How Do You Feel About Bethesda?

[Adinnieken]

One of my all-time favorite developers, tbh.

I put over 1,000 hours into Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, several hundred hours into Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas. While I've seen my fair share of bugs and freezes, the enjoyment obtained from the game world supersedes all of it.

To me, the buggiest game was Fallout: New Vegas, followed by Oblivion. Fallout 3 was the most stable, least buggiest game. It was tough having a level 60 character, with over 600 hours played in game (more if you include the number of times I had to restart), and having to delete that game save because it was corrupt from something that happened to the game save file early on in Oblivion. So as the game progressed it got exponentially worse. However, the inability to climb mountains, the pop-in beasts, and the ability to fall through the terrain were the most frustrating bugs I ever experienced and that was with Fallout: New Vegas.

Unlike others, I saw Fallout 3 as a fix to the bugs in Oblivion, but New Vegas as not only a return to those bugs, but an inclusion of several worse ones. It cemented my hate for Obsidian, that's for sure. They ruined KoTOR II and Fallout: New Vegas in my opinion.

I'm looking forward to playing Skyrim, but right now that's extremely low on my priority list. That being said I can't wait to see what Bethesda will bring to the table with the next generation of consoles.

Also, while I empathize with PS3 owners and their frustration with the quality of the games, it is unfortunately the architecture to blame here. The PS3 has less than 256MB available for the game, the Xbox 360 has just under 500MB. There isn't much room to breathe on the PS3. And as for testing, it's easy to see/understand how the memory bug was overlooked (it was overlooked on both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 mind you), play testing would have been for the general experience, not a long-term play-through. It would be an easy bug to miss considering you'd need to spend 8 hours a day for 5-8 days in order to experience it. Even then, it could still vary based on your character, your skills, and the areas you've explored and items you've obtained. Not an easy thing to play-test for. If any one here is familiar with how real beta testing is done, it's centered around a repeatable problem. So if user A can repeat the problem, it is more likely that it will get reported and resolved. However, if user A can't repeat the problem or user B, who is the developer can't, then it can end up in a black hole. Bugs that are easily reproducible by both the tester and developer are the ones that'll get fixed. Bugs that can only be reproduced by the tester, and not the developer are often more difficult to fix, but require tenacity. Bugs that can't be reproduced by either the test or the developer may never get fix or will only get fixed with more reports, and then it falls into the tenacity experience.

Don't assume they're bad developers because there are bugs. Bug hunting is a complex art form, one most public betas don't really address. As someone who was invited to Redmond by Microsoft for his tenacity as a technical beta tester for them, I know what real beta testing is. Well, technically real beta testing is a step up from even me, those are the people who can take the debug info, go through the code, and find the source of the bug. I'm not that good.