Bethesda, QA, and respect for gamers

[a7x5631]

Especially for a game that is 4th generation on the same source code.

 

Consoles are a big reason for that.

 

I'm surprised so many people are surprised about the bugs.

 

I agree with your post but, do you remember Oblivion on release? Exiting the sewers for the first time, crash. Entering a new cell, crash. Trying to get on a horse, crash. And I always got the crap where I can't fast travel because an enemy is nearby, even in city walls. With Fallout 3, VATS was completely unusable. And if you did manage to get the interface to pop up, it felt like using the Skyrim UI with a mouse, complete garbage. New Vegas was a lot better, but in the first week you couldn't be around more than 5 NPC's at a time because it would lag like crazy, even with a beefy system (game limiting the CPU to 1 core).

 

Great game, but very rushed. No Bethesda game has been stable on release since Morrowind, and even it had a few minor problems.

[headbomb]

I do remember Oblivion's release. Back then you could chuck it up to being unfamiliar with the tech (Oblivion differs a lot more from Morrowind than Skyrim differs from Oblivion), inexperience, new generation of consoles, etc. And problems in Oblivion were mostly of the "OMG, this is a massive, complex, game" type. They weren't of the "Why does these Elven Boots look like an Armor?" variety or of the "Why is this heavy armor tied to my light armor skill?".

 

Skyrim however (and despite Bethesda's claim) is running on the same engine as the last few Bethesda games. While some problems are due to the sheer size of the game, those pertaining to weapons and armors aren't. They were completely avoidable with the bare minimum of efforts, and there is zero excuse for their presence in the game. Bethesda aren't new at this, and they consistently fail to release products with a modicum of polish. A typo here, a typo there is fine. But we're talking roughly one in fifteen weapons, and one in five armors.

[eltucu]

Consoles are a big reason for that.

Well no, for a lot of things. Things like content, rather than pure coding, are independent of the platform. It is the same to edit an armor value in a PS3 as it is on a PC.

 

Even so, i bet they have their tools coded and their work organized in such a way that once the low level stuff is done, everything above that is platform independent and can be developed for all platforms at the same time. So no ones has the task of doing something for PC, while other is doing exactly the same thing for xbox 360. On multi platform titles im 100% sure that its a very high priority of the dev team to avoid those situations.

 

The lower the level they make stuff stop being platform dependent, the more time they can save for general stuff like level design, texturing, modeling, and whatever comes afterward. If say, instead of using .nif for the meshes, they use a dedicated format, dealt with differently on each version of Creation engine, for each platform in a way that better utilizes each platform strengths, the work of modeling would triplicate (and thats just the designing phase, each step afterwards that depends on that would need to be triple checked for consistency between each platform, and so on).

 

If they can just get by with less effort, they will. The only big reason for sloppy work is Bethesda. Really.

Yup, I wonder if their coders have ever read their IDE's manual... the game won't run on old processors anyway, so what's the point in keeping LAA, SSE and various optimizations off?

Well, there exists the very slight tiny chance that the compiler they used couldnt output working machine code using SSE2 with their (valid) code in C++. But in this day and age, the chances are that if it that was the case, Beth's code was crap from the beginning rather than the compilers fault. Edited January 8, 2012 by eltucu

[alsoran]

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Proudspire manors alchemy room only has open cupboards, no chests, no pots or any other storage for your ingredients. Details perhaps but how to explain such an oversight? To me these little things tell me there are people working on these games that lack the basic feeling for the job.

 

The jumbled mess the Weapons and Armor fixes mod corrects is a different magnitude though. Thats just sloppy. Didn't they set standards before creating and naming items?? And didn't anyone notice it before the release? One look at the items list shows the errors and inconstancies. Just very strange.

 

On the one hand the get things so right like with the epic music, on the other hand they look like amateurs. Maybe it's a priority issue like you say.

 

Still its a lovely looking game! The theme reminded me of "The hunt for Red October" both great peices of music, if you haven't already check out Malukah's version of "The Dragonborn comes" on youtube.

 

That lack of consistancy does grate and break the feel of the game. Ungraciously, I have a sneaking suspicion that the code was written in a sweatshop somewhere, production line stuff at a bargain rate or perhaps supervision and control of the story board was sadly lacking as you say or both. On the other hand perhaps its the best fit for the current consoles, who knows? I was really expecting to be able to do more stuff, which I can but not quite, like you, what I would expect. Imagine my surprise when I first go to the nearest box to see whats in it and it wont open! I can only open fancy chests, and yet I can open any urn it seems. NPC's are better looking but they stand and lean back awkwardly, who put their skeleton together?

 

Sometimes as I play, I think of it as a very beautiful Oblivion upgrade with some previous mod ideas added, two swords, better faces, better hair(?), rolling and such like, smoky chimneys, lit windows, drop torches, better weather etc. It is becoming apparent that parts of it lacks overall depth and as has been pointed out by others, some continuity, but I think Oblivion and Fallout had that too. Skyrim has enough perhaps to satisfy me if I played on a console, but my PC is capable of handling something a bit more sophisticated and I was hoping that I could wander off and be absorbed in the world more than I can at the moment. I'm really expecting a great deal from the CK to help with the interaction with the environment and immersion thingy, perhaps too much.

[headbomb]

What surprises me is that people keep downvoting that Reddit thread.

 

I mean how the hell can you take Bethesda's side in this? They want buggy releases?

[Rimland]

NOW. YOU. KNOW. HOW. BETHESDA. MAKES. MONEY $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

 

release buggy games... and let the community fix the "problems"

 

$20 Todd Howard is the only guy writing code, the rest are just graphic designers !!

[Sheralynn]

What surprises me is that people keep downvoting that Reddit thread.

 

I mean how the hell can you take Bethesda's side in this? They want buggy releases?

 

Many personalize and romanticize Bethesda. As some kind of caring parent.

 

"Beth works their asses of just for the gamers sake."

 

"So why do people complain about a company that pours out there hearts and souls into each game."

 

http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/515313-why-people-shouldnt-complain-about-all-of-the-bugs/

 

lol

 

Dunno if it was a troll, he's banned now, but either way this is what you have to deal with. No criticism allowed.

[headbomb]

Yeah, it's a silly attitude.

[Stormcrown]

While I agree Bethesda should've done a better job...

 

I don't see any other game coming close to the level of Open RPG that The Elder Scrolls is at. It's sad that the best game we've got in the ORPG genre is a bug-filled one, but hopefully with Skyrim's massive success (Week of release sales) other game developers will see what a market this genre is. And I'm not saying the RPG genre. The ORPG (Open Roleplaying Game) genre. That Fallout and Elder Scrolls pretty much dominates alone.

 

In my opinion, they (bethesda) should have Mass Effect as a goal. The mass effect series is so well polished...and dynamically one of the best games I've ever played, in regards to NPC dialogue, speech options, roleplaying and overall immersion factor.

 

If the next Elder Scrolls game can reach the level of perfection that Mass Effect 2 (and probably 3) currently stands at, it will be worthy of the title, "The Elder Scrolls..."

[Lanceor]

I challenge anyone to name an open-world game that's as big and beautiful as Skyrim but has few or no bugs.

 

The really important hard-coded stuff - the open game world, the combat, the adventuring... few if any other games have come close to matching Skyrim or even Oblivion for that matter, yet we're complaining about details? I too would have liked Skyrim to be perfect, but sad reality is that no game ever will be. In fact, I'd like congratulate Bethesda for getting their priorities right in making sure the core of the game works almost flawlessly rather than fussing over details.