» Wed Jun 16, 2010 11:13 pm
There will still be lots of bugs (have you played Fallout 3 or Oblivion?). I don't really care about bugginess generally. Bethesda has always (in the time I've been a faithful customer of theirs) released RPGs that are incredibly buggy, but I still hold them up as one of the finest gaming companies still around (my other two favourites, Blizzard and Ensemble Studios have disappeared or become considerably less cool, due to WoW, which I refuse to ever play). Even with a large amount of quests that may or may not be bugged, their games provide a hundred + hours of gameplay (easily). I mean...when you're developing games that massive in the same amount of time most companies make a six and a half hour shooter, it's understandable that not every bug will be caught and/or rectified. Have you played Call of Duty: Black Ops? That game is laughably bad and surprisingly buggy, considering they're using the same engine as nearly every other CoD game (which have only gotten worse since leaving the WWII era). They had a similar development time to Fallout New Vegas. I'm not saying Black Ops is anywhere near as buggy New Vegas...not even close, but it's a terrible game with a short, unenjoyable campaign, the worst online gameplay I've ever suffered through (except Army of Two, possibly), no story, and no replay appeal.
This is my first time buying a game made by obsidian though, and I must say that the game corruption bugs have hurt my gaming experience. I had the DLC bug pop up on me once (clearing history fixed it, lucky me), but I've been a little gun-shy -so to speak- ever since and have played very little, for fear of losing my progress, even though I constantly alternate between 11 different saves.
Bethesda's engine was old and buggy. We all knew that. They got Obsidian to make their next game on the outdated engine while they worked on ES5 (which is gonna be a classic...I can already feel it), which will probably be on a shiny new engine. If anything I feel bad for Bethesda....they make games that are literally unparalleled in terms of content and manage to do fairly well with an outdated engine. Then they pay another company to use the engine they have no experience with, end up with a game that's buggy to the nth degree, but still have their name on it, when they had next to no control over the actual production. They're getting a lot of negative press over something they didn't have direct control over...kinda sad.
In the end, there's a reason that all of Bethesda's RPGs have GOTY editions.