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Bethesda Criticized Over Buggy Releases
SSDNINJA writes "This editorial discusses the habit of Bethesda Softworks to release broken and buggy games with plans to just fix the problems later. Following a trend of similar issues coming up in their games, the author begs gamers to stop supporting buggy games and to spread the idea that games should be finished and quality controlled before release – not weeks after."
It's not only Bethesda, the today-released Black Ops game is unplayable on multiplayer. Huge lag for every player and there's no point playing it until patch.
It's funny because Obsidian is the developer of New Vegas, and not Bethesda (who are the publishers).
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
While the article summary doesn't mention Fallout: New Vegas, it's clear from both the context and TFA itself that this is really a New Vegas issue.
I stuck some of my early (and mostly positive) thoughts on New Vegas's PC version in my journal a few days ago. Being in Europe, I only got the game after the first PC patch had been released, so I never got to see the PC version at its worst. Having now finished a 35 hour playthrough of the game, I can offer a slightly more comprehensive run-down of the bugs I did hit. Obviously, this is just my experience; your mileage may vary depending on your hardware and luck-stat.
The most common of the bugs is the Nvidia slowdown issue. This is annoying, particularly because my PC is massively ahead of the recommended specs, and because it often seems to occur at random, rather than just at "busy" times (though a few particular busy scenes will consistently cause slowdown). However, it's not going to stop you from completing the game and only had a minor impact on my enjoyment.
I had a few crashes to desktop - maybe a dozen over the course of the 35 hour playthrough. These almost always seem to happen in specific areas. The killer area for me was the "outer" section of Freeside, particularly near the door to the Old Mormon Fort. At least half of my crashes happened while walking towards the Fort. After a while, I just got used to tapping quicksave before walking through that area. It was an irritation, but not a massive one.
Quest bugs are potentially extremely serious. There are plenty of reports of quests being rendered uncompletable. In some cases, this can apply to main-plot quests, which is potentially game-breaking. I had three quests glitch on me over the course of the game. In two cases, it was a case of an NPC getting stuck in the middle of a scripted sequence and loading a quicksave fixed the problem without losing me more than 60 seconds or so of progress. The third case was more serious; several NPCs involved in a major sidequest refused to acknowledge my existence. This one cost me 45 minutes, as I had to go back to a proper save from before I started the quest (plus factor in additional time for trying to fix things before reverting to an old save).
I had a fourth quest incident that may have been a bug or may have been sloppy script work. I pushed a quest towards a very specific resolution, but when I handed it in, the quest-giver seemed to be assuming that I'd engineered a slightly different set of outcomes. As I say, this might not be a bug, it might just be a (rare) incidence of bad writing.
Beyond that, I didn't hit any of the other big bugs that have been reported. My followers worked as advertised (and are much improved from those in Fallout 3) and, most importantly, I had no problems with loading savegames. I think that the initial PC patch fixed those issues. There were a few small problems; monsters that sunk half way into the ground and stuff, but I don't tend to sweat that too much so long as it's only rare occurences.
In short, the bugs are an irritation, but the game is very, very good. If even small bugs irritate you, then the game is probably best avoided for now. Otherwise, I would say that the PC version is playable enough right now to be worth your money and time. One of the advantages of the PC as a platform is that patches can be pushed much faster; if I was still waiting for the PS3 or 360 version patch, I'd probably be rather irritated by now.
It's so fun to see NPC's heads spin around!
It doesn't matter so much on the PC where it can be patched by the community (in the case of Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout3 anyway) but I'd be gutted if I'd bought any of those games for a console. I don't know how you go about convincing publishers that games need to be released only when they're ready - I'm not going to boycott them, I'm glad I bought Oblivion et al. Maybe some kind of US class action suit would work - not fit for purpose because the quests are so buggy I can't complete them :D
I thought most major game developers nowadays released beta versions, only to patch it after release (if you're lucky).
Specifically, Daggerfall had a bunch of notorious bugs, including instadeaths for no obvious reason, and "falling into the void", where there was a hole in the walls that would drop your character into the spaces between the walls with no way out.
I am officially gone from
theyve been doing that since daggerfall in 1994(?) he is just realizing that now?
Never, ever buy a game without the chance to test it first. I've lost count of the number of game demos that I've installed only for them to not work, be incredibly slow, to have fatal bugs, to be so dull as to be unplayable, or just be annoying/crap in their execution. I don't go on to buy the games and save myself a lot of money.
Download demos first. Play your friend's copy. Don't be the guinea pig, because in a few weeks everyone will KNOW if there are problems with the game anyway. It's really not that important or practical to have the game for the first week - the servers will be overloaded, the software will need to be patched, and other gamers won't get an "advantage" over you in the space of a week or two. Plus, the price will come down and you'll be able to get second-hand copies (if the activation system even allow you to do that).
Stop pre-ordering. Stop buying games that you can't try out first. Stop buying games from companies that screw you over. Stop listening to the hype and paid reviewers. Start being an intelligent consumer who actually makes informed purchases. It's very simple. When something is in the "under £10" category, then it can be worth a punt even if you can't find any reviews, but a full-price game? I want a demo, or at least play on a friend's machine.
Such techniques mean that I've avoided many of the big-name flops and saved myself an awful lot of wasted money. The last big disappointment for me was Black & White and then I learned not to waste money on things without waiting for others to find the problems. Now I buy my games a year or two after they come out - the initial period of zero games is hard (but with the current indie scene, that's made much easier, and a recession helped) but after that you get the best games, on hardware capable of getting their full value, avoiding all the known flops, fully patched, with still-active servers (if the servers empty within the first year, it's hard to call a game a big success) and you don't have to pay full-price.
Stop pissing your money away on crap.
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 ...
What is this nonsense? Bethesda fixes bugs? As far as I know, they never released a single update for neither Oblivion nor Fallout 3 for PS3 ever, only a few expensive DLCs.
Some pretty damn serious bugs too. Oblivion: Game of the year edition is almost incompletable on the PS3 when using English unless you have the EU release. To cure vampirism, at one point you have to save your game, exit, change the OS language settings to German or French, start the game again, fumble through the buggy (now working) dialog, save again, exit, change back to English and restart the game again. If you have the US release you are out of luck. They never released a patch for this...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Every time I buy a new huge open ended RPG, I expect bugs.
Whenever you have a game with hundreds of characters, open ended quests and areas to explore, theres bound to be bugs. I Imagine its pretty hard to properly test all possible situations players will create.
As long as the game is involving and fun, I don't mind a bug here and there. Practice shows that eventually all the kinks are worked out, If not by the developer,
than by the community. Personally, I'd rather developers focus more of their resources towards content than extensive polish. Just my two cents.
Every black isle/ troika / obsidian game came out with a prety impressive list of bugs, and all of those games are among my favourites.
Also, GJ Obsidian on New Vegas. Great game, the minor bugs I encountered were more of the 'hah, funny glitch' kind than gamebreaking.
I pre-ordered New Vegas because I knew it would be an amazing game in spite of the bugs. It uses the same engine as Fallout 3 and Oblivion, and they were riddled with bugs, too. And a lot of the bugs in New Vegas existed in those 2, also. I don't blame Obsidian for those bugs.
However, the new bugs... I totally blame Obsidian for those. I experienced a lot of bugs relating to quests and story line, and that's all on Obsidian.
I definitely think I got my money's worth. Most $60 games aren't nearly this good, even if they have fewer bugs.
So how can Bethesda/Obsidian prevent these bugs in the future? It seems obvious that their internal testing didn't catch them, as the bugs are just too serious. Maybe they should sell pre-release 'beta' copies and let players test it. Anyone that doesn't want a beta-quality game can wait until the proper release, and everyone that buys the beta can just deal with the bugs. And help fix them.
One of my favorite MMOs did this like 15 years ago. Sierra's The Realm had an alpha that was free, then sold the beta client and charged monthly. When it was ready, they released the full version, and the beta testers didn't have to buy another copy, since they had already paid for one.
A lot of people won't like that, but the don't -have- to buy the beta. They can just wait for the release.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You don't know its buggy until you've bought and played it.
I would suspect that a large portion of these bugs can be squarely blamed on gamebryo and bethesdas stubborn insistence on continuing to use it well past it's sell by date. Slowdown, crashes and clipping issues could all presumably be the fault of the engine rather than any code of their own (not to meantion the whole "looking like ass" and "pre-baked terrain shadows"), scripting bugs however are a different issue, but I like to think that they are just giving a nod to th original fallout games, both of which were (and still are) riddled with them.
The entire Fallout series has been plagued by serious game breaking bugs. Even back in the days of Interplay and the first Fallout games, there was everything from constant crashes, to quest destroying glitches. To complete the mutant base in Fallout 1 took me something like 50 game loads, and probably only 5 or so of those were from actual gameplay related choices. The thing would crash if you dared to even move your character. And then there is the buggy as hell final boss encounter from Fallout 2, where the computer console would either randomly forget to show the turret option, or if it even showed it the other half the time it didn't work right.
Fallout 3, once again constant game crashes seemed to be back again at least in the PC version. A friend of mine had a completely broken series of saves where anytime the water facility building was entered the game would instantly crash. Any machine that loaded the save would experience the crash. This essentially requires a complete game restart, as his furthest back save still had the glitch present.
I like the whole world / scenario idea behind Fallout, but the execution in the games has always been a bug filled disaster. This is exactly why I didn't run out and pick up New Vegas. I've enjoyed playing the Fallout games when they work, but the bugs are so annoying it can seem like a chore to even finish a game.
Fear is the mind killer.
When 75% of your sales come in the first week,and most of that comes from moron fanboys who pre-order and buy it on day 1, why would the company change?
People keep buying the same buggy crap over and over again. Hell, people KNOW it's going to be buggy and go buy it anyway. Internet complaints mean exactly nothing. It's money that talks.
This is an entirely market driven behavior. Gamers are a lot like crack addicted morons: they complain a lot, but they do it while forking money over to get their latest fix, so nobody gives a rats ass what they're saying.
As soon as people en-masse say "we refuse to buy the next Bethesda game until after it's been proven to be relatively bug free on release" this nonsense will continue.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Obsidian make buggy or uncomplete games, but is about the only company that write decent characters and story. The people that know anything about gaming know this, so wen you buy a obsidian game, you know you will see a lot of bugs, but also a excellent game. "Ugly, but the sex is fantastic".
I have played New Vegas for about 45 hours, and I have loved it. It works any cents I have invested in it.
-Woof woof woof!
Internet connected devices and faster internet speeds have made developers extremely lazy. In the days of the SNES for example, if you released a game with game breaking bugs and glitches, there was no way to patch them out and fix the game. You had to release games without game breaking bugs and glitches in them no matter what...unless you wanted a major recall on your hands. Games were tested overly and thoroughly to ensure that every single problem possible was discovered and dealt with before the game shipped to retail. How many game breaking errors are found on the best SNES games that people still play today? Does Super Mario suffer from any major issues that crash the game? Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Mega Man X? How many game saves have been corrupted in Chrono Trigger on the SNES? I've never seen it happen and CT has been out for a long time. Look at the best and more popular PS2 games that were released not that many years ago. Did Grand Theft Auto or Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy or Virtua Fighter on the PS2 suffer from game breaking glitches or bugs on the PS2? I've played thousands of hours of all of those games individually and never once did I have to hard reset my console because the game froze my hardware.
How many AAA titles on the SNES or PS2 were as horribly built as the games we play today that are designed for the current generation of consoles (and even current PC games)?
Why are so many titles not tested now? Easy. Developers can rush games out to market, without checking for bugs or glitches, and then patch them in later. Hell, think of the money and time they save on testing the product. Instead of having to test the games themselves, or hire specialists or outsource to a testing company, they let the masses discover the bugs and glitches on their own. It's turned into free labor essentially, game testing has. Instead of having to make sure that a game works before it ships out, the companies can release a broken game, and then patch it later. But only if enough people complain.
Anyone remember the Fallout 3 'The Pitt' DLC on the 360? When it first came out it was literally unplayable. You would reach the entrance to the area surrounding the steel plant and the game would crash no matter what. Bethesda had to pull the DLC from the marketplace and try again to release a working version. They didn't test the DLC before they released it. And a year later when they put the same DLC on the PS3 it was just as bug and glitch ridden. And yes I'm singling out the Fallout series for this example but it's not just the Fallout series that is guilty here.
And of course the gaming media won't say anything because they are slaves to the almighty advertising dollar. Look at scores for Fallout New Vegas and read the reviews where many reviewers simply mention the bugs and glitches in passing, as if they are nothing noticeable, and simply try to wash them away with phrases like "this is a MUST HAVE title".
I feel bad for the person who buys Fallout 3, an entirely single player game, for their console, because they like single player games, and they don't play online. Imagine spending the money on Fallout 3 and not being online connected and never getting the patch to fix this game. You basically can't game in this day and age without being connected to the internet so that you can patch your incomplete and bug filled retail games.
I can't wait to buy Fallout New Vega GOTY Edition in a few years. Hopefully Bethesda fixes the bugs by then.
The easier it is to update the game the more missing stuff there is.
It's simple.
When New Vegas was launched i bought Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition with all the DLC and patched, and cheaper than the launch price for just Fallout 3.
2 years from now i'll buy New Vegas with all the DLC and patched, and cheaper than the launch price for just New Vegas.
End of story.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Don't buy the game until some months have gone by and a couple of patches have come out. For that matter, don't buy any moderately expensive piece of software until it's been patched thoroughly.
If only a small amount of people do this, then those people will benefit from the early-adopters' experiences. If a lot of people do this, then perhaps developers will get a clue and invest more in QA, and we will all benefit.
TIP: there's absolutely no game, or indeed any piece of software/media, that you need to buy the day it comes out. If it's good today, it will also be good a year from now. If it won't be good in the future (e.g. online games that only work with official servers that might get disconnected), then you're wasting your money anyways. And finally, no matter how much of a fan you are, I promise there are enough classics you haven't played yet lying around for you to sink time in until the latest game becomes bug-free.
PROTIP: you will save a lot of money like this, specially if you wait until sales season. I buy a lot of games on Steam, GOG and the like, and average about $2.5 on games of the caliber of Mass Effect or Half-Life. Then I use [part of] the money I saved to support indie game development.
I stopped purchasing their shit when Fallout 3 had issues with my 3D sound card and they still have not been able to fix it ... by now they will never get around to it.
So this was really a case of "every game under the sun plays fine except their shit". The argument of an infected machine does not fly with me either since I use Linux as my main OS and re-image Windows every so often to fix broken shit (reimage solved my Elder Scrolls issues for example).
Booking space for DVD printing is scarce, and when the game isn't ready to ship at this point, then boom, lots of bugs in the shipped product, b/c the booking slot had to be used. Happens to many game publishers.
Obsidian made New Vegas, not Bethesda. While yes, it is on a Bethesda game engine, the game was not made by them.
It's certainly fine to call Bethesda on making buggy games, but it is not fine to not have your facts straight before posting a story.
Then again, this is video game journalism we are discussing here.
This isn't so much a Bethesda game as it is an Obsidian game. One of the Obsidian developers posts regularly at Somethingawful and took the time to explain some of the bugs. As expected, a lot of it was "we had to release the game on time". The rest is my own conjecture. Some of the fault lies with the Gamebryo engine, which is a piece of junk - yet they're required to use it for a certain number of games. Another problem is the nature of the game itself. Sandbox type games are fun because they let the player do whatever they want, and yet this makes testing much more complex. It is a buggy game right now, and yet it's still the best game I've played in at least a year. I would rather be playing it right now than arguing about a lack of good, bug-less games on /.
Some of the posters above seem to think that software needs to ship with a certain guarantee, and yet the users of that software and capitalism prove them wrong over and over.
Except if you look at the complaints, ATI cards are hit too and hit worse. In fact the unofficial dx9 patch has been called an ATI fix.
The game plain old has problems with the facial animations, and craps on any hardware when you enter a zone with lots of human NPCs. E.g., the outer Freeside that you mention.
And I really mean on any hardware. I actually have a GTX 480, which is the top end graphics card you can buy at the moment, short of going SLI. I'm not saying that to brag, but just to say even on that I've seen plenty of times when the game turns into a slideshow. (Not that it'll stop some fanboy out there from going, "OMG, buy a real computer. If you don't have quad-SLI, you shouldn't play games.")
That said, heh, I'm probably one of the most guilty of supporting that buggy release, seein' as I've been making weapons and suits for it since launch on the Nexus. I guess it's just more fun to mod than to play :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And yet Bethesda never completely fixes their games. Ever.
Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and now New Vegas (not to mention their old DOS TES games). They receive a handful of patches that mostly fix issues with scripts, leaving the game engine seemingly untouched. I remember being disappointed with FO3 when one of the patches was released where, according to the patch notes, all they did was add a few achievements!
They are great story tellers, and quite adept at crafting expansive and interesting worlds that draw you in, but their programmers certainly leave much to be desired.
I wonder how much blame can be placed upon the engine they license. I also wish that someone like Carmack offered some sort of consultation service to whip cappy code, and coders, into shape.
wtf does that even mean?
Bethesda has a long and storied history of releasing games that are very ambitious, and very unstable. The original release of Daggerfall would crash hourly.
Now that the majority of games are for consoles, how about letting us return defective products? If a companies initial release was awful, they would lose a lot of day one sales in returns if we had that simple bit of consumer protection.
Well, I consider it more of a question of being able to think in more than one dimension. It's not like the bugs are the only things to consider about a game.
Yes, the game is buggy.
On the other hand, even with the crashes and slowdowns, it's _still_ more fun to play than <insert brainless shooter du jour> or <insert brainless RTS where you just need to click X times on 'build zerg' and rush> (presumably named that way because there is no actual strategy involved, and the troops can't even follow basic tactics, much less strategy.) It's just that simple.
And then comes such icing on the cake as that it's superbly modable.
Even as voting with my money goes, between Fallout 3 with the bugs and the average brainless click-fest without bugs, I'll vote for the former every single time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But resources are finite, and QA testing can be expensive. It's easy to say "OMG there are bugs in this game, there shouldn't be bugs. Let's boycott until they take the bugs out!!" but in the real world there are tradeoffs.
Bug testing in a game like this probably has an exponential profile—twice as much QA time might only get rid of half the existing bugs (4x the time, 75% of the bugs, etc.). If they got rid of most of the bugs, perhaps the game would cost twice as much, or there would only be half as many quests, etc. The author doesn't mention any tradeoffs, he just wants more stuff.
Anyway, I'm in the process of playing Fallout: New Vegas and really enjoying it despite the couple times it has crashed on me. I don't know whether the QA tradeoffs were managed effectively (and I doubt most commenters do either) but I do know I like the game.
They're called Giant Radscorpions, and IIRC there's a Giant Queen Radscorpion in there too.
I don't have a problem with bugs as much as games that lack content. And I am very curious why other gamers don't ask for more content.
Since the original article is about Fallout New Vegas, let me use it as an example.
I played Fallout 3 (bought it as soon as it came out). My first complaint: The game had few firearms (ONE Shotgun, ONE SMG, ONE rifle, ONE sniper...). In all, I think there were about 10 firearms + 3 laser weapons (and quite a few hand-to-hand weapons). My second complaint: the game was not what it was supposed to be. A game like Fallout 3 should be a survival game, where besides going on an adventure and completing quests and improving your character, you strive to survive by scavenging, hunting, looting, working and even pillaging if you feel like it. You should also have to be concerned with shelter. Fallout 3 did not feel like you were striving to survive. The Wasteland seemed actually quite a comfortable place.
I stopped playing after just a few days, and a few months later, when good mods were available, I downloaded some of them.
First, I downloaded new weapons in order to add some variety in my arsenal. Just a note here: due to balance concerns, I compiled all the weapons in one single mod and I created new real-world ammo calibers for guns that needed it. I also modified the inventory capacity to reduce it and make it more realistic, I downloaded an improved AI mod that made enemies much more tactical fighters, and I modified the health system to be closer to reality: about 3 bullets to the chest were necessary to kill an enemy (or myself) and some guns ignored body armor but required about 5 bullets to kill (armore piercing = less stopping power). Gameplay-wise, two things happened:
First, with about 200 firearms (no kidding, there really are that many player-made weapons out there!) I rarely came across two enemies that carried the same weapon, or even used the same ammunition. When I started playing the game with the mods, one challenge was finding ammo. Even if I raided a raider camp and killed 10 of them, I would not find much ammo compatible for my gun (and I could not carry 10 rifles due to limited inventory space). Progressing was that more challenging.
Every time I had the option to start a firefight, I really had to think carefully if it was wise to do so since my ammunition was limited. Sometimes I had to uses stealth to pass near enemies to get to my objective, just to save ammo. Sometimes I would get caught, deep in enemy territory, and I was in for a hell of a time! I could fight back, but most of the time escaping was the best option. In the original Fallout 3, I would usually have hundreds of ammo after only a few hours. In my modded games, it was a lot longer before I had that much ammo, and even then I had few bullets of one same caliber.
Making money was a bit harder, since the reduced inventory capacity did not allow me to carry all the guns I looted on my dead enemies. I had to travel back and forth to pick up the guns and bring them to a store (before new enemies arrived to take back the place I just secured (i.e. respawned)) or simply find other methods of making money.
Second, once my character had acquired a bigger arsenal and quite a bit of ammo, I definitely had a lot more choice in the guns I used. In fact, choosing the right gun gun the right mission was a new challenge that came along with my modding of the game. For example, with a few dozen assault rifles available, I could choose between assault rifles that had more important firepower, higher firing rate, larger magazine capacity, better accuracy or a rifle that used a more wide-spread ammunition so that I could find more ammo if I ran out. As I said, this was a little challenge but it was entirely optional. If you did not want to bother with that, you could pick any rifle, but choosing the right one made things a little bit easier. Some of my friends who tried the mod are more "casual players" who enjoy a good game but don't want to bother with complex things like choosing
Their game engines have been full of bugs since "Elder Scrolls Arena" ~17 years ago. But its a RPG, people care about something else than nice gfx or even a full working game.
I've been playing the Sims 3, which has been out for quite awhile now. There are several expansion packs for it. It is an extremely popular PC franchise with a large rabid community. Despite all that, the game is still buggy.
My first playthrough featured a loss of two hours when I hit "Error Code 16". Basically you can't save your game. Game save bugs are amongst the worst types of bugs.
I have a pet fireman. One of my Sims wanted to "be in a fire". So I had him start grilling some hot dogs and then sit down nearby to play some chess. Cue fire and ridiculous Sims jumping around. The Fireman shows up in a little red firepickuptruck and puts out the fire. Then he stands there. You can't interact with him. I thought he was stuck on the grill that burned, but I moved that out of the way. Even once in awhile he will stumble and look sheepish.
One day while a Sim was watching TV I randomly clicked on the fireman. "Join: Watch TV" was there! I clicked and the fireman moved! Hooray! Problem solved. Except now he is permanently on my couch. That was worse, so I used the same technique to move him back out to the lawn. You can't talk to him, but he will join you in activities.
Having a pet fireman is fine. There's always a chess opponent nearby. He never seems to get hungry/dirty. However, his truck is a problem. First, the garish light is always on. Luckily, no sounds. The big problem is that it blocks the street. Any time a car comes to pick someone up they park really far away.
Anyway, you'd think they'd fix this stuff after several expansions. Actually, the Word Adventures expansion apparently created the "Error Code 16" problem, even for players who didn't buy the expansion.
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
Actually, you don't need to be technical to test a game. (Or a web site, or anything else.) You just need to try every combination and write a bug report for everything that doesn't work.
Of course, you also need to enforce a culture where those bugs are taken seriously. From my experience with testers, well, they're humans too, basically. If you treat them badly for doing their job (and there is no shortage of people taking them for the enemy), they start doing a more half-arsed job, and if you tell them to not worry about some bug, they tend to do just that. Basically you'll have to see to it that if someone reports that clicking on the third seashell on the northern beach causes screwed up textures, they should never see an answer boiling down to "who the FUCK cares about such things? How many people go around clicking on non-highlightable objects?" Because then you stop getting that kind of bugs, which may actually be just symptoms for some issue (e.g., memory corruption) that'll be a lot more spectacular on someone's computer out there.
Also, basically, you need to stop making excuses for why it's ok to not even try to fix some bugs. The point is, a bug is just a manifestation of something. Of something you don't know. Even something like a minor graphics glitch, it could be just a spurious bad coordinate in a mesh, which will never get worse than that on any hardware, or it could be a loose pointer that can (and on someone's machine WILL) cause a crash or a corrupt saved game. The moment you start just "knowing" that some things aren't bad enough to be worth fixing, you'll let some far worse ones slip through too.
Anyway, TBH, I actually prefer non-technical people for testing. They shouldn't be coders, and shouldn't think like a coder. They should represent Joe Average and Jane Housewife, who just want to play the game, not to know the difference between a memory leak and a graphics slowdown.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
and you'll have two options:
1. buy the original game new for 1/3rd the price and a years worth of patches.
2. buy the deluxe version of the game new with all the DLC included and a years worth of patches.
only negative to this strategy is that online play may be diminished.
Heh. Well, modding Fallout 3 at first WAS about hex editing. Bethesda only released the GECK (modding kit) after what seemed like half an eternity, so, yeah, even applying a different texture on a rifle involved a hex editor. Granted, it got better after NifSkope was changed to deal with the Fallout 3 meshes, because then you could set the textures there and do a much simpler hex-hack to get around the first-person textures.
Ahh, those were the days ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Those are the jokers that released Star Trek Legacy upon us.
Even a quick death would be too good for them..
bethesda, buggy releases? omg its like 1996 all over again.
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
I've spent dozens of hours trying to actually complete this game on the XBox 360, and it's impossible. Given Bethesda's track record, do NOT buy this for consoles - they will not patch these problems. Fortunately there's an active modding community on the PC, and there's a mechanism in-game (again on the PC only) for adjusting broken objects, characters, stories and plotlines on the fly. On the console, you're just screwed:
* Game will eventually corrupt your save game with no chance of recovery.
* Game will eventually start freezing when buying from merchants (especially if you purchase a Caravan playing card)
* Game will crash if certain story choices are made, or will not be completable if certain story choices are made
* Game will crash if certain gameplay choices are made (e.g. don't shoot Caleb McCafferty in the head)
* Game will randomly crash when fast traveling (anywhere, any time. I'd suggest saving often but you'll run a greater risk of save game corruption)
* Game will randomly cause areas of the map to be "dead zones" - entering them triggers a crash (e.g. Nipton)
Bethesda has only acknowledged one of these problems, and it's taken them more than 2 weeks to promise a fix (which they haven't yet). This article is spot-on - don't buy buggy software. Bethesda makes buggy software. Don't buy Bethesda software Q.E.D.
I've got about 80 hours logged on the PC version of New Vegas, which I prepurchased because I'm a huge fan of both the series and of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games. Also, I'm from Maryland, so there's a little bit of regionalism, too. I absolutely love the game, and don't regret buying it (other than the catastrophic loss of productivity), but it shipped buggier than hell. Patched to date, it still CTDs on average once every two hours, and there are graphic glitches from time to time. I have solved most of my gripes with the game with the help of mods, such as the custom .dll (ATI in my case), and a couple good graphic and UI mods.
Do I like that the game was buggy when released, and still is post-patch? No, of course not. But, in my case, it hasn't outweighed my enjoyment of the game. This has nothing to do with game reviews. Generally I don't buy new games because I don't like the massive pricetag they seem to come with these days, nor do I like the fact that most of them are released with less than 10 hours of SP content to be augmented by DLC (at additional cost to the user), and that oftentimes it seems that the side-effect of widespread Internet access is that games are released to work on 51% of PCs, with the rest getting patches as problems arise. Honestly, if you don't like games requiring at least one patch post-sale to be a complete and functioning product, blame the Internet.
But I digress.
What sales of this game tell you is that people like it, bugs and all. What continued support of Bethesda tells you is that consumers accept a certain risk of bugginess because they believe that the game itself will be worth it. If FNV was boring, or if the gameplay stank on ice, it would be in the $20 bin this week. No amount of Bethesda pressure on reviewers (which I suspect is overblown, frankly) would be able to suppress the righteous indignation of irate consumers posting 1-star reviews on Amazon, or crushing the game on Metacritic. For that matter, major news outlets now routinely review games (USAToday, Washington Post); good luck to any game company leaning on an actual newspaper to print a favorable review. What this tells us is that you can release a game that isn't 100% functional as long as the experience of playing the game is positive enough to outweigh the negative feelings generated by it not working correctly. If your game has bugs, I may still buy it and feel good about it as long as the net experience is positive. When something goes funky in FNV, I try to fix it, or I restart the game. I do this because I was having fun before the game crapped out, and expect to have fun once it's working again.
Counterexample: I recently bought STALKER: Call of Pripyat, and found that it was so buggy, clunky, unpolished, and boring that I didn't bother trying to fix any of the problems. I just uninstalled it. Why? I played the first game and recall it being fun, but not so fun that I would go out of my way to play it. There wasn't a balance of positive experiences and expectations against which the game could draw when it started to crap the bed. And I should note that the game received pretty good reviews, and there are a lot of people who really like both the game and the series.
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They could just open-source the games so we could at least help fix the bugs, eh? Honestly I've loved their games enough that I am the type of person who would be willing to buy the game, fix the game, and submit the patch back to the company. And port it to Linux...
Yeh I really don't care, I buy Bethesda games expecting them to be buggy. Its part of the experience. I've run into some bugs in New Vegas (NVidia slowdown, fixable w a .dll available on newvegasnexus or w/e), and one mission I can't complete (waiting for the dude to go into the control tower @ Mccarran) as well as enemies falling through the ground from time to time. I will continue to buy these games despite their bugginess as long as the gameplay is still awesome. I also only buy PC versions so I can get the fan made patches ASAP, sorry for the console gamers.
That ahve always released games that where tremendously buggy. Inexcusably buggy, and then maybe fix it latter.
Every game, buggy.
And why Fallout is getting such critical acclaim mystifies me. It's another woner around in a confusing array of side plots while getting lost use mediocre graphics.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So um... Minecraft Alpha, anybody?
Does Super Mario suffer from any major issues that crash the game? Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Mega Man X?
Maybe not issues that crash the game, but all those games you listed have some pretty serious bugs: Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, and the list goes on and on.
Most proprietary software developers only "care" until they get your money. That's why I've got games where I fall through the map to my death, or get stuck in a floating pose and am unable to continue the game. All of this happens while playing the game *normally*. I've seen developers release a shoddy PC conversion of a console game with bugs like this. Then they release one patch, which addresses completely different issues and doesn't fix these.
It is just another reason why I will never buy a game on launch day again. For the price that modern games cost, they had better well be bug-free. Also, most of the sequels to my favorite games have sucked. Thief 3, Unreal 2, Deus Ex 2, Red Faction 2, SiN: Episodes and more.
The only sequel that I didn't feel ripped off when I bought was Doom 3. Thanks id. Quake 4 is awesome too.
Depends on what other differences there are between that and the other TVs I can buy. E.g., if for the same price I can buy a plasma TV which turns itself off every 2-3 hours, or a normal TV which doesn't, you can bet your ass that I'll buy the first one. (What, doesn't anyone else bring along a burro so they can wager on it?;)
IOW, for games the choice is more complex than that one variable.
Yup. See above.
When a game crash becomes able to cause a pileup on the highway and kill several innocents, I'll see the point in that analogy. Otherwise, it's at best misleading, and I see no point in addressing it.
Oh, yes. Please. Now if it turned the lights randomly ON in mom's basement^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H my lair, that would be a fatal bug. But turning them off? That should be a feature ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The software houses seem to think that getting new releases 85% right is all they need to do. Let the users do the serious debugging in production. Once you have installed a seriously large - and maybe critical - piece of software, you aren't likely to change it for something else. Hell, you probably can't change it for something else, unless you have seriously deep pockets and infinite amounts of time. Vendors of ERP systems and database systems seem to me to be the worst offenders.
I'd reply to this, but I can't find the One Fucking Pixel on the screen that will open the reply window. Oooo, I must have passed over it. No fucking idea where, but the window opened. Now to complete the "Preview" and the "Submit" pixels hunts. Exciting, edge-of-seat gameplay this.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
One person's story:
I used to test software for a living, and our team was pretty darn good at it. We took our work seriously, and personally. If something was missed, it made us all look bad. So we did our damnedest to be the best. Part of our work also involved finding bugs missed by overseas testers. And there were always plenty. Too many in fact. It was a constant battle. Then one day we learned that our team had been off-shored... to the same group of folks that we used to have to constantly keep an eye out for.
Take from that what you will.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Most reviews out there mention that the game has bugs. If they don't, don't trust their reviews anymore.
I bought the game, and I am not voting for bugs (even suggesting that seems preposterous). I am voting for games I enjoy. I hate bugs as much as the next guy, but the fact is Bethesda (and Obsidian) makes the games I enjoy most *by far*, even with their flaws. While I haven't had any problems with New Vegas yet, I had a ridiculous number of crashes while playing Morrowind. Somehow, it still ended up being the single player game I've dumped the most time in, probably by a factor of 10.
If I can "vote" for two things, more amazing games that have a few problems, or no games at all, I'll choose the former, please.
You know, Obsidian is the former Black Isle. FO2 was extremely buggy. So you could argue that FO NV is a proper successor to my favourite game of all time.
I mean, this is the common process for the iTunes App Store, release software now, have frequent updates, improve product over time.
Is this bad? I guess if the product is non-functional on release then yes, this practice should not be adhered to, but if a product has a few glitches should it prevent release, or can it be fixed incrementally?
This whole new generation of games and app stores have long since evolved past the idea that you release a game that cannot be updated, as with old game carts or pressed CD's on a non-network enabled box. Maybe some game developers have exploited this by shipping a game before its ripe and then hoping it ripens up on the customer's box, but many are improving the game with time rather then making it just work.
Personally, I would rather see what is currently common on the iTunes App Store, a game is released and constantly evolves, improved, and has new content added at regular intervals. I think Angry Birds is a prime example of this new process, where new levels and even bird types are introduced at intervals; I paid $.99 a year ago and still finding the game evolving and appealing a year later.
But sure, if a game is crap out of the gate then don't use updates and patches to hope the game will improve over time. Stricter policies on Q/A should be enforced by the publishers and target platforms.
The alternative to this is to expect 100% perfection on release and allow no game patches, but then we would only get on game every 10 years (aka Half-Life release schedule) rather then on a much shorter interval. There is definitely a fine line where this process is either a determent or boon to the game industry.
It sucks & they are obviously doing it on purpose. It doesn't really affect me however, as I only buy their games after they've hit the halfway mark on there release price. By then the game is generally stable.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Not just at Bethesda but in the whole IT industry where software and often hardware ships to a date rather than when it's reasonably bug free.
I remember beta testing Star Wars Galaxies and nobody on the beta could believe that it had actually been RTM because of the number of bugs in it.
How often have you felt like unpaid beta testers for operating systems, office applications or business critical systems ?
How often have you done something about it other than following the tried and tested go to the website and look for a patch route ?
Strange as it is, I now usually don't play anything but World of Warcraft. I am sure people will give me crap for that, but honestly they have more incentive with a subscription system to fix bugs and make the game better, and that is exactly what they do. Right now it is a little buggy because they are in the pre-cata patch and trying to get everything sorted out before the new expansion, but I know those bugs will be fixed, because they have the incentive. I try and play other games, and usually give up after a short time because of how buggy they are, and how little polish there is.
Bethesda's Oblivion was a big part of that too. When the faces you make in the designer look absolutely nothing like the faces you see in the engine itself, you can tell that they really just stopped trying.
Not everyone likes WoW sure, but I think the subscription model really is a good thing for both parties in the long run.
It's a freakin game, not a life support system, you dope. If they did what you ask, then the game would cost $2,648 per copy (think: Adobe CSS). I've played the game going on 60 hours with a few bugs, but the bugs have not come close to destroying the excellence of the story and gameplay.
This isn't a new issue with Bethesda titles.
It stretches back at least 14 years.
I remember purchasing Daggerfall, installing it, and very shortly having to deal with the game crashing. Then dealing with my character falling through the floor. Then being unable to complete quests due to quest objectives spawning in unreachable portions of the dungeons.
They even coded in a debug command that would automatically teleport your character to the location of any quest items in each dungeon in response to this issue. They never did fix the floors, but they fixed some of the major game crashes before they stopped releasing patches.
Yet despite this, people still continue to purchase their products.
And you wonder why they don't have any incentive to change the way they do business?
Posting anonymously here for obvious reasons. I had an internship for a while with a game dev, whose publisher is one of the major publishers out there. I was brought on in the middle of a small project that they were trying to put out the door. This particular game was not terribly large, so the publishers had put the dev company on a short timetable in order to limit the budget.
I pulled this game out again a while ago and messed around with it a bit. It crashes. It crashes a lot. Constantly. And even back then, when we were about to put this game out the door, we knew how bad it was.
There was a... I believe "bitch session" is the proper terminology here, in which everyone in the company was invited to a roundtable in the cafeteria room to ask questions of the people in charge. There was unanimous agreement - more time was needed. The project was rushed. There was no time to iterate, no time to properly implement new features when they were requested. And the programmers aren't the ones that can ask for time extensions on the release date - it's the publishers who set these dates, the company providing the funding.
We eventually had another meeting where the dev directors revealed that they'd worked out a compromise with the publisher. They were now only going to start releasing games on a three-year timetable, but the teams would be smaller and more projects would be going on at once. That would mean you'd have about the same number of man-hours per project, but there'd be more time from start to finish with which to tinker and identify problems.
So yes, maybe Obsidian is the developer of New Vegas, but I'm more than willing to bet that it was Bethesda that decided when the disk should go gold. I bet if it was up to Obsidian's programmers, then the game would still be going through testing.
If you buy a game (or anything else), and it's broken, take it back.
OOM killer is looking pretty decent these days, actually, from what I read on LWN. The sysadmin can tune it, essentially saying "see this httpd? You don't kill it. Ever. It's the whole reason this bloody server is powered on, you can kill its' child CGI scripts if they're leaking memory, but the server has to stay up."
If your objection is that desktop users don't know which processes are essential and so have to rely on the default algorithm, I'd say they don't have any use for that feature anyway. 99+% of the time OOM killer goes after the real culprit, and it's only the pathological cases that cause issues. On a user's desktop those issues generally don't arise, unless perhaps said user is a "developer/sysadmin/software tester/general protection fault" with his development platform hosted on 127.0.0.1 - even then it won't happen too often for the reason in the next paragraph.
On a desktop responsiveness becomes an issue long before the OOM killer is called, unless you're running swap-free. A server hits it sometimes because it sits there quietly in a rack in the other room or even miles away, and nobody is running X to notice that when they click on an icon they have to wait 4 seconds for the desktop to load back into working space. When people notice that on their desktop, they tend to fire up top, iotop, sysstat, vmstat, etc. and hunt down the culprit well before actually running out of memory.
Well, maybe I should have qualified it better.
I don't think you need technical people, as in, programmers or IT people, as testers. The tester's job isn't to also diagnose a loose pointer. They just have to find what doesn't work and how to reproduce it by in-game actions. Or even better, provide a savegame where the bug happens, and maybe from right before doing whatever causes the bug.
But obviously you still need intelligent people, and who can understand such ideas as "state" or "combination". But I think a lot of people do, without having had a CS education.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Which is exactly the kind of mindset I called OCPD. If it's not perfect, it's crap. A.k.a., the Nirvana Fallacy.
And I find it just as annoying both ways. Both when someone has to pretend that even having a crash on a bad day is the end of the world, and fanboys who have to pretend that no flaw exists at all, lest their beloved game is crap.
In reality it's a complex thing with many factors and variables. There are the good parts in column A and the annoyances in column B. If the difference between A and B is still a fun experience on the whole, that's that.
Yes, the bugs are an annoyance, make no mistake. They go definitely in the minus column. But the question is: was the game between them fun enough to make up for that. For some people, it was. I guess for others less so.
The whole pretense that the bugs are the only thing that matters or should be the only thing to discuss about a game, is plain old silly.
And speaking of which, you know what I find even sillier? People who haven't even played the damned game at all, making the biggest fuss, either that it's the greatest ever or that it's unplayable crap. Apparently just out of some sheep mentality that they must fit with the herd bleating this way or the other. Do you actually have any first hand experience to share? Yes, anecdotes aren't data, but second hand hearsay and wild confabulations are even less material to base judgments and pronouncements on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is the industry standard, with only a few shining examples doing anything differently.