A signification portion of the list is composed of design decisions that don't really count as bugs. Yeah, there are no footprints in the snow. Tough. Yeah, there are a lot of bugs there, but this is still probably the least buggy TES game on release I"ve ever seen. Morrowind used to crash so often it could tell when it was about to do so and made crash-recovery savegames! Daggerfall has so many bugs that some of them will probably need to be emulated by DaggerXL just because the players will miss them.
There are, however, some extremely frustrating issues. For example, the disappearing item bug with chests was there in Oblivion and it's back. Not cool. Games are often like this. They tend to be built by clever programmers who do a lot of hacking to meet release dates. Even game engines written by John Carmack used to show a lot of the same sorts of weird bugs and instability.
As a developer, I agree they probably need a better testing routine, but I can't comment on any other aspect of the resistance issue without having an idea of what they patched.
Well, as for the "no footprints in the snow" issue, I couldn't care less, however pre-release there was talk of snow falling "dynamically" and accumulating on the ground as it fell. This wasn't true obviously. There was talk of footprints and other such effects on this "dynamic snowfall", so I guess that is why people mention it.
Furthermore, "the least buggy TES game on release" just doesn't really cut it in 2011 after the quality of some games out there, after all, while not an ideal comparison, GTA 4 is a large game with very few glitches. Sure the story is pretty much linear etc etc, but the game is still sandbox, and I never experienced a single glitch; hell the most I ever experienced even in GTA:SA was the empty car driving thing. Perhaps because these were made in a time where you couldn't just shove a shoddy mess unfinished on to the market and then patch it up in the months/years afterwards: if the game wasn't finished and bug-free upon release there was no live update system.
Thinking about it, there isn't really any way they could have not known that the game was riddled with bugs and glitches when it was released, look how many there are and how quickly they have been found, so they knowingly released something unready and faulty for people to pay full price for. That isn't acceptable. If the glitches were minor/obscure/inconsequential it may be forgiveable. But no matter how less buggy it is than previous TES games on release, the majority of these should have been addressed and dealt with pre-release and there is no excuse for them not being.
It is dishonest and shameful to do this to their customers, their fans, to treat us with such lack of consideration, treat us like we are idiots that won't notice the errors, and it does not matter how good the game is, and it is good, because I would rather wait another year and have a fantastic, lightly bugged, polished labour of love than a rushed, bug-crippled cash cow shoved out just in time to part the parents with some Xmas money.
I don't know about Morrowind, but I know they lied about the content of Oblivion, and I know now that they have lied now about the content of Skyrim and not only that, but released it unfinished.
Much as I enjoy TES games, I dislike being lied to, deceived and treated like a fool even less, so I will not be buying the next TES game unless it is released in good condition, and the things promised as content pre-release are actually there and I can confirm this.
Damn I'm not even mad, just hugely disappointed.
» Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:48 am 
