Why is Bethesda allowed to make games?

reply to post by Openeye


Tell that to any other video game maker in the last 5 years and they'll tell you that it's impossible to work out engine problems until release.

I've worked with some video game designers and studios here in Canada, tested a few of their games in studio and on beta, and they always *hope* to get all major issues worked out by launch, but it's never a guarantee.

As for the Skyrim PS3 version, IMO that was a fluke, probably more attributed to code within sony's firmware for the rendering and hard drive space code than the actual game code. The issue was quickly fixed though as I remember it.

I play the PC version, as I am addicted to modding that game. Fletcher's pack is great

Besides, we all know Bethesda leans heavily on the mod community for general polish and add-ons.

Most released DLC is from the mod community, except for maybe the first 1 or 2 official releases after launch.

Originally posted by cj6
reply to post by DragonTattooz

 

Actually its not. Ive deleted all autosaves and turned autosave off. I tried reinstalling the game data. Ive downloaded the patch. IVE DONE EVERYTHING THAT PEOPLE HAVE SUGGESTED. It does not fix the lag or stop the save file from increasing. Bottom line: its unfixable!

My son has been playing all day, I just asked him and he said it still has not crashed since he did the autosave thing earlier; he added that it would have crashed multiple times by now and is convinced it is fixed. Are you on a PC or PS3?

reply to post by DragonTattooz


Depends what kind of PS3 you have as well. The original is not optimized for certain game engines...

Originally posted by tothetenthpower
reply to post by DragonTattooz

 

Depends what kind of PS3 you have as well. The original is not optimized for certain game engines...

My son is on a PC, not a PS3. That's why I was trying to clarify if the other poster and i were on the same page.

reply to post by tothetenthpower


what you say their is about not being able to test properly without alot of people is nonsence dude!

every bit of software when in development should follow a strict software development cycle which includes FULL testing, full alpha phase, full beta phase, full pre release phase and so on.

lets jump back a few years, games were properly tested then (even in bethesda) and all games worked how they should when bought from a shop Without A PaTcH!

day one patching is the complete laziness, well, on concoles that is, pc's due to them being infinatly varied from the fact that most pc's are different on the inside, consoles on the other hand should NEVER need a patch on day one. concoles are not infinatly different, concoles have various releases, firmwares, drives and so on, but nowhere near the level of pc's and nowhere near a level that should lead to a company simply not testing a product meant for a concole on every said revision of the concole! (eg every xbox, all hdd sizes, all drive versions, fat/slim, motherboard variation, power supply and region).

In skyrim for the ps3 ... they very very simply did not properly tested it! this is blatantly obvious to anyone who has done any software development and learned about software dev lifecycles.

expecting random players to pay very good money to play a game that is not tested properly is criminal in my eyes, as i said, i have a friend who does not have internet and who spent (Wasted) £40-50 by buying skyrim for the ps3 ... bethesda sold him a faulty product, if this was any other product that was not a game trading standards would have been up bethesda's ass like an endoscope!

I actualy advised him that he should take the game back and get his money back as its broke, but he never bought this from a bigger retailer and did not want to screw over the small game shop over for bethesdas mistake.

In the long run, if anything, this will damage the view of sony for a small amout of people, and should deffinitelly damage bethesda, personaly, i would not get a ps3 even if my xbox started giving me hand herpese every time i touched it ... as it works where as the ps3 doesnt ! (esspecialy after watching skyrim on it)

btw...Stats!

* Super Mario Bros. (40.24 million)[45][46]
* Super Mario Bros. 3 (18 million)[47]
* Super Mario Bros. 2 (10 million)[48]
* The Legend of Zelda (6.51 million)[49]
* Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (4.38 million)[49]
* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (4 million)[50]
* Dragon Warrior III (3.8 million in Japan)[51]
* Dragon Warrior IV (3.1 million in Japan)[51]
* Golf (2.46 million in Japan)[51]
* Dragon Warrior II (2.4 million in Japan)[51][52]
* Baseball (2.35 million in Japan)[51]
* R.C. Pro-Am (2.3 million)[53]
* Mahjong (2.13 million in Japan)[51]
* Family Stadium (2.05 million in Japan)[51]
* Punch-Out!! (2 million)[54]

en.wikipedia.org...

im not counting the numbers above, but there is a good few million games, all games that sold insane amounts and worked first time on the day of release, on different versions of the NES hardware! ...

my point, if they could do it in the 80's ... whats the big difference? ...

ill tell you what it is, companies seem to thing that because things can be updated that they dont need to work right first time ... this practice is criminaly lazy and just wrong .

a game should be ready 110 % on release day, if it is not the companies should stop rushing games out and spend the correct time on them!
/

reply to post by tothetenthpower

Tell that to any other video game maker in the last 5 years and they'll tell you that it's impossible to work out engine problems until release.

I find that very unlikely, I have worked with many developers who have released their product with little to no issues. The reason the big developers (such as EA whom I have worked for, Activision who I have thankfully not worked for) have such problems in QA is that the do not allocate enough resources into the department, they have gotten lazy. It is more cost efficient to either legacy a problem or just pass it over until the players complain about enough for their to be a fix down the road. This is sloppy game making!

They dont care because they know their product will be purchased. I hate comparing video games to drugs but sometimes its a proper comparison. If a new Battlefield game comes out, people will buy it no matter what. As long as the trailer looks nice, and the in game graphics are good it is sold. The common gamer rarely thinks of overall playability until he has the controller in his hands. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a great example. The game was pretty damn good, but the multiplayer had loads of obvious bugs that the testing team had to have seen, and dont get me started on the single player mode

This is becoming a growing trend, to pass the buck to the players instead of having the QA team do their damn job. The big companies in this country really need to look up to others like Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom who all practice excellent QA methodology (albeit Konami is starting to fail the test I know people who work for them).

The main thing with Bethesda games is you NEVER (and I mean NEVER) download the first couple of patches they come out with because they usually break something major while trying to fix something relatively minor. (a great example being Patch 1 for Skyrim fixed the HDD install graphics glitch but made dragons fly backwards and refuse to fight. Patch 2 fixed the dragons but nuked all elemental and magic resistances in the process.) I've invested about 100 hours in the game (X-360: FTW!) without accepting a single patch/update and have encountered a grand total of maybe 3 glitches/bugs. (Even the handfull of supposedly broken quests worked fine for me.)
The bugs that I recall have been one dragon which didn't give up his soul after he was killed, getting stuck in a crevice a few times while trying to find the weak spots to climb up mountain ranges rather than walking around, and some arrows that hit invisible walls between myself and my targets. Nothing all that bad.

New Vegas had some issues. Fallout 3 wasn't too bad. Oblivion was very polished, IMO. Morrowind on the original Xbox was almost unplayable it was so glitchy. I'd say Skyrim ranks somewhere between Fallout 3 and Oblivion in terms of glitchiness. I certainly wouldn't call it a "broken game" by any measure. Two Worlds was a fatally broken game. Superman 64 was a broken game. Skyrim is just a vast game with a handfull of bugs that Bethesda will undoubtedly repair as they are found.

Guys all I was saying is that in the years since we've been able to push updates to both consoles and PC at anytime, QA hasn't been that necessary. It allows developers to focus on other things and enrich game content.

At least that's the impression I am given. Automatic updates and the ability to push them to all devices has caused lull in the QA industry as a whole.

I'm actually a pretty big Bethesda fan...the games they make are pretty ambitious.

Since they are "sandbox" games they are obviously going to be much more susceptible to the glitches and bugs, especially given the size of Skyrim. You could lock 100 people for a month in a room and they'd still not find a bunch. Personally, I've had the game freeze on me about 4 times, usually when it is loading to enter a building/farmhouse.

But look at the problems they have on the multi-player maps for SOCOM or COD...they are a fraction of the size of Skyrim and they are loaded with bugs/glitchers.

My biggest gripe with Bethesda is Fallout - New Vegas....that game was AWFUL! I cant remember being so let down about a game (other than MW3). The graphics/world layout were terrible and uninspiring, and it was crashing all the time.

I've been a fan of Bethesda games for years, and they do merit some credit, just not for consistency.

Oblivion was introduced to me by the PC testing industry, we called it a video card killer. You could mod it til the cows came home and had a solid storyline for the most part. I remember being very paranoid in the void quests, you were locked out until you completed it, survival mode was mandatory. And there was one level where you went into the surreal dream of a tortured artist where everything look like a surrealist painting, it was a BRILLIANT idea, and would soon inspire the much less creative VR Chinese invasion level on Fallout 3.

Sure I will admit I even noticed on the PC versions that New Vegas had way more collision and spawning bugs than Fallout 3, let alone Oblivion, and yes Skyrim is very sloppy in places, and like someone mentioned, I feel like I'm seeing some of the same layout and building design throughout ALL the games they do, Time to have a talk with the main building modeller, or retrain him in something else and get a new guy?

I worked a few years in several different projects as a texture and art asset guy for a small local video game developer. The team I worked with was and still are some of the most creative people I've ever met. It was one of the few companies owned and run by true artists and idea guys, not fancy business majors or clever coders. But still your friend and your foe is your publisher, bottom line.

It's a conspiracy in itself. Many brilliant minded developers turned into publishers, and this is what ruins them usually. It's like getting corporate sponsorship and money backing at the same time you get the creative freedom you always wanted. You listening to the angel or the devil?

The typical relationship is the developer is a bunch of sold out artists who do whatever the huge money publisher asks. These publishers are so huge they will buy ANOTHER publisher just to get the rights over what they are developing. I worked on one of the very first LOTR titles for xbox that released closely with the movie. Our publisher was bought outright by another multigazillionaire publisher, new to this industry. Their fancy new art director saunters into to our healthy creative environment and starts to say things like we need to redo all of Moria, then add more masculine features as he's drawing circular shields and curvy swords. We had a hard time not laughing, this was the new guy calling the shots. Top this off with a sloppy test team and I had test experience, dupe bugs piss me off and spell job padding for a lazy behind.

What I'm saying is Bethesda is a great development team, and they need some passionate testers and a few more sharper design team guys, maybe even a weirder texture artist who thinks outside the box? Sometimes PS3 is not their main dev platform and the port takes time/more money, and you got a tightwad soulsucking publisher breathing down your throat? Our PS2 port sucked horribly, because they outsourced it, our between level FMVs sucked because they outsourced. See the pattern?

The trick to doing a great game is give the artists full creative freedom AND enough time, they call the shots, next the design team, then the programming, one great tester during production and small good team after. Hey, it could happen right?

If you want to check out a cool game by some interesting cats, look at Xoctic. It has a really unique approach to simple shooting games:

to be fair it's not the devs fault it's the publishers. they put in place an ideal to quickly code games to the 360 and hastily port out from there. and on top of that they got devs churning out content early to get them "DLC" dollars when they could of spent that time and money ironing out issues.

I'm playing on the pc and with a couple patches the bugs are minimal tbh. my only gripe is with each passing chapter the games get easier and easier. to me skyrim is an awesome and ambitious adventure game. to the casual gamer it is a super rpg. I laugh reading how people go out of their way to make uber character builds when there really isn't any reason to. again this is something I attribute to the publishers, they've dumbed down every genre chassing the bigger casual market. the saving grace is the pc version has a large mod community.

reply to post by cj6


Hey! lay off the dev's, bugs can only be patched if they are reported, and from what Im seeing is that there are more people reporting bugs for the Xbox and PC versions than for PS3 so it would make sense that those versions are getting fixed.

Yes I have played it on PS3, over 400 hours of it (lvl 52!) and yes there are bugs, get over it. No code ships glitch free. and Yes I have reported the bugs I have encountered and yes they got patched!

Originally posted by dtrock78
Since they are "sandbox" games they are obviously going to be much more susceptible to the glitches and bugs, especially given the size of Skyrim.

Do you even know what Sandbox means?
Minecraft is a Sandbox, Gary's Mod, Terraria, Little Big Planet, Clonk Endeavour - those are Sandbox game. Sandbox isn't a linear game where you follow a given story without the possibility to change the world, do what you want and explore everything freely. I think only Ultima 6 and 7 came close to "Sandbox RPG"

Bethesda? They produce linear games that may fall in the "Open World" category (meaning you can go where you want, not level based) but it's not Sandbox because you can't do what you want, you always have to follow what Bethesda intended the player to do. You are linearly guided through the main 'story' (as badly written and lame as they are, they can't compete with Bioware or Obsidian), everything is shown to you, as if Bethesda thinks all their players are retards. The game are easy, casual and don't have much substance.

I really do wonder why Bethesda is popular. Their games are boring. For over 15 years they trie to create RPGs and from Arena to Skyrim,they fail every time. Boring, badly written storyline, NPCs that are paperthin with no personality, nothing interesting to say, they are just there to fill the world. Lame, uninteresting, simple Gameplay that guides the player from the Beginning. Usually very broken gameplay elements, like the Skilltree (it was really bad in "Fallout" 3)
I really believe, those games sell because of all the hype and because of the 'great graphics'. As we all know, today 80% of the gaming audience is only interested in graphics and not gameplay.
And it's funny that after Oblivion every game forum was filled with "the game sucks" posts and "I never buy another Bethesda game" or "To enjoy Oblivion you have to install 100 mods" but then Skyrim was hyped like crazy, everybody bought it and the complaints started again. I really wonder if gamers are the most stupid 'race'

I think that Oblivion is a masterpiece and far better than Skyrim. Skyrim is almost unplayable for me on PS3. I had to give up and in that I lost respect for Bethesda, not just because of the bugs & glitches, but because the game is mediocre, at best. I couldn't get as into it as I did Oblivion or Fall Out. Bethesda had to have known of the issue before the game released, IMO. SONY should hold them to higher standards from here on.

Originally posted by MrGrimm
Even the best in post production will never get rid of all the bugs. It's all about the deadline man, and there is more than you can imagine that goes into making a video game.

That is true, but they should catch it when quests are impossible to complete because the NPC completely disappears from the game during the quest. They should at least ensure that the quests are fully working. An occasional backwards flying dragon is one thing. Not completely testing the game's quests is inexcusable.

I had that problem with two quests in Oblivion and with two in Skyrim. To me that shows a complete disregard for the consumer. It is even worse when they hype the fact that they test the game with a "speed run" after it is "completed." Instead of seeing how fast you can get through 20% of the missions you take the time to ensure you can complete 100% of the missions.

Developing a game is long and hard work. With massive games like Skyrim there will be glitches. However, somethings are inexcusable. I've put in many hours with Skyrim and I enjoy the game. However, I do get frustrated running in to quest glitches in every Elder Scrolls game now.

Originally posted by cj6
I officially hate Bethesda and wish that they would just stop making games if they cant get it together already. Anybody agree???

Hate is such a strong word. I seriously doubt Bethesda is sitting back and laughing at you. You have to understand this is more work for them rather than an easy-out. They are taking the steps to correct and patch the bugs, so you shouldn't feel like they're flipping you the bird while they take your money.

Sadly this is the new status quo for video games: Why delay a game with extensive internal Q&A when you can release it to millions of people and use them as your testers instead?

Part of the reality that comes with consoles being hooked up to the Internet.