First, this is quite a long post. Grab yourself a coffee and relax.
Second, English is not my first language, hopefully the quality of text is still acceptable.
€: Third, there may be spoilers regarding persons or quests.

They say the start is always the hardest part. Probably true if you don’t know where you are going yet and yet you have to make some tough decisions early on.
Well, over the past years Bethesda had us make some hard decisions by releasing many games that might just hit the sweet spot between action and roleplaying. So while the Fallout series has seemingly carried the main bulk of decision making, the Elder Scroll series also had some decisions to make, just differently so.
Seeing Fallout 4 coming to life and being released soon enough, I wanted to take the opportunity to reminisce about the games Bethesda had been releasing over the past few years, some of my favorite games, but not all good.
A good couple of days ago I ran across a copy of the Skyrim Legendary Edition for a short buck. I knew of Oblivions buggyness, thought a moment or two about my computer being able to handle the game and picked it up. What followed was … a wild ride of emotions, for a matter of reasons. Pretty much everything was expected, just not in this intensity, both good and bad.
Bethesda is known for making their games generally big, no Fallout or Elder Scrolls game has been an exception this (well… Shelter is), and most of the time, the game is looking appropriate for its time. Remember when Fallout 3 first hit the shelves? Getting out of the Bunker for the first time and being blinded by the sunlight? An awesome feeling in a world so different… over the time, their artists even exceled at making diverse locations and with Skyrim they finally got the faces right too! Skyrim was nicely done, with pine woods, plains and all those nice little references to the Lord of the Rings… not quite my style, but nice nonetheless. I was astounded at how the game actually worked on my ancient rig, hell a few weeks back I have been struggling running New Vegas (heavily modded, though), now I could literally smell the fresh snow.
I can’t say much on the soundscape, though. That’s not because Bethesda has made a bad call, on the contrary, it’s my condition. Bad ears or something, I won’t go into detail any further. What I’ve been hearing, most of the games’ sounds are nice, footsteps, gun or swordsounds, grunts, pretty much all okay. Voices, too. Well, for the most part if they could have sticked with the stand out voices to single characters. Boone in New Vegas, or Farkas in Skyrim. Too bad Farkas’ actor had been used on other NPCs as well which hurt the game’s feeling quite a bit after a few hours. Have a few less recognizable voices for regular townsfolk and such and things should be fine.
Those NPCs got you and me a good amount of quests. From easy fetch or kill quests all the way up to clean three consecutive dungeons, kill a big bad boss at the end and solve a small puzzle – often the way was more exciting than the end, and that’s okay. In the Fallout series, most of these quests also mattered in the end, which was awesome, and I hope Bethesda will continue on walking the extra mile. It’s good that they did find a sweet spot between the more quest heavy New Vegas and more exploration (I remember that New Vegas barely had any good, big dungeons), and the map being huge again. Things felt pretty small with New Vegas to me, while Skyrim doesn’t have this kind of neighborhood feeling. Good progression here although I think it will be a hefty challenge linking the openness of the world with the consequences of the quests in one final event; there’s just so many strings coming together. Since I have been working in community projects for various games over the past ten years or so, I can relate; it’s a ton of work. Speaking of ends, the quality of Main Quests has drastically improved over the years. Oblivions quest series felt kinda… meh to me, Fallout 3 was great, and Skyrim’s final battle felt pretty epic to me. Good job here. Maybe for once you could retire a character ways after the Main Quest, after you have done everything you wanted to, and then play the credits of what happened outside the main quest…
However, those things come at a price. Now I don’t mind a bandit being stuck in a wall every now and then, but with Skyrim someone’s head got to roll. Within around 30 hours of playtime in 1 ? weeks I encountered no less than half a dozen gamebreaking bugs, and a lot of those sure as hell aren’t related to modding the damn game. They aren’t related to the game being not properly optimized for its platform, whatever that platform may be. I know Rage had tremendous driver issues, yes that can happen. Recently it happened to Arkham Knight but since I haven’t played it I cannot say anything of the bugs within. Back to Skyrim. I had to read every bug up when encountering one, so there goes a Sunday afternoon that you had planned on spending relaxing but ended up being a rush of madness at a game. In Skyrim, I encountered the Esbern bug (because of a follower being present and he wouldn’t start his speech), I encountered the High Hrothgar bug (that wasn’t even being fixed by mod, had to disable / enable a character that was related to an unfinished quest to update his actual quest status), I encountered a bug where a cell wouldn’t update with a quest status, quitting on cellchange with a CTD in two different instances forcing me to reload earlier saves (in one instance going back six (!!!) hours of playtime because I never bothered with the quest), I experienced Morthal NPCs not updating properly and rendering me unable to enter Morthal at all (CTD), experienced a bug that goes back to the days of Oblivion when fast travelling and autosaving at the same time - and in one case I made a bad call with mods. Other games have been plagued by this as well, just not as much as I have experienced just now, and it’s making me somewhat angry.
I know of Bethesda’s stance on mods and it is totally reasonable and understandable because they can’t be responsible for every outcome of modding – they can’t check every mod. I know another company tried this on small scale with maps in a first person shooter for reasons “power levelling perks” with what they called a “whitelist” – it just didn’t work out in the end, too many good maps fell flat and the process still took months to get a map through. Also, in America I suppose you’d get sued if not for this official declaration on mods, so…
However, mods also fixed so many of these bugs I practically refuse to play any Bethesda game without them. Might be a reason to wait – until I get a new computer to handle Fallout 4 and for Fallout 4 to get rid of most of its bugs. I have seriously thought about giving Skyrim back. When I play a game I want a product that I can play from alpha to omega without having to rollback the game half a dozen times. This point definatly goes to digital game reseller platforms like steamworks who just integrated a fitting feature – you can get a refund of the game bought within 2 weeks for a reason, and if that reason is “I can’t finish (emphasis on gamebreaking and more than one) the game because of bugs”, that I think is a very good reason because the developer hasn’t done its job properly. You wouldn’t drive a car with one of its motion dampeners defect would you?
Well I got carried away here for a bit and I apologize. Bethesda games are generally playable and I have spent probably a good two thousand hours combined in games like Oblivion or New Vegas, modded or not. Mods have been an integral part of the experience, however, with adding fixes and additional content to the package. I doubt there would be sold as many copies of Oblivion today as there would be without.
As you can probably see by now, I do like Bethesda games. I am looking forward to Fallout 4. I just felt the need to vent my frustrations here for a bit; but with Bethesda’s reputation those… “fears” are not without a grip on reality. I really hope a few more people are joining QA until November.
I hope you enjoyed the read and share your feelings towards this matter.
Regards,

- Excea

In terms of bugs, I think and this is my opinion but I think that with the game being exclusively on current gen (PS4/Xbox One) that the amount of bugs/glitches should be lower due to the framework being similar. I think we will still have issues but nothing like New Vegas or Skyrim, the latter being somewhat playable at launch and the former being a mess at launch.

Most of the bugs I encountered in Skyrim were quest related. The game is loads of fun and I love it dearly, but the quest design in general svcked pretty hard. Way too many force greets in the game. The first time I went to Riften I felt sympathy for any woman that's walked past a construction site and had to run a gauntlet of wolf whistles and grasping hands. The game is hardcoe with the aggressive way that it shoves quests down your throat. You get quests auto-inserted into your journal via overheard dialogue, books, rumors, force greets and notes reverse pickpocketed into your inventory. It got very annoying and obnoxious and led to a cluttered quest journal containing quests that I had no interest in doing. All of those open quests and running scripts would start to bog down your system and bloat your saves over time. I wasn't surprised when they told the PS3 people to try not to have too many open quests while they were trying to fix the performance issues with that platform. The irony is of course that Beth designed the game in such a way that it was extremely difficult to avoid or refuse those quests in the first place. Talk about being your own worst enemy.

My main concern with FO4 is that they didn't learn from the mistakes of Skyrim and the quest design will be as bad if not worse. When you consider the inclusion of a voiced protag and a strong focus on narrative it should raise some red warning flags. They'll want to ensure that all of the awesome content, scripted sequences and snappy dialogue will be positioned front and center with little to no option for the player to avoid any of that crap if they're not interested. It used to be that I could count on a Beth game to drop me in the world and leave me alone while I explored the content. Now they push the content at you relentlessly and bury you under a load of quests almost immediately. Hey Beth, get away from me and leave me alone. This ain't my first RPG. I know how to find quests without your help and FFS when I refuse a quest clear it from my journal. For now I'm holding off on FO4 until the mod tools are out and the UI (PC) has been fixed.

I totally expect the random stuff that skyrim added to your journal to continue in Fallout 4. It does annoy me from an RPG perspective because as a good person, I would never accept Brynjolf's quest in Riften and it doesn't go out of your journal. Now that particular forced encounter can be gotten around by going to the smith and just smithing stuff and Brynjolf will try to talk to you 3 times and then give up. The others though can't, like the guy in Markarth as an example, that quest is added to your journal whether you like it or not.

With Skyrim though, they did a good job of relegating a lot of that to the Miscellaneous objectives section, which is bound to fill up regardless of what quests you do. I don't mind getting a bloated misc section (although I understand how some would), but it does bug me when a full named quest is added to my journal. The only quest I feel obligated to complete as soon as I get it though is Blood on the Ice, which is just a mess. Still not as bad as Beyond the Beef, though.

This is an issue with lots of quests being imposible to refuse in Skyrim just involve in conversation with npc was enough, other could not be avoided.

Also the quest log in Skyrim, In Oblivion you had an book and quests you ignored just ended up on pages in the back. Face it how many quests did you refuse in Oblivion?

in Skyrim the stand on the quest page and glare at you.

Just as annoying is the short description, the minor quests are worse with their 3-5 word descriptions, lacking any information of quest giver or even the nature of the quest.

How bad: well had an entry Talk to Vex, well I exited the thief guild too look for Vex, it was no information that she lived in it outside of previous discussion or you remembered her.

Lack of quest giver is also annoying, it might be some random quest you picked up or an quest to help you become trane.

However this is hardly an bug, more an piss poor implementation.

I think the term 'game-breaking' is overused.

I also think wrapping up what's worse about Fallout 4 is foolish when we are still 3 months from launch.

I missed out on all these "game-breaking" bugs in Skyrim. I feel left out. My game never broke once. Though I attribute this to a very small selection when it comes to mods. The worse culprit for causing trouble are ironically the mods that allege to fix problems with the original game and then proceed to "fix" one thing while breaking several other.

My worst experiences with bugs in Skyrim was when they ruined the climix. At the end of the Dragonborn dlc when Miraak was just refusing to die normally, I had to do some crazy [censored] to overcome the bug , it really left a bad taste in my mouth. Another one was the first encounter with Alduin, there is a bug which happens sometimes which prevents Alduin from losing health, which was annoying.
I searched those on Google and other people had the same problem but Bethesda never adressed these issues.
I expect their game to be free of game breaking bugs at least two months after release. I'm playing Witcher 3 right now and I only encountered two bugs, one solved it self with a reload and the other one is pretty minor and doesn't even worth mentioning, I expect the same from Bethesda, there should be no need for consumers to use community made bug fixes for a fresh game.

Well as far as bugs go, there's two type of bugs: related to the game, and related to a mod.
The latter one usually happens to either bad planning, bad execution or incompatibility. Bad planning usually indicates a bad mod altogether. Bad execution is a little harder to spot but will usually be recognizable after loot crossreferencing or commentaries (in Beth games anyway). Compatibility is usually a user issue that can be solved through merging, bashing or other means. Works with most mods in most games. Sometimes there's some instability due to the engine, though, nothing can be done about it unless the developer releases the source code. Those sometimes led to impressive engine enhancements (also see: ID engines, the first U-Engine also has gotten some nice improvements over the years). But then again, then instability issues were also present in the original game.

Gamerelated bugs are usually due to bad planning or execution. It's not that there are bugs, it's not the problem, they are usually an indicator of shortened QA or other production values. With budgets usually assigned to AAA games that should give you some thought. In Beth games sometimes quests or questsolutions feel tacked on, kind of "well this sounds fun, can we implement it?" - "Yeah we can.". And than they forgot that this idea is assigned to a character that is already assigned to something else. Normally, this shouldn't be a problem. However, sometimes a crossreferencing failsafe isn't working or implemented. For example, a questgiver dies so it's impossible to end the quest and purge it from the logs. There should have been a notification or something. For those who like to dig in history, you may also want to read about the Gothic 3 fiasco.

As far as forced quest greetings go, scripted sequence are a must for a more immersive environment. Forced quest greetings can be annoying, but they are a convenient way of making sure the script is working right, or loading in the first place. There's a balance, and I think that Bethesda has hit a good balance here. Things like Brjnwolf or Beyond the Beef are design decisions, and yes those may or may not be questionable (aside from me not liking the latter one anyway, good thing that Fallout's morality system is quite flexible.).

A lot of Skyrim issues were due to how the newer scripting system and quest data (from scripts) can cause irreversible bloat and even potential damage to save games. I have seen reports that FO4 does NOT follow that convention (Beth realizing that in so was a mistake in terms of greater potential of issues from modder scripts). Note that the problem became so bad that procedres and tools to "clean" PC save games are some of the most popular and used utilities on the Nexus.

Skyrim is a great game, but the bugs and glitches Bethesda neglected to patch are unacceptable. They abandoned the patching way too soon and basically left console players out in the cold. I was considering picking up Oblivion GOTY until I read about some annoying vampire glitch that you have to either have a copy of the original Oblivion, or change the language to German or some crap to bypass the glitch. What's the point of cranking out all these DLC's if the base game still plays like crap?

Revisiting Skyrim pn PS3, I am to this day, experiencing a bug where everytime I engage an enemy in combat, the favorites menu randomly pops up, selecting different weapons and unsheathing my current weapon, causing unecessary deaths. It's easy for die hard fans playing on PC to say 'I have no problem playing Skyrim' and defend Bethesda's neglegance with proper patches.

Mods and annoying tricks like booting up your PS3 in safe mode should not be necessary to play a Bethesda RPG. Dragon Age Inquisition ran just fine and so did a lot of massive games I've played on PS3. People say SOny designed PS3 with a weird internal memory, but other devs somehow figured it out. I suppose bugs and glitches are to be expected with any massive RPG on Fallout's scale but that does not excuse Bethesda cranking out a few DLC's and then saying, they're done withe the game, leaving patching up the modding community.

I'd say "game-breaking bugs" is somewhat excessive. I experienced a number of bugs as well, but always found a solution for them in both TES and Fallout. I'm not too worried about bugs in FO4, because of course there will be some, but they will also be fixed. Same as always.

My only concern, really, is that FO4 is a carbon copy of Skyrim.

Yeah I think that's been a concern of many since well before Fallout 4 was revealed.

Pretty much this. I am hopeful that consoles may finally be able to get unofficial patches if not the console editor. I love the games and don't mind fixing some things myself but having no option at all is a joke.