we also announced that we’d be bringing more house rules to the game in a free, future update. This is because setting ourselves up to have house rules work better in the future took more time than we thought, but we’re confident that in the long-run, it’ll be worth it for both us as developers, and for you all as players.
Why isn't there text on the cards anymore?
With the release of the physical 5th Edition of Talisman, the cards in the game were redesigned to have more of a focus on the stunning artwork on them. Using the new design of the 5th Edition cards as a basis, we designed the Talisman: Digital 5th Edition cards to showcase the artwork in a way that did the hard work of all the artists at Avalon Hill justice as we brought them to life.
While this was our focus, we understand that for some players, usability comes before showcasing artwork, which is entirely fair. We’re going to be looking at ways to offer players the ability to choose between the modern look that we currently have, and one where text is featured more prominently.
My stats seem wrong, why?
We’ve had a much bigger influx of new players than we expected, which has meant that the servers we use to track player statistics was overwhelmed with requests. We’re going to be looking at the statistics tracking system we use soon to ensure everything is running as it should - it’s on our list of things to sort!
I'm getting a 'Lost connection to server: HandleDisconnect' error - what should I do?
Good news! We recently rolled out a patch that hopefully will have fixed this issue - if you’re still getting this error though, please email [email protected] with as much information as you can, and we’ll do everything we can to help.
Are you going to change the yellow lines on the board?
Yes! This is feedback we heard strongly during our debut developer stream, and in the update that we just rolled out, we've reduced both the intensity of the dividing lines, and also reduced the bloom generally across the game.
The dice are pre-seeded, make them like they were in Talisman: Digital Edition!
If you’ve followed the development process for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, you’ll know that we stripped back the Talisman engine to the absolute bare-bones to build the game back up again.
Part of stripping back the engine meant taking the dice system back to how it was when we originally launched Talisman: Digital Edition, where the dice would be generated before the game started. We recently rolled out an update that adjusts how the dice behave, to bring them more in-line with the experience players expect from the current version of Talisman: Digital Classic Edition.
We’re also going to be looking at other ways we can give players more options when it comes to dice generation - but more about that in the next question.
The dice are rigged still, why are they still rigged?
This is something we’ve discussed, debated and argued with players in all our games for the past 10+ years. Not only that, but every single digital board game developer we’ve ever spoken to has had the exact same issue. Negative pattern recognition, gambler’s fallacy and more combine together to make it feel like the dice are against you when you get bad luck.
There are many high-profile examples of titles tilting the odds towards the player, because as humans we’re not very good at recognising the difference between ‘true’ randomness and what we define as ‘fair’ randomness. It’s for precisely this reason that we added a house rule that will make your re-rolls always be a different number, which we hope will mitigate some of the dice rolling frustration!
In the future, we’re going to be investigating other, optional ways we can lean the odds into the players favour, to better align with what people ‘expect’ the dice to do. Ironically, this would mean we were actually rigging the dice at that point, but if people would feel happier with the ability to optionally toggle on such a mode, we’d be happy to offer it.
I rolled a 1 but it counted as a 6, why?
In the physical version of Talisman: 5th Edition, the Talisman symbol now represents a 6, instead of a 1. This caught out many of the Nomad Games team when we first started playing 5th Edition, so we understand the confusion!
When is 5th Edition coming to other platforms?
When it’s ready to! To answer this question properly, we’re going to be focusing on just the Steam version for the foreseeable future until we’ve incorporated community feedback and requests, and then look into other platforms.
Every character can now choose their alignment, why even have alignment at this point?
Alignment being chosen at the start of the game is something that was introduced in the 5th Edition rules changes, in order to give players more options with how they wanted to play the game. This choice is only made at the start of the game, and during the game follows all the same rules as 4th Edition did, so changing your alignment in the middle of a game carries the same weight, choices and tactical decision.
[h3]What Happens Next?[/h3]
Now that we’ve gone over the more common community questions, one question still remains - “What’s Next for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition”?
Firstly, our priority is going to be fixing any of the bugs, crashes and other issues that have been reported by the community. We’ve already rolled out two patches (you can read the patch notes for the latest one here) that fix a number of community reported issues, and we’re not slowing down anytime soon. Our team are going to keep working on updates, and we’re also going to be putting out a player feedback form so that you can more directly give us your feedback on the game.
We massively appreciate your patience, love and support, and can’t wait to show you what we’ve got planned for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition.
