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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."
I thought most major game developers nowadays released beta versions, only to patch it after release (if you're lucky).
And what does that have to do with anything? It's usually the publisher that releases the game, and often also tries to hurry up the developer.
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.
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
Personally, I think you're exactly the kind of person that lets them get away with that crap. Hell, you've put me off the game for life in a few short paragraphs. I've played PC games for decades - I've seen my share of weird bugs and had to manually debug / patch quite a few myself. I also program myself so I know the avenues that things can take and know it's not really possible to have a "bug-free" game. But what you describe is *disgusting* for a retail product. I can't remember the last time I had any of the 200+ games on my Steam account crash - possibly a weird issue with Zombie Driver not likely a "fake" joystick driver I installed that I had to debug with the programmers because they hadn't seen it before.
How you can then sum it up into a "mostly positive" review, I have no idea. To me, it reads:
- The game has issues with the majority manufacturer of PC gaming graphics cards. This causes even way over-specced machines to run the game noticeably slow to the user.
- The game crashes - a lot. Over 12 crashes in 35 hours is a crash every 2-3 hours. I don't accept that from buggy shell script glue, let alone a professional game. That stops any potential purchase for me dead in the water. Hell, I get annoyed if a game crashes 12 times in its LIFE on my machine that I can't attribute to something I did wrong (I can't name a single time that Half-life (any version) or the Doom series or the Quake series or the Unreal series has ever crashed on me and they all pushed the boundaries at the time - I can name some isolated incidents of crashes in L4D2 (when I run out of swap space and kept-Alt-Tabbing to try to fix it before something went wrong) and GTA3 (when it crashed twice on me and nearly got uninstalled for doing so).
- The game has obvious, easily worked around bugs in poorly scripted cut sequences that render the game unplayable unless you happen to have an earlier save. It takes a second to write check-scripts for uncompletable quests and "somehow" fix them (by respawing the items in question, or just letting the user continue). You experienced three quests which glitched to the point the game was unplayable in the single run through of the game. God knows how many a testing team should have caught on random hardware.
- You had display issues with sinking monsters that could easily make it possible for you to be attacked by invisible beings that the game is drawing in the wrong place.
- There are other reports besides yours that almost every aspect of the game has bugs - from display to AI to sound to loading games to just plain crashing at random.
And that's AFTER it's received a post-release patch! That's so bad that if I worked at the company, I'd be cringing and disassociating myself from it. When Frontier:Elite II was released, it had a reputation for being a very buggy game and that was nothing in comparison to what you describe.
"In short, the bugs are an irritation, but the game is very, very good."
The *gameplay* may be good, when it's not crashing, making you reload or just displaying everything in the wrong place. The game, however, sounds like shit. And those sorts of bugs are NOT an irritation - if I have to restart a program more than twice, I stop trusting it and start doing things like checking my hardware. I don't tolerate it from the operating system, I don't tolerate it for my firewall, or my office suite, why should I tolerate it from the one thing that I pick up and expect to work without me having to debug the damn machine? A crash a day is too much, for any single program. Hell, I get concerned about my machine if I get a crash each month and I run an XP image that's been following me around for the last 5 years without reinstallation on three different sets of hardware.
Stop buying and tolerating this buggy crap. If a game crashes, that means that it nearly wrote over memory it shouldn't have and could corrupt your data, your operating system, even your hardware. You were "saved" by things like DEP and similar but that doesn't mean it's acceptable.
So by that logic, the bugs in any of the dozens of games that use the Unreal engine are Epic's fault? Obsidian is the developer, they took the contract for the game and agreed to timeline, it's their responsibility to get the game out.
You don't know its buggy until you've bought and played it.
The problem therein is that all the publishers really give a crap about is first-month sales. Chances are, if everyone is waiting for the game to be patched, then the patch will never see the light of day because they will assume the game failed and that's the end of it.
There was a time that the main rallying cry of the console gamers who didn't want to play on PC was "it just works" when they put the disc into the console. But now, with the advent of online-enabled consoles, so much for that. Xbox and PS3 gamers are forced to sit through the old "ship now, patch later" setup, and woe to someone who has an offline console and simply has to suffer through the bugs - since none of the companies are interested in putting their fucking game patches in a USB-storage compatible file for offline updating.
I'd say that the Wii doesn't have so much of this, but then there was the game-breaking Metroid: Other M bug, as well as the 5-6 other bugged doors that wouldn't "break" the game but would prevent 100% completion. And of course, most of the 3rd-parties writing for the Wii these days aren't doing quality control since they're simply shovelware houses putting out crappy knockoffs.
I have to agree with both parents. ledow is right in thinking that a finished product should not contain this many bugs, but being a fan of Bethesda games myself, I understand the point that RogeyWon is trying to make. Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout are very good, and especially, huge games. After all the patches, Oblivion and Fallout 3 still crash randomly on me about every 3 hours on average, but I find the games so enjoyable, that I have learned to live with and forgive this nuisance, using the quicksave feature judiciously. While this may seem outrageous to some, I think it is unfair to compare an Oblivion/Fallout type game to Doom, Quake or Half-Life.
A Bethesda game is much more complex and much bigger than a first-person shooter such as Doom or Half-Life. A shooter has the core game mechanic of running around and shooting, with a few scripted sequences scattered about. In an Oblivion/Fallout type game you have shooting, close combat, inventory management, movable objects in the world, an RPG system, NPCs with scripts and dialog, a persistent world, followers, quest lines, complex world interactions and scripts controlling everything from the behavior of items and locations to quests and NPCs. And not only are Bethesda-RPGs much more complicated than an average shooter (or any other game), they are huge as well. I am sure that I have invested at least 150 hours playing Oblivion, and I still have not seen or completed some of the mayor side quests that are available (such as Arena and Fighters Guild).
So yes, buggy games are a nuisance. But I am willing to be more lenient towards Bethesdas RPGs because I know that they are much more complex than your average game and that I am getting a game package that will keep me occupied for years.
Totally agreed. Try applying those low standards to any other product.
Any other product category, you'd consider the product to be broken and return it.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
It's a fine balancing act. Err too far one way, and you get the bugfest that is Fallout New Vegas. Too far the other way, and you get Duke Nukem Forever.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
So by that logic, the bugs in any of the dozens of games that use the Unreal engine are Epic's fault? Obsidian is the developer, they took the contract for the game and agreed to timeline, it's their responsibility to get the game out.
If the bugs are in the engine itself as designed by Epic, discovered years ago, and still never corrected, as was the case for the Fallout engine? Yes, it would be their fault. How can you argue otherwise?
There was a time that the main rallying cry of the console gamers who didn't want to play on PC was "it just works" when they put the disc into the console.
It's funny how the roles have reversed. I chat with my friends who purchased Fallout: New Vegas for their consoles, and we trade stories about bugs. The "release now, patch later" mentality has resulted in bugs getting fixed quicker for the PC since there's no certification process. Combine that with the bugs can be fixed via entering console commands on the PC, and the PC version of the game ends up being more playable than the console counterparts.