» Sun Dec 18, 2011 10:07 pm http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ObviousBeta
(BTW, Skyrim isn't on the page as an example, but I seriously am considering adding it)
Anyway, this is not a "whine because I hate the game" topic, because I am very addicted to it, and I'm a longtime TES fan.
Unfortunately, Skyrim, even after Patch 1.3, is a bug riddled mess.
Morrowind has some badly implemented game mechanics, but I never noticed any game destroying exeprience playing it. Oblivion was very unoptimized and had some quest and gameplay weirdness, but I could play the stock game beginning to end and never suffer anything immersion or fun destroying.
I cannot say that about Skyrim.
To be fair, Skyrim does work as intended, and all the gameplay mechanics are functional. Unfortunately, the bugs noted below are so "brick to the face' obvious it is killing my game experience:
1. Graphics bugs out the wazoo, like water that loses all texture unless I move closer to it, weird black fuzzy patches that appear over pickable plants, items that make constant banging noises against object without anything interacting with them, and sometimes entire meshes and texture areas ghost in and out (most memorably an entire house did this for about eight seconds straight then reappeared).
2. Character A.I. is rather dense. You can tell the guard at Whiterun whatever you want to get in the first time, but he'll still stop you again and repeat himself for no reason. Followers tend to be schizophrenic picking equipment and tend to space out in combat, and the pathfinding A.I gets very easily confused.
3. The user interface is not just a console centered mess, it sometimes has flagrant errors like displaying computer symbols and filename gibberish in place of game text, the font greys out at odd times, and the mouse clicking timing is so scattershot I once entered a conversation with a shopkeeper eight times when I was trying to buy something.
4. The game engine is optimized WORSE than Oblivion, with many areas of slowdown where there shouldn't be any reason for slowdown, sounds and music are unnaturally quiet, and the shadows are so hideously rendered I edited my INI to completely disable them (which bought me so much added performance I refuse to turn them back on). Also, I can understand why people want the LAA tweak for this game......it has so many instances of CTD prone code that said tweak, which would be icing on the cake for Oblivion, is practically a necessity for some people if they don't want the game to crash every 15-30 minutes.
....I could go on, but I'm wondering what Bethseda was thinking releasing this game with such glaring errors, and I was wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience.
