I first off do have to say. Ive made it to lvl 25 so far, and I'm just trying to finish out the last bits of the game (no, i have not taken advantage of the glitches, I wanted to play this through for enjoyment). The patch fixed very minor things. I've suffered from 5 save corruptions, numerous game crashes daily, and more glitches than i can count (and i know their are many people who have had worse problems). Fallout 3 you saved because you may want to do something differently. Here, you have to hard save every 20 min, because you don't know what door, what fast travel, what shooting is going to freeze your game, crash your console, or corrupt your autosave. It is sad when a company uses the live community as their beta testers. ANY tester who played even halfway through this game would have run across countless issues that needed to be fixed for a stable game. It is time that companies stop using people who are paying them to test our their bug ridden games. If you cant tell, I have been waiting for this game to come out for quite awhile now, but i would have rather waited a few months to get a better experience out of it. At this rate, ill have finished the game, and the achievements with only the memory of a bug ridden legacy to the fabled fallout 3

I am not sure how long have been playing computer / console RPG. For me it is 25+ years since the old days of Wizardry, Ultima, etc.

Rule#1: Save a lot and save often. 20 minutes per manually save is way to long IMO. Every 2 minutes should be the norm.

We did that back then with floppy disks so why is it so difficult now that we have the hard disk (xbox360) to save to. You learn to never trust the autosave, use alternate saves, save before going into room/building. If you need to save inside a building, save under different item(s) so you can do it again if necessary. Back then there was no forum to complain to, no internet to look for patches, and yet we still managed. I do agree there were lot of hacks and exploits we learned from magazine articles.

I have been playing for slightly over 6 hours now. There are some graphic glitches with dead scorpions but nothing crashing. BTW I install the game to the xbox360 hard disk.


BTW. How do you their testers have not found some (or most) of these bugs, glitches, and issues? I am from a software development background. QA always manage to find more bugs than you can ever fix before the release deadline. Someone will need to decide what defects will get fix before release, what can be handled later as patches, and what will never get fixed.

Currently, im just over 50 hours on my main save file....usually if I'm not doing anything major, I do it about every 20 min. if I'm doing a questline, i save more often. I've got only 3 quests left on the main story line, and I'm trying to finish out the rest of the side quests first. I have had to manually shut down my xbox a few times a day, and i know thats not good for the console. i dont bother saving several times in each structure (unless its a vault, or another large layout) because if you explore it for 15 min, and the game crashes, it takes you 3 to get what you wanted, and be back where you were.

I agree their is always bugs, but honestly, I've come across several game ending bugs (game freezing, corrupt save files, blank screen), some within the first few hours. This whole forum is full of people who are running across game ending bugs and glitches. ANYTHING that makes you have to manually power down your console (and it happens very frequently here) is an issue that needs to be addressed. Hard reboots are not good for any piece of hardware.

Well with respect to your experience in gaming and your background you have to understand one thing, sure you had to do it when you were saving on floppys etc so many years ago but thats exactly it, THE GAME HAS EVOLVED, we're not supposed to that anymore we're supposed to enjoy the game that we paid for without having complications. The fact of the matter is sir, is that we paid for a finished product and yes games have glitches its just the way it is but not glitches that will completely destroy the experience of the game, given these game-save bugs occurred after the recent patch and they probably did not stress test it, prior to that they had an opportunity to weed out the minor bugs that patch was meant for.

I have installed the game to my hardrive as well and the game save bug occurred to me 28 hours into playing and frequent crashing also does among a plethora of quest glitches and like you graphical glitches (and ALOT of other gamers in this forums can attest to these occurring to them). So what the Orginal Poster is coming from is perfectly understandable, it does seem as if sometimes just SOMETIMES it feels like we are playing a beta.

I understand where you are coming from and you're defending an industry that you have worked for and that is admirable but we as consumers and more importantly as gamers SHOULD demand a higher quality product for our money.

RPG in general have not evolved all that much since paper D&D. The gameplay is pretty much like this: 1. Open the door. 2. Kill the monsters. 3. Grab the tressures.

With respect to saving games. NEVER trust the system to do it for you. Save a lot and save often will apply until they stop making RPG on console/computer. It just like working on a word processor software, sure it has auto save but do you want to trust it? Best practice - hit the save button often.



No software product can ever be 100% finish or bug free. Just look at Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. Computer/console games have a hard and fast release date that must be followed. They can only do so much before they have to send the stuff to the printers and DVD burners. When the bug report comes in Bethesda or Obsidian have to try to replicate the problem in their own environment. Until they can do so and their developers can debug the codes/scripts; they cannot blindly fix the issue just because people complain in the forum. It is usually a good practice in software development that you don't tell the end users what exactly is going on until you have something ready.

I've never had to pay for an open beta before but time are changing.

this game is so cool (save) run run run kill the zombies (save) heal up (save) talk to a character (save) go to a new place(save)1/4 of mission done (save) 1/2)mission done (save) game freezes!!!!!!!!!(go to menu) first 2 saves are corrupted (load game) start mission all over (save) finish mission (save) get 10+ hrs of game play (freeze) go to menu and try to load a game (epic fail all save are now corrupted (go kill yourself) b**** how this is the worst 60 dollar u ever spent

It is pretty annoying just playing the game as its meant and running into all these issues. But I guess we're supposed to expect tons of bugs. I saved countless times in FO3 simply in case I wanted to do something differently whether it be in a speech challenge, to test new items, etc.. not because I feared for my game this much. Developers need to learn when a product is defective and should be delayed. But who wants to miss out on the easy holiday season cash.. -.-

Oh yah I agree RPGs have not evolved much I def agree with you, especially this one but I am saying the way games are, from 10 - 15 years ago when saving was a must the convenience factor through the next gen and next gen and next gen consoles have evolved, relying on an auto save is not safe agreed but honestly, would you want to go back to the days of old where you absolutely HAVE to do what you did, save every 10 mins and with this bug btw you HAVE to save every 2 mins, and even then its a toss up weather ALL of them will be corrupted, thats Broken, this patch like i've said in previous posts around was not stress tested, this bug from what I got from forums intel is showing up when people do a 5 - 6 hour in one sitting on the game. But then again yes it can be avoided by not playing too long if thats the case, but isn't that gimping the game experience. Again, in this day and age quality is a must.

2nd I will agree with you, I agree that no software can be 100% bug free i've known that too from my years of gaming. But having minor bugs and graphical glitches thats minor and doesn't take away from your experience is one thing, a game save that destroys your progress and completely makes the time you put into the game utterly useless is another, you haven't experienced the bug so its hard for you to concept how alot of us are feeling, but if you put in the time to play this game as alot of the people have and took precautions like I personally have, i ignored the said quest that it might be attached to, i didn't play 5 - 6 hours in one sitting and still 28 hours into the game with 33 of your saved and the next save that you are able to load is 18 hours, 10 hours behind, its a massive killer for your game. Thats 10 hours you put in that is completely negated by a design flaw and a flaw you don't know and have no control over so it COULD POTENTIALLY happen again.

like I said I have no doubt you know what you are talking about you sound knowledgeable and your experience in gaming is well over mine, but its a game breaking glitch where peoples time are wasted and experience are destroyed which is terrible for a game that was paid for on release.

Sorry, but in the context of the reported scale of bugs this is demagogy. There always will be some bugs, but what we see here is way beyond reasonable. I cannot fathom how you can get corrupted saves that wipe out previous saves. These kind of problems were solved in last century and somebody must be really sloppy or bad at his job to still cope with such issues. Same thing about freezes - script errors cause crash?! Affect video and cause general lockup? Unless you know nothing about separation of basic software modules into independent entities (problem extensively studied and solved in 70-ties of last century)... You may get misbehavior, not crash. I am in this profession too.
This game is not even in beta, it is initial integration and test. And we are the testers.

100% agree^^^
I really don't appreciate treatment like this from a company I've come to respect (Morrowind?). I WAS loving New Vegas until it started crashing and glitching, and I'm even willing to accept some minor bugs, but this is unacceptable; I can't even zone-out without crashing, and THAT my friends, is [censored].
please release and update soon, and next time, show some damn pride in your work.

I am so sick of people telling me to save every chance I get. The problem with that logic is that the saves are the problem, not so much the game. I can handle a game crashing, freezing, or bugging out. Really. But when a game does all that AND wont even let you load your saves, the game becomes, in all sense and purpose, unplayable.

just a bump, figured keep it at the top for people to rant and not clutter up the bug threads

Yes. 110% yes. This.

I didn't know the FONV was a buggy piece of crap until after I bought it. I bought it at 7am, on the way home from work. Popped it in, literally played every second I could in the starting area. Talking to everyone, setting up for doing the side quests there. (I played Fallout 3, and I noticed the engine hasn't changed much. So I wasn't really worried about saving TOO often... I had no problems in my 40+ hours of FO3.)
I got tired, went to bed.

Came home from work the next day, and booted up my auto save.... What the [censored]... My right control stick isn't working. The control stick felt lighter than usual. I figured my controller broke. Went out, grabbed a new one. Set it up... Still not working. Turned out, it was the [censored] game. It somehow canceled my one control stick from working in that save. I didn't even think that was a possibility. I could run, jump, fire the weapon, do everything. Only the right control stick couldn't register...

I ended up making a new save, and playing the starting crap over before getting bored, and regretting buying the game. I expected it to be at least as good as FO3. What I got is a glitchy pile of garbage. I'm afraid to even get very far in the game now after reading around on multiple FONV forums... I wish there was some way to just get my money back for it. I should of just waited 2 days for Fable 3 to come out....

PS: For those of you that don't think I spent long in the game. I played for about 4 hours in that town doing everything. Exploring every nook and cranny. Talking to every person, absorbing all the information. Really getting into the RPG element for the game. No. I'm not that far in. Do you know how much that broke my experience? Now I have to go talk to all the people that I've already talked to. I know what they say, I know where I'm going to go. Just going through the motions.... I can't imagine doing this for more than just one town. I don't even want to play it now. Anyone know the game return policy at Walmart?

Its not even a pride in their work, its show some respect for us!! I gladly hand over my hard earned cash for a product that you know will be good... however, as we have all found out, this is not. Plain and simply it is flawed. There is no great leap of much, graphics or otherwise since the last one, so surely your building on pretty strong foundations there, just new stuff to do.I personally feel I have had the piss taken out of me a bit, glad I bought the special edition so I can read my lovely hard backed graphic novel while my console reboots!!!!

The main problem that comes to my mind is that we're all assuming that every issue can be patched. I know for a fact that this is probably not the case. There are always limits to what a patch can fix (when it comes to consoles at least). The more I look at the list of problems. The faster I want to drive out to Walmart, and beg them to take it back... I'll also accept the contact information for the makers of this [censored] game, so I can have them give me my money back directly. It's not Walmart's fault that Bethesda released a [censored] game.

Pray that the Walmart Gods smile in my favor. And thank Jesus I didn't buy it at Gamestop...

Game publishers get their money from retailers, not the end consumer. Bethesda already made their nut, whether or not people buy their broken buggy mess of a game is inconsequential at this point, hence the abysmal support. :sadvaultboy:

honestly, i wouldnt be so upset, if the game wasnt this bad. its not a matter of catching the bugs, and finding a fix. sadly, this is stability issues that should have been found in basic testing the first time a tester loaded the game.

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