i personally believe bethesda shouldn't intentionally leave in glitches and bugs no matter how amusing they are because you can never really know what those amusing glitches are really affecting. that and running across a randomly rag dolling troll or a animation froze dragon can really kill any sort of believability the game has. what are everyone else's thoughts on this? should bethesda keep in these seemingly harmless but very amusing glitches or should they be dealt with just as swiftly as other glitches?

None of those glitches are "intentional" I can honestly assure you.

By fixing one bug you make tens or even hundreds of more bugs

The only one I've come across which looked like a feature was the orbital giant cannon thing. And that is awesome!

This.

Some bugs aren't worth the trouble it would take to fix them, as the latest "patch" demonstrated.

Then how can you ever really know what effect 'fixing' them will have?
With most bugs, its actually pretty easy to know what the effect is, or at east what it ISN'T affecting. You can be pretty certain a rendering bug isn't going to affect AI behavior, for example. That doesn't mean fixing them is easy, and there's often other priorities.

I don't think they intentionally leave in bugs and glitches, but there are a bunch of design decisions that are glaringly obvious and equally as dumb.

Why can I decapitate people with a mace? Why is it that hitting oil with a torch does nothing?

I have a feeling if they really didn't want you to fly 400 feet in the air every time a giant hits you, they could have.

Bethesda has a long history of not fixing bugs. The Unarmored skill did not work in Morrowind and the bow reach reach bug in Oblivion caused some player's computers to restart. Bethesda knew about both bugs (and hundreds of others) but did nothing to fix them. Daggerfall is famous as much for its bugginess as for its complex gameplay.

I have been a vocal critic of Bethesda's customer service for years. But I have to say Bethesda appears to be improving their game. Morrowind was patched three times: once for the original campaign and once after each expansion was released. Skyrim, by contrast, has already been patched twice, and more extensive patches are promised in the future. I am willing to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt. I believe they are trying to turn their abysmally poor service record around. Time will tell if they succeed.

All computer software has bugs, finding and fixing them all is not feasible at all, even if you have the budget of NASA. NASA has a defect density of 0.004 bugs per thousand lines of code, each thousand costing $850,000. Everyone else has between 10 and 20 bugs per thousand, costing about $5,000 per thousand lines. A bug in a game causes no lives to be lost, no rockets to explode mid-launch, it sends no nuclear reactors into meltdown, so the quality assurance budget is sized accordingly; unless you're willing to pay $6000 for a computer game you can expect it to have some bugs.

Sure they knew about some bugs before Skyrim went gold, but given the enormous size of it they must have spent a fair bit of time, money and effort on QA. They did pretty well if you ask me.

they do todd himself said during skyrim's development that they would leave in any entertaining bugs they encounter.

Patch the freezing please.

Then they are doing it wrong.

How many times is your OS patched? Is that creating more bugs?

No, most sw development teams can fix bugs without making more

So far very disappointed in the game that has been sent out. Bugs everywhere and game froze twice in 15 mins, hard restart the PS3, and play the stupid quest again. From the very first Thieves Guild quest all the merchants are standing around Baylof not moving. Minor quest qliches everywhere. A backwards flying dragon, really..... Game freezes...did I mention that, this is so frustrating. Only Bethesda games freeze on my PS3, you really are doing something wrong. Freezing up an Xbox or PS3 should never happen, you know what the system is. It never changes like a computer, really....freezes the game. As you can tell this is very frustrating to me. I think I'm done with this game, two toons and who knows when the game quits on me. I'm with everyone else that thinks they should get their money back. This is the exact same reason I quite playing Fall Out 3, and this headache is back.

At least when Blizzard delays a game they make sure it's right. Diablo III for the save.

Off to play Batman Arkham City. Now there's a great game, take notes Bethesda.

From the mouth of Todd.

About putting buckets on people's heads to steal things.
"It was like day two, and we went, what? Do we fix that? Our lead programmer is pissed and wants to fix it, and I said I'm not sure we should. That's one of those where maybe we leave it in."


They intentionally leave bugs in.

Buckets on head is hilarious and they would probably disappoint more people by removing it then leaving it in. Don't like it, don't do it, now I fixed your bug. Most people had to learn about that to do it anyways and it isn't really all that helpful of a bug anyway.

It is considered to be left there as this glitch ain't game-breaking as it is the player who decides if he will use it or not (just like how player decides to or not to use cheats).

I don't know. Some glitches can be astonishingly amusing. To anyone who's played GTA IV and discovered the playground swing glitch - you know how epically amusing some glitches can be.

To anyone who hasn't played it, or didn't know, there's a place in GTA IV where, if you backed your car up to a swing set in a playground, and tried to reverse UP the swing supports, it would literally drop kick your car like a football half way across the city. Freaking awesomesauce. (You had to reverse it up because otherwise you would just end up flying through the windshield and leave a stain on the footpath).

Not all glitches are bad, and given that R* are usually very, very good at removing glitches from games, I have always wondered if that was left in on purpose.

Then there's the glitch in Skyrim where giants hammers send foes into orbit. I never get sick of that. Bye bye Sabre cat!

A few I don't mind--pot on the head kind of thing. I do hope they don't take that as an excuse not to fix more important and less amusing bugs, though.

I like them, and there are plenty of other people that do too. That is why they leave them in.

At the end of the day, Skyrim's still a game, and its primary goal is to entertain.