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Bethesda Investigates Shivering Isles Bug

Posted by Zonk on from the lots-of-bugs-on-that-island-what's-one-more dept.

Gamespot reports on a glitch in the recently-released Shivering Isles expansion to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It's unclear at this time if the Xbox 360 version of the title also has it, but on the PC side of things a game-breaking snafu can arise after 50-120 hours of gameplay post-Isles installation. "The bug apparently starts affecting the game as soon as the expansion pack is installed for the PC version of Shivering Isles. The problem arises because the game generates a huge number of identification numbers internally for objects, and once the allotted space for those numbers becomes exhausted, newly created objects will disappear from the gameworld and the game could simply crash ... It appears that the more frames per second the game runs at, the faster that space of identification numbers fills up."

54 comments

  1. Broken script by pdbaby · · Score: 1

    Seems it's a broken NPC script with 6 of the new additions (all generic guard characters, amusingly). Time to move to 64bit? :-P

    --
    Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
    1. Re:Broken script by mikkelm · · Score: 1

      I hope you're joking. Somehow I doubt that this is caused by exhaustion of addresses in a 32 bit field. If it was, your Oblivion savegames would be above 16GiB each.

    2. Re:Broken script by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 1

      Pssh, they used some dinky variable type like "short", assuming that they'd never need more. If they'd used 32, they'd be fine right now.

      Either way it's sloppy. You should never have anything in your code that just keeps growing every time you run the code, unless you're keeping time or something...Because this issue is continuing after they stop and start the game...It's saving this crap on the hard drive somewhere, and that's just damn sloppy.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    3. Re:Broken script by DogFacedJo · · Score: 4, Informative


          It is caused by the exaustion of IDs in the low 24 bits of the ID. The field was intended to roll over back to 0 since the majority of the IDs are only needed temporarily. Unfortunatly they bugged the implementation, failing to preserve the 8 high bits (normally FF) in all rollover cases thus generating much internal confusion.
          The problem was exascerbated by the new guard scripts which really burned through the IDs fast.

    4. Re:Broken script by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 1

      You should never have anything in your code that just keeps growing every time you run the code, unless you're keeping time or something...

      Or you're simulating something which has the ability to just keep growing. It's not necessarily a memory leak if it's actually using that.

      And by the way, if you are keeping time, note that we won't run into trouble for at least a few decades, by which point we'll all be on 64-bit, and it should be trivial to switch to a 64-bit integer for timekeeping.

      It's saving this crap on the hard drive somewhere, and that's just damn sloppy.

      Yeah, it's called saving a game. Notice how some shooters let you save the game whenever you want -- take Half-Life, you can save anytime you want, load up your game, and everything will be where you left it. You can walk back five levels and still find the bloodstains and bodies you left there.

      What's damned sloppy is not that they have something growing, or that they are saving it. What's damned sloppy is that they don't seem to have a plan for when it gets too big. For instance, most shooters follow a general rule that anywhere you have something that respawns, all visual effects of that something should disappear either after a fixed amount of time, or there should be a maximum number of them.

      Examples: Bullet holes where you have potentially infinite ammo. Crowbar in Half-Life 2 -- you can bang away on a wall and make interesting designs, but eventually, you'll make a new mark and the oldest one you made will disappear. Antlions -- just about any other monster will stay where you left it, but antlions do tend to fade after awhile, just play "Antlion Troopers" for a very graphic example of this.

      But, I don't think they were sloppy to let that grow quite a lot -- even to the limit of, say, a 32-bit integer for the ids. I think that's actually a design feature, and a good one -- if they had a plan to keep it sane, as in, not running out of RAM, and what do you do when you actually run out of ids?

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  2. News from the future... today! by Clever7Devil · · Score: 4, Funny

    This happens in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade as well. It occurs when a character casts too many beneficial spells in a short period of time. Blizzard is reporting that it is a Buffer overload.

    --
    "By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
  3. Deja vu by hansamurai · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hey, this kinda reminds me of the time Slashdot hit the comment limit in its database.

    --
    Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
    1. Re:Deja vu by physicsboy500 · · Score: 0

      It reminds me more of when many featured articles hit their slashdot limit.

      Thus just causing many of them to crash.

      --
      The original generic sig.
  4. Ha! by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 0

    So the number field they chose to represent the key for these objects was too small, so after a period of time it fills up and causes unstable behavior?

    Who says programmers never learned from Y2K?

    I did some Y2K work in Y1.998K, and it's stuck with me...All my auto-numbering keys are as big as I can make 'em. Any number that grows, I figure out the largest possible size that number could be, and then put it in a datatype that's capable of hold a number at least twice as big.

    Sure it's a waste of space, but on a small system, the performance hit is negligible, and on a large system, the odds are higher that they'll run out of numbers! When you try and optimize variable size in situations like this, you end up with problems like this...

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    1. Re:Ha! by remembertomorrow · · Score: 1

      __int64/BIGINT for the win!

      --
      Registered Linux user #421033
    2. Re:Ha! by illegalcortex · · Score: 1

      It's not just a waste of space, it's a waste of time. Using certain data types can be much faster, especially where graphics are concerned. While you don't want screw something up by skimping, picking the right data type for the situation is the way you get the highest performance from your code. Games would be a case where this matters a lot.

    3. Re:Ha! by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But this isn't graphics code...This is unique object identifiers. With graphics you know how big all the numbers are going to be! You set hard limits on all your rendering, and you're done. If your code isn't set to render past a certain point, it just won't...If you're set up to only process X vectors, it doesn't matter if the system is capable of more...And moreover, nothing grows in graphics processing. You process the same level all the way through...If the system has to do more work with a series of frames, dealing with shadows, and objects and funky light effects, stuff slows down, but that frame is the exact same "size" in terms of bits as all the previous frames.

      In this situation, they're just storing object information. Not visual, just existence. And their number is too small...Hell, the patch that was released just adds some zeros on the end.

      This is exactly what I'm talking about...People being stingy with the numbers because they think, in their minds, that all big numbers slow things down. Sometimes, big numbers are your friends.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    4. Re:Ha! by illegalcortex · · Score: 1

      Sigh. I wasn't saying this WAS graphics code. I thought that was fairly clear. I was just making the point to you that choosing your variable size isn't just about size, it's about performance. CPU architecture handles certain variable sizes differently. This means different variables types will actually affect the performance of your app, even if it has nothing to do with the graphics.

      Also, if you read the post right after yours, you'll see that this wasn't even the problem. The problem in the weird way they were prefixing things, which caused it to roll over way before the size of the variable did. It was a bug, plain and simple. Would have been a bug even if they had prefixed an Int64. Except you should already know this because you replied to that post BEFORE you replied to this one.

    5. Re:Ha! by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 1

      I did read it. I even responded to it before I responded to you.

      Prefixing, in my mind, is the wrong word for what they did...They started numbering at FF000000 or whatever, assuming it'd never roll over. So first off, that's just dumb. You should never start an incrementing counter from anything but zero...To point at your original argument, they used way the hell more space than they needed, because, in their minds, all they were ever going to need was FFFFFF, not FFFFFFFF.

      Second, it's still a size issue. Wouldn't have been a size issue if they'd started at 00000000 (4,294,967,296 possible objects), I agree, but they didn't, so they only left themselves 16^6 (16,777,216) possible objects, and they ran out at high levels. At that point they needed to look at the number, and make damn sure that they weren't ever going to need more...Just from my experience, looking at 16,777,216, I wouldn't trust it for a second. If you're still in the 10's of millions, you're probably going to have problems at some point with a number that continues to grow over the runtime of a program that runs for 100+ hours.

      But the coder looked at it and said, "Whoa, any bigger, and I'll have to go to 64 bit...I guess this will be big enough." And now they have a problem. It's not that big a deal, but it's something that could have been prevented.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    6. Re:Ha! by illegalcortex · · Score: 1
      I wrote:

      Also, if you read the post right after yours, you'll see that this wasn't even the problem ... Except you should already know this because you replied to that post BEFORE you replied to this one.
      And you replied:

      I did read it. I even responded to it before I responded to you.
      It's at this point I realize you are not really reading my posts. You must be reading them somewhat, but maybe "skim" is a better word. But this reply makes me understand why you're absolutely not getting what I'm saying about larger integers, cpu architecture and performance. I give up on you as a lost cause. If you're actually interested in understanding, go back and read my posts again and maybe you'll get it.
    7. Re:Ha! by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 1

      Well, yea, I was skimming. But looking back, I don't think I was that far off, though I did make some leaps from what you said...In my mind, all the interesting performance issues with games are in the area of graphics...A 64 bit object identifier wouldn't have really made a dent in processing, especially for a game like Oblivion, which has so much positional data to keep track of, so I just leapt to the (to me) interesting bit, and ignored the back end stuff which you were probably talking about.

      I understand what you're saying...Hell, big number freak that I am, I've seen applications that just crawled because of the overuse of big variables...places where people used 64bit all the way through, even for stupid things...VB used to be rife with this kind of stuff, and I don't support that.

      Even in cases like this one, I wonder that they really needed to store information in this manner...I mean, it seems like some of these numbers would be reclaimable. I don't know. Maybe they didn't want to have to officially keep track of the "object database" if it can be called that, retiring numbers for destroyed objects, etc. And I'm all for restricting datasets, so things can't grow, and you can use an appropriately sized number.

      But in situations where you can't restrict, and the number's going to keep on growing...You can't just hope it won't top out. Err on the side of caution.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    8. Re:Ha! by geekoid · · Score: 1

      On some systems thats fine, on many types of programming you need to control all the information, and keep it tight. Like..say.. Graphics for example.

      This bug is clearly due to amaturish code.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  5. Seen it Myself by DG · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm armpit-deep in Oblivion these days, and Niner bought me the SI expansion for my birthday.

    When I saw the announcement about the bug, I tested it for myself, and it is very real. Happily, there is a community-produced script patch that disables the problem.

    Interestingly, the root cause of the problem isn't so much the broken scripts that consume ObjectIDs, but rather that some intelligence was baked into the ID instead of it being just a raw counter.

    The ObjectID is prefixed with "FF" and the remaining bytes are the counter values. When the counter hits FFFFFFFF it rolls over, and the "FF" prefix no longer applies. *That* is the problem - the game code no longer recognizes the ObjectID as valid without the FF prefix.

    It seems that the code that generates the next ObjectID is smart enough to skip IDs that have been assigned; hacks that reset the ObjectID counter back to FF000000 appear to do the right thing. If the counter had no prefix, the bug wouldn't affect the game - the counter would roll over, but any objects that had been around since the start of the game (with low ObjectIDs) would be properly skipped and all would be well. Unless you managed to have FFFFFFFF objects extant in the game world, there'd never be a way to run out.

    Happily, my counter was at FF4xxxxx so my game save is OK. I feel for the guys who discovered they were at FFFxxxxx.

    DG

    --
    Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
    1. Re:Seen it Myself by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wow, that's incredibly short sighted of them...I've seen crap like that before, working on databases built by amateurs. Like a lookup table that doesn't have a "flag" to tell the query which dataset the entries belong to, but instead a situation where the original designer just incremented the key by an arbitrary amount, e.g Rate codes are 1-999, product_codes are 1000-1999, etc, so when the 1000th rate code is added, it writes over the first product code, and chaos ensues.

      You should never make the "size" of a variable part of it's identifying factor.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    2. Re:Seen it Myself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's basically it but its a little more complicated than that. Indeed, all objects in Oblivion are referenced by an unsigned 32-bit integer known as the formid. The high 8 bits of this value, however, is reserved for the mod index. The first master file (generally Oblivion.esm unless you are running a total conversion) has a mod index of 00, the next mod you install has an index of 01, etc.... Objects that are generated dynamically in the game have a mod index of FF which is where the problem arises. Create too many new objects in the world (16 million) and you overflow this counter.

      While this problem does bring into question the ID system used by Oblivion it is still a large improvement over that used by Morrowind (the mod/plugin data structures between the games are very similar) which had numerous duplication and mod conflict issues. If Shivering Isles had not had a bug which generated too many new objects we'd likely never of heard about it.

      Dave Humphrey -- http://www.uesp.net/

    3. Re:Seen it Myself by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1

      You should never make the "size" of a variable part of it's identifying factor.

      That's just silly. People do this all the time for a variety of reasons (often for space concerns). Hell, IP address are just 32-bit numbers, and if the lower 8-bits of an address roll over, the address is in a different subnet. Sounds like a violation of your rule to me. And I'm sure I could come up with myriad other examples.

      What you shouldn't do is make such an assumption *unreasonable* (obviously 1000 codes is ridiculously small, particularly since you have 2^32 values to play with), and make sure to document it, regardless of your decision.

    4. Re:Seen it Myself by ultranova · · Score: 1

      It seems that the code that generates the next ObjectID is smart enough to skip IDs that have been assigned; hacks that reset the ObjectID counter back to FF000000 appear to do the right thing. If the counter had no prefix, the bug wouldn't affect the game - the counter would roll over, but any objects that had been around since the start of the game (with low ObjectIDs) would be properly skipped and all would be well. Unless you managed to have FFFFFFFF objects extant in the game world, there'd never be a way to run out.

      Or you they just make getNextObjectID() roll over at the proper place: "if objectID == FFEEEEEE Then objectID = FF000000 Else objectID = objectID + 1; return objectID".

      Then again, after seeing Morrowinds "let's run all the scripts once every frame and let each of them check if the user is activating the object this script actually applies to" approach, I can't say I'm the least bit surprised. Event-driven code is sooo 2000.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    5. Re:Seen it Myself by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 1

      Well, IPv4 would be considered a bad example by a lot of people, because of how quickly we ran into problems with the size of the address space.

      The thing with IP addresses is that they don't just keep incrementing...There is a hard limit on how many you get, even for an internal subnet, though it's unlikely anyone would ever max one out. If they did just keep incrementing, the internet would flop because the system would be re-assigning addresses to different people all the time. As a semi-relevant aside, the number in the expansion that over-flowed was the equivalent (in actual numbers) to a 192.0.0.0 subnet.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  6. fills up faster? by metalpres · · Score: 1

    so it fills up faster and crashes sooner the higher the fps? well then i should be able to play the game for about 500 hours cause i cant get more then 15fps in that game... :(

    1. Re:fills up faster? by darkrowan · · Score: 2, Informative

      300 hours, roughly I guess. Here's better data on how much time you have left vs both current reference ID and framerate
      http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering:Reference_Bug#R emaining_Playtime

      --
      AccountKiller
    2. Re:fills up faster? by jafuser · · Score: 1

      "The basis of the bug is that an internal "space" of identification numbers for objects created in the game (e.g., a dropped arrow, a new creature, etc.) becomes exhausted"

      Hah, I used to collect arrows by dodging them. Probably another reason I hit the bug so early in the pre-expansion game. =P

      --
      Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
    3. Re:fills up faster? by Loligo · · Score: 2, Funny

      >Hah, I used to collect arrows by dodging them.

      Guess that beats collecting arrows by NOT dodging them...

        -l

    4. Re:fills up faster? by jafuser · · Score: 1

      You can do that too. If I recall correctly, I think there is a 50% chance that getting hit by an arrow puts it directly into your inventory =)

      --
      Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
  7. Official patch (beta though) is available already by DogFacedJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A tested patch is clearly only a short way away.
        This story broke about 4 or 5 days ago... and the longer you put off patching the more likely the problem is to hit.

    http://www.elderscrolls.com/downloads/updates_patc hnotes12.htm

  8. Bethesda and the Time Bombs by Deorus · · Score: 1

    This sounds almost like the Slow Animations bug that happens after roughly 200 hours of gameplay and has never been fixed. People playing on the PC can hack their saves to reset a 32bit float value to temporarily work around the problem, though those with the Xbox (and probably PS3 too) version of the game are SOL.

    1. Re:Bethesda and the Time Bombs by Mongoose · · Score: 1

      PS3 version of SI isn't out yet. Maybe it's a good thing. The PS3 version is superior to the 360 version with the new shaders and additional content. Yes, buy the game for every platform. ;)

    2. Re:Bethesda and the Time Bombs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FYI: The bug doesn't have anything to do with SI, it's in the base game.

    3. Re:Bethesda and the Time Bombs by jafuser · · Score: 1

      Hah, this sounds like the exact same glitch, and explains what was going wrong.

      I stopped playing Oblivion only a couple months after release because of this. I had (for the time) a relatively fast computer and I loved to collect and gather tons of herbs and junk. I started having this problem at around 200 hours into the game.

      I always suspected that the amount of stuff I was collecting probably had some co-relation to the "slow animations" bug.

      It was a very elusive sort of problem because nothing seemed to exactly co-relate to when it would start, but it would always start very abruptly at roughly (but not exactly) the same amount of played-game time, despite trying various pervious savegames. In fact, I'm the person who wrote the first version of the list of questions "put together that may help find a commonality/solution" in those threads =)

      I had long grown irritated that Bethesda completely ignored the threads about this problem. I later saw that people discoveredhow to hack the save files to get around this problem, but I wasn't satisfied with that as a solution since I had no idea what else it might affect, so I never bothered to finish the game.

      I'm just glad that this bug is finally getting a spotlight. I'm not sure what it says about me though, that it took an EXPANSION for the average user to collect as many "world-deltas" as it took me in a few weeks of obsessive herb picking and junk collecting =)

      --
      Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
    4. Re:Bethesda and the Time Bombs by MBraynard · · Score: 1

      I understand the 360 will get a shader update.

    5. Re:Bethesda and the Time Bombs by iainl · · Score: 1

      The 360 got its shader update the Thursday or Friday before Shivering Isles went up (so before the Live downtime the other week, if that helps you). If you've played the game since then, that was why it had to perform an update.

      I think it makes a big difference, but others don't think it makes as much of one. The main change is in outdoor areas - the Level-Of-Detail method for bringing foliage in from a distance is much smoother.

      For the record, it still doesn't make things look quite as nice as the PS3, and that release also has shorter transition times from indoor to outdoor, as it dumps everything onto the hard drive. But the framerate seems a bit more solid on the 360, which is nice.

      --
      "I Know You Are But What Am I?"
  9. Re:Official patch by DogFacedJo · · Score: 1

    I feel strangely dirty...

        As if I somehow was paid for something that should have been freely given.

            Next time I leave out the link. ;}

  10. *sigh* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You can say a lot about Bethesda, but their code have some amazing "features" sometimes, one would think they have learned by now. Take Battlespire (released in 1997 I think), playing that over a LAN and tradeing stuff had some interesting effects. Give another player a pair of boots, and they would recieve a spear, hilarious.

  11. Quick! by Some_Llama · · Score: 1, Troll

    Somebody should submit this to http://www.worsethanfailure.com/

  12. Oblivion = too many bugs... by necro2607 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ouch, Bethesda seems to be making a bad name for themselves with Oblivion, in terms of software bugs. I don't mean to "troll" but my girlfriend's game has been screwed up multiple times, including the health bar no longer increasing, or the game bugging in such a manner that a quest could never be completed. We searched forums and contacted support about these issues (among others), with no solution ever found. Luckily I haven't encountered such extreme problems myself, but I have noticed small bugs from time to time. Regardless, such showstoppers as mentioned above are pretty unbelievable for a $70+ game of such supposedly high stature.

    1. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by sholden · · Score: 3, Funny

      it's a daggerfall sequel. They're still striving to meet that bug count standard.

    2. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oblivion is relatively stable compared to some of the stuff Bethesda has put out over the years. Even with the latest patch installed, Oblivion's predecessor Morrowind will simply crash if you play it long enough. Moving through map areas really fast can cause the crash in an hour or so.

      Don't get me started on Daggerfall (you want me to list the bugs?) or Terminator: SkyNET, where sliding down the hood of a car would usually kill you with falling damage, and the promised high-res mode for the previous game, Terminator: Future Shock, was impossible to finish because a mission required you to hit a sprite-like object with gunfire, which was impossible (couldn't hit sprites, only 3D models) in SkyNET's modified engine.

      Captcha: magneto

    3. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No more so than their past games. Daggerfall ( 2nd installment in the Elder Scrolls series ) was notorious for bugs - skeletons charging at you by walking backwards, being able to jump through the walls of the dungeons where 2 panes meet, and then being able to walk along the outside of the "roof" of all the tunnels, jumping to adjacent tunnels and rooms at the risk of falling to your death if you miss and then a long plunge to the depths of infinity while the entire dungeon shrinks to a pinpoint of light...

      QA has never been their strong point - game scale, non-linear free form plots and intricate character creation is their real skill.

    4. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by necro2607 · · Score: 1

      That's lame, though. Just because their previous stuff was buggy as hell doesn't make it OK for them to keep doing so... I have pretty reasonable standards, I'll tolerate some bugs here and there, but I don't consider it acceptable to allow total show-stopper bugs that render the game unplayable (your health never going up pretty much makes it impossible to continue playing the game)...

    5. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by Shados · · Score: 1

      Thats probably why PC gaming is slowing down a lot more than because of MMOs... between games like Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2...these games were released in a state that could barely be qualified as alpha by console standards. I am and always was a PC game fan, but this is getting out of hands.

    6. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by ultracool · · Score: 1

      Since installing Oblivion, I've had real problems with games crashing under Windows. Oblivion would crash every 15 minutes or so, and nasty crashes too! Some of them would even reboot my machine! It's too frustrating to play now. I'm going to have a go installing it under Wine. I won't be able to have HDR, but at least the game might be playable. Like Windows needs something else to make it more unstable...

    7. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by __aamkky7574 · · Score: 1

      Thats probably why PC gaming is slowing down a lot more than because of MMOs... between games like Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2...these games were released in a state that could barely be qualified as alpha by console standards.

      Ummm, you do know that the XBox 360 version has the exact same bugs as the PC version, right? And at least on the PC, you can avail of an unofficial patch which includes about a 1000 bugfixes. No such patch for the XBox 360. I can't see why you think that console programming involves some miraculous process which results in no bugs.

      P.
    8. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by Khanstant · · Score: 1

      They're features to encourage you to play better games.

    9. Re:Oblivion = too many bugs... by Joker1980 · · Score: 1

      Couldent agree with you more, but its not only Oblivion. Morrowind was also a buggy mess. Dont get me wrong i enjoyed both immensly but as software becomes more complex testing is going to have to become a higher priority for all software.

      --
      Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
  13. just had it happen to me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i was cheating using player.additem
    i thought it was becauze i was adding nirnroots 99999 of them

  14. Bethesda = Bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bethesda has always made buggy games. I'm not saying the games aren't fun, but anyone who says they don't make buggy games is a liar. Ever heard of Redguard? They recalled it it was so buggy. I'm kinda surprised it didn't make it into the Wiki.

    I liked the one where shooting arrows over water made it so you couldn't drop anything any more.

  15. Nice title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Took me a moment of "where the hell are the Shivering Isles and why is Bethesda Hospital involved instead of the CDC" before I realized what was going on.

  16. People are actually still playing this POS? by Hazelnut · · Score: 1

    Wow. It's a dumbed down, albeit pretty, game. It's hardly much of an RPG, and I got bored after 15 hours when I realised how utterly shallow and moronic the game was. The patronising inbuilt quest walkthrough comments and complete lack of choice is most situations is absolutely unbelievable. It's a crying shame the direction the current bunch of idiots at Bethseda, lead by Todd 'boobies' Howard, has taken the ES series. I loved Daggerfall, and Morrowind was pretty good - Oblivion should have taken the strong points of both instead of being dumbed down for the masses, even if it did make a large amount of money.

  17. Makes me wonder... by A_Non_Moose · · Score: 1

    if Bethesda ever figured out the reason for the "Stutter Bug"?

    Common factor seemed to be 200+ hours of gameplay and the animations for doors (fire, too) would
    "Stutter" so badly in ruins it was impossible to do anything.

    Thank $deity for the mod community and someone with a savegame 30'ish seconds before the bug.

    Sounds very similar to this particular bug, but where I stopped playing was a month or so
    after that bug was fixed by the mod community.

    Several long continuous threads might still exist on elderscrolls.com.

    (edit before post: and the disappearing items "fix" was to "take all" and place the items back one at a
    time...thx a lot, Bsoft...how about a "Put all" button, or, "always keep this item".

    Simple this to make the game less tedious/annoying.
    (Ignoring the book shelf, display case perfectionists.
    Yeah, yeah, I was one, too, to a degree).

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  18. Bethesda games have always by geekoid · · Score: 1

    been chocked full of bugs, or hugh areas of nothing.

    And I mean serious bugs. They should get a QA specialty consultant to go over there QA process.
    They could be good games, but I know when I see a bethesda game there will be bugs that should have been showstoppers and will crash the game, if not the computer.

    Exactly why I haven't picked up one of there games in a number of years.

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