Bugs are an Elder Scrolls tradition lol. You get the game, it's epic, but there are some issues. A lot of them seem to have to do with items, the number of items scattered throughout the world, etc. and memory management. That said, the games have been progressively less buggy each time. I can't speak to Arena since I haven't been able to get it to run with DOX BOX and I don't want to buy an old Amiga or something to run it lol. But Daggerfall to this day has bugs and many people never finished it. Morrowind was less buggy. Oblivion even less so than Morrowind. But they were both buggy, nevertheless.

Like I said, to me, it's part of the tradition. Get the game, discover bugs, and wait for them to be patched. I'll live.

New engine dude and first used for this game, there will be tons of NEW bugs.

-- Anyway, buy it after 1 or 2 patches.

Bugs are okay, I just don't want it to have any ctds, at all.

CLARIFICATION ALERT: Gamebryo is a bad engine. In 2002, it was F**KING AMAZING. Even now, it isn't terrible. As a matter of fact, the Fallout games and Oblivion, in my opinion, used it extremely well. Although I do agree, an upgrade is required.

Why does everybody think new engine=less bugs? I'd say the exact opposite is true.

Then don't buy it, you have 10 months to decide.

To be fair it was also used for games like Rockstar's bully. Some of it is on Bethesda(Wonder if they got some tips during cooler talk with say...Carmack.)

On the other hand Gamebryo was fairly impressive for those games and Fallout 3. That it represented some of the best graphics on consoles at one point, and for Fallout 3 almost entirely and a little for New Vegas, it was looked past for the most.

Gamebryo was impressive for an engine that wasn't exactly updated into iterations like Epic has done with it's Unreal 2 and 3 engines with 4 slated for sometime in 2012.

With Bethesda's new engine most issues should be avoided. Depending on how advanced it is any bugs would most likely be pinned on Bethesda(Keep in mind a 100% bug free game is virtually undoable if you keep all factors from game development to release and patching realistic. Lets not forget it's an RPG and likely massive at that)

If the OP is still scared I'd advise to read multiple reviews for what they list as problems and of coarse check up this board here for peoples thoughts on any discovered/documented bugs and issues along with other forums like IGN and Gamespots with a pretty general userbase. I honestly doubt bugs will be as heavy and game breaking/crashing as New Vegas though.)

Microsoft's next home OS was Windows XP after Windows ME.

I can't think of a more drastic example off hand of a predecessor not predicting the instability of its successor (yes I know XP is NT and they killed off 9x with XP). It's like comparing a cruise liner with a styrofoam boat held together with duct tape in that case.

In addition, this is a new engine. While they may introduce new bugs it's very unlikely bugs will be identical to those found in Gamebryo games.

Right, there'll be new ones.

(No seriously, what's with this rose-colored-glasses "new engine = fewer bugs" thing? New tech usually = untried and thus all sorts of things catching the developer off-guard. How many programs, game or otherwise, are better in their "sequel" incarnations once they've had one go-round to shake the "new tech bugs" out?)

I don't understand. I've never had any game breaking bugs of crashes. Maybe you're just playing it wrong.

You are afraid to buy this game?
Are you mad?
Take a way the wal from your name and thats what you are....NUTZ!
Don't take offense its a joke

Yes, there will be new bugs.

I'm afraid of buying this game, though not for these reason. I'm afraid that it's going to be overly mainstream and underly TES. It may look pretty and smart, but so did Oblivion- and we all know how that ended up. A new engine doesn't guarantee anything.

I've been highly tempted to preorder, but with the industry where it is right now, I'm not even going to trust Bethesda to release a game worth paying for months in advance. I really, REALLY hope I'm wrong, and I'll almost definitely have the money hidden away by then, waiting for great reviews to come online and give me reason to go out and buy the game immediately.

In a game this large, it's mostly impossible for it to be 100% glitch free, but they do a pretty good job of making it playable anyway, testing and removing what problems they can. Anything they miss gets patched pretty quickly, especially if the problem is a major one.

You have to remember. Morrowind was very new territory for Bethesda. It was their first attempt at console game design. Nobody had tried anything like it before, and it was really the only game in it's class. Morrowind blazed a trail in a totally new frontier.

Oblivion was developed without even knowing what kind of hardware it was going to run on. It was their first truly multiplatform foray, and basically a release title for a new hardware platform to boot. They had to design for what they THOUGHT the system was capable of, and it was only in the final six months of development that they actually had final hardware to work with. Imagine trying to build a part for a car without even really knowing what kind of car it was supposed to fit, and you know what they were up against.

Skyrim is being developed on final, established hardware for platforms that they have a lot of experience with. They've had Oblivion and Fallout to hone their skills. There haven't been any quantum leaps in graphics technology since Oblivion was released, so this time it's less of a jump than it was with previous titles. They have a bigger team, a larger list of more talented people, and less of a crunch than they previously had. They are testing more extensively than they ever had in the past.

Honestly, I don't think you have a single thing to worry about. Not in the slightest. Previous allegations of TES games being horrible-to-play glitch fests have been highly exaggerated at best, and their development situation has never looked brighter.

the only problems i had with morrowind was the occasional freeze on xbox,.. but even with the GotY edition i didnt have THAT many problems, certainly none that ruined the game for me...

...and on PC, morrowind runs perfectly except for the occasional crash, but it doesnt happen nearly enough to ruin anything for me, and i can start the game back up quickly and load my file in under a minute, so... really, the odd crash doesnt ruin it for me, especially since i save regularly.

although, fallout 3... that does become unplayable!

usually around 10mb, people would suffer constant crashing/freezing and they couldnt play it any further, i got unlucky and mine started doing that around 4-5mb...

on PC it'd probably be more stable, especially because of user-made patches, but im not really sure, i'd need several PC fallout 3 users to clear that up.

anyway, oblivion did kinda start to "break down" after a long while, but... i think that may have been my xbox 360, because other games [such as saints row] behaved exactly the same, pieces of the game world vanishing, things falling through the ground, etc... i believe that was just cause my 360 was dying, and was very unstable [even movies failed to play correctly]

so... i dont think skyrim will be too bad with the glitches, least im hoping.

still not gonna stop me from buying it, though.

If you're on PC learn to use the command console. The only problem with having it enabled is the temptation to cheat :/

Meh, i'm not worried. Of course they will release a patch that fixes the major bugs.

True. I'm looking forward to all the new bugs!

I keep hearing that crap as an excuse to everything.
Of course it's gonna impact on performance but hardware has nothing to do with quests programming. Just to be very clear.

Logic dictates that a new engine will equate to MORE bugs.

As I get older, I am realizing an important thing about video games:

They all have bugs!

No game is going to be perfect, and you know what? I am cool with bugs, to me that's just part of the game, and always will be.

I suppose insane game breaking bugs wold really svck, but they are rare.

new game, new bugs

push out, patch later started with Daggerfall

and thank god it did, or nobody'd put out a game, because they always have bugs and sometimes you just gotta deal.

The two biggest bugs I found in Oblivion made it so I was forced to stay a vamp and that I could never complete the Thieves Guild quests, but those bugs weren't game breakers for me. I just started new characters to do it on, why one might ask. Because I was to stupid to regularly save. I consider it a personal problem, just expect the unexpected and save a little more. If the bug persists then you have a problem. There are many tests through a game to make sure that it can play. Still you never see an Elder Scrolls game get horrible responses for its glitches. Mostly because they are so obscure that one doesn't really notice them. Sure you get an occasional crash or freeze, but it doesn't really take away from how good the game is.

No way... i never bought anything in pre-order.... Skyrim will be the first game i will buy in pre-order for sure!!

At the moment Bethesda have everything going for them (money, fanbase, resources) plus really high expectations to deal with. Also, it seems to me that they have most of the important elements in the game already done, wich leaves them time for more testing, debugging etc. All of that makes me think that Skyrim will be significantly more polished than previous Elder Scrolls games, but I wouldn't expect it to be as polished as say, a Blizzard game.

That said, personaly I can live with bugs to an extent, and neither Oblivion nor Morrowind were that bad even on release. Come to think of it the only game I have ever bought and never bothered playing due to bugs was Gothic 3.

I think you better stay away from airplanes too. In fact it's probably a good idea to hide in your house under your bed for the rest of your life.