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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.
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.
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.
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 ...
It's funny because Obsidian is the developer of New Vegas
,,,using Bethesda's engine. Nice try, though.
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.
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
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.
It's the publisher's task to check the game for bugs before releasing it, though.
So how do you explain New Vegas being FAR more buggy than Fallout 3? In theory, New Vegas should be LESS buggy, since the Gamebryo engine has been given time to be perfected.
Living With a Nerd
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.