Slashdot Mirror

Bethesda has treated PC gamers very well with the Fall Out and Elder Scrolls games.

If by "very well" you meant "released buggy games and a few patches that fixed a small percentage of those bugs, and then left it to the community of players to fix everything else" then yes, you are correct.

For example, there is the Unofficial Oblivion Patch

This mod is a joint effort to fix the vast amount of bugs currently existing in Oblivion v1.2.0.416, fixing over 2,200 bugs so far!

For another example, there was the Fallout 3 1.4 patch, issued three months after the previous patch, with folks complaining left and right about how buggy the game was (it would throw up an error on Windows when exiting the game... they couldn't even get their "quit program" routine to not crash!).

The patch does not actually fix any known bugs. The only new features are:
- New achievements for The Pitt
- Support for multiple add-ons (Gamers in Asia can now play Operation: Anchorage, unlike before).

Releasing API's to allow fan made mods to their games are one of the reasons I enjoy playing them.

They don't release an API, or you misunderstand what an API is - they release a "construction kit". Some might think I am splitting hairs, but they have never put out anything that lets you communicate directly with the internals of the game engine, a "programming interface" if you will.

Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of Bethesda's games - Skyrim on day 1, Fallout (and New Vegas, different people I know) collector's editions (PC and XBOX). But I am also not blind to how poor their code seems to be and how little they really support and fix their games. When equipping an item causes the game to crash, something is seriously wrong (Morrowind did that to me all the time).

There are a lot of things wrong with Oblivion, but most of them are fixed by mods. For example, your first complaint is remedied by Map Marker Overhaul.

...(annoying, unmoddable) intervace;

Not quite:

DarkUI'd DarN
Toggleable Quantity Prompt

...(annoying, unmoddable) intervace;

Not quite:

DarkUI'd DarN
Toggleable Quantity Prompt

Somewhere around Oblivion or perhaps slightly beyond that is where I stop caring about how pretty a game is

Heh, you don't know what you're missing :)
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=30054

Oblivion remains an unbelievably gorgeous game, jaw-dropping and absolutely amazing. But the counter-intuitive leveling system took immersion and broke it on the wheel.

Agreed, but thankfully the game is highly modable.

Give it another go, with nGCD to replace the leveling system and either TIE or OOO, both of which fix level scaling. It's like playing a different game.

Oblivion remains an unbelievably gorgeous game, jaw-dropping and absolutely amazing. But the counter-intuitive leveling system took immersion and broke it on the wheel.

Agreed, but thankfully the game is highly modable.

Give it another go, with nGCD to replace the leveling system and either TIE or OOO, both of which fix level scaling. It's like playing a different game.

Have you bought a house? Every house has it's [sic] quirks. Most of these are discovered after at least a few weeks of "use." Often, you can pay a little extra to fix or improve the quirks, or you can just live with them. I'd say the initial walkthroughs, the home inspections, etc, are not too far removed from reviews of games

So, with a house, you can fix the issues yourself (or pay someone to do it), and subsequently increase its value.

How does that have any relation to games? Can you fix the game yourself? Can you pay someone to fix the game for you? When you do get the game fixed, does that increase its value, justifying your investment?

So, they are improving from their old practice of releasing broken and buggy games with no plans at all to fix any but the most glaring problems later?

See the glitches list for Oblivion on the UESP wiki for a start; continue to the Unofficial Oblivion Patch where the modding community fixed over a thousand bugs left by Bethesda to rot; and that's not even including still unpatched bugs in the engine, for which you need some additional software made by modders ...

You know coding is quite a heavy thing to just throw at a kid. Him being from the "gratification-right-now" generation will make him quit long before anything cool can be done with coding.

How about leading him into mods? You can get results very quickly and pretty much for free after an initial investment. Get him a copy of Oblivion GOTY or Fallout 3, introduce him to TESNexus.com or fallout3nexus.com, download Blender, some of the easily available scripting wikis and forums and away he goes.

He can have a replica of his favourite Final Fantasy weapon in a couple of days, usable in-game. There are at least a dozen mods of Cloud's Buster sword he can reverse engineer to teach himself the shapes and the textures and how to make a file usable by the game engine. Immediate reward. May make him plug at it long enough to begin modeling NPCs and elaborate armour.

...Didn't someone mod a dungeon from Daggerfall into Oblivion - Cybiades, something like that?

Answer my own question.... Tesnexus

Not sure if it is actually a ported dungeon, but the textures would certainly indicate that to be the case.

If that dungeon is any indication of the game proper, and not just a high level one...damn.