Questions for the lot of you. . .

How does a game become bugged? Where does it originate? How can bugs be fixed and when does one know that it is fixed? How can fixing a bug create more bugs? Is there ever the possibility that a buggy game can be fixed?

I simply do not understand how all the above transpires and if there is any real hope that things get resolved. It is as if there is a false sense of games achieving the all-out playability that is assumed to come out at release time.

So, those of us who have played F3, NV, and F4 have been exposed to these bug-laden games and some even expect it to be the case with each new release. But how can anything be done to ensure there is consistent playability pre-release or post release? Is there anything that can be done?

Thoughts? Insights?

Well video games are millions of lines of code, many systems interacting with each other. I wager video game "engines" are some of the most complicated programs on the planet, some are attempting to emulate the physical world after all.

So when you place stories, characters, animations, sound, music, AI on top of that theres a monumental chance for some really cracking bugs. Bethesda has sort of gone one further and let the player muck about in the world and move things, take different stories at different times and intersect them, and visit any area you want whenever you want (almost). That creates an infinite possibility of player interactions with the world (good), but also a lot of chances to [censored] things up (bad). And no amount of pre release testing could account for all these scenarios. Im sure all game companies have some sort of code anolysis system in place, but thats beyond my level.

So bugs that are quite obvious like thise present in perks, or story elements that are the same for all players should be easier to track down that all the endless edge cases that could arise in graphics hardware and other parts.

This.

Think of a computer game like your DNA. It's comprised of millions of lines of code, with billions of bytes. A tiny, easily-missed mistake can cause a major issue elsewhere. Furthermore, hardware can interact with software in... funny, and sometimes unpredictable ways. For instance, look at this story on "http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html". Long story short, a switch that isn't properly connected to anything somehow manages to cause a PC to crash, every time its hit.

While bugs are more reliable on consoles, that's usually because they're all built to the same specifications. Your average PC stops being built to specifications the moment a user starts adding programs or opens the case to add RAM. Thus, a PC potentially has a greater range than a console of how it gets bugs- and a developer can't test a PC game on every possible configuration, because it's just not feasable to mimic the millions of possible hardware/software combinations.

Lots of different lines of code interacting with each other causes unpredictable results. Some can be odd quirks, other time it actually affects how quests and features work, hence the bug.

I remember years and years ago using a Commodore 64 computer writing out programs to play simple games, would take a long time and if one character was messed up, it wouldn't work right. Now I am not a programmer but I can't even imagine what the lines of code look like for a game like this. I remember it would be like:

10 yada yada yada

20 blah blah blah

30 BS BS BS

40 Why am I staring at this screen its giving me a headache

50 and so on and so on

run

*error*