I swear they have a special team whose job it is to go through their games once they're finished and fill them with glitches. Unbelievably bad quality control.

My first Elder Scroll's game was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on launch day. It is amazing game/work of art. I have been both thrilled and frustrated with the game. I was so incredibly satisfied when I killed my first Ancient Dragon at like level 23 or so. It has become, in many way, the game I compare other games too. For me it surpasses similar games that I loved such as Fable, Ultimas, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, and Zelda.

I like it so much I have thought about getting The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and/or Fallout 3 or New Vegas.

They also added Kinect Voice support to Skyrim for free, which is very cool and useful. Not just speaking a shout, but you can sort by weight or price. And do many convenient navigations with your voice. I has removed some frustrations I had with the game and made it better.

Clearly I am playing on an Xbox 360. If I had a PS3 I think I would be rather upset/disappointed with them. I realize the PS3 is a beast to program for, but it doesn't quite seem fair not to support it.

Well I personally dont like Bethesda because 1. I dont like RPG's and thats pretty much all they do and 2. they rip gamers off by releasing unfinished games, no way did Skyrim deserve GOTY for 2011.

I love Bethesda above anything else.

They're pure masters at game development and crush everyone else. Todd Howard is the God of game design.

Oblivion - the best game in the history of mankind
Morrowind - the second best game in the history of mankind
Skyrim - the third best game in the history of mankind
Fallout 3 - among the top 10 games in the history of mankind

And even purely technically speaking they all run flawlessly on my PS3 (except for Morrowind which isn't available on it).

They annoy me. Needless to say, I don't feel comfortable supporting their future products. Skyrim PS3 simply shouldn't have happened.

I don't especially like them. I've only played Oblivion and Fallout 3 (both on a flatmate's PS3) and they were just... well, I found them really boring. I'm sure they're super-great games, and normally I love sandbox-style games (at least Infamous, San Andreas, Red Dead etc.) but there was just nothing about those games that grabbed me. Collecting bottle caps and taking slow-mo headshots I just found dull.

So that, combined with the horrible performance issues I noticed for a friend playing Skyrim, means they've not really done anything to win me over!

I don't think I've played a game of theirs yet. Don't really like the games they make (or the bugs that come with them).

Skyrim is one of the single best games I have ever touched, and I have been playing video games for 24 years now.

However, it is so damn lame that the DLC is having issues... Hurts my soul. Just make it happen.

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.

"meh" is pretty much how I feel about them

I usually like fantasy WRPGs, but somehow I can't get into the TES series at all - I get bored with those games really fast and I don't even know why - I just lose interest and stop playing. Fallout 3 was pretty good, but other than that, they haven't produced anything I care about.

Oh ... and they should really work on their QA/QC - they're one of the worst offenders when it comes to releasing unfinished games.