I think it will be 3.. This new engine looks impressive.. Doesn't look buggy anymore...

I say 7. We'll probably need an "Unofficial Skyrim patch", since Bethesda's patches never fix all of the bugs.

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I give it a 8, with Fallout New Vegas being a 10. That game was so bad with glitches and bugs I had to sell it.

this

No poll? Ummm.... I'm not sure what to do... maybe I'll just mention my answer.... 2-3.

I do not know how buggy TES games were, but Fallout 3 was unplayable until they released a Nvidia patch. New Vegas was playable, but had some quest bugs.

7 because of a new engine, new features and game-play design.

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What bugs?

I'll say 4-6

When Obsidian wrote Fallout New Vegas, they literally just modded Fallout 3. And in lower quality than some of the modders here on the forums.

All of Fallout 3's resources are still in New Vegas, many not even being used. It really is a huge mess.

I had exactly the same experience. FO:NV was by far the least buggy release for me of anything Bethesda has ever published. I was running on brand new PC hardware, though, so that might have helped.

True story:
I was just out of college when Daggerfall came out, working my first programming job. Living with my GF and her 2 kids, and working 60+ hours/week. DF was exactly what I'd always wanted in a CRPG, and I was extremely enthusiastic about it, so I squeezed in time for it whenever I had a chance. About 3/4 of the way through the game, I got save corruption but didn't realize it, and it propagated through all the following saves, getting worse with each one. The game became unplayable. I wrote a cold, angry email to Bethesda about being tricked into paying for an early beta product. Within days I got an email back from a developer--I think Julian, but I don't remember, and ended up emailing him my save. He fixed it and sent it back. I'm still giddy about that to this day.

That response, and the amazing and unique character of the TES games (sandbox, etc.), has left me very tolerant of the deluge of bugs that usually accompany a release. It can take a few months, but BGS always winds up providing an amazing experience. I'll take a diamond in the rough any day, as long as the diamond eventually shines through.

Also: on PC, always use a save "system" with a BGS product. Save often, and keep a separate directory with known-good saves that you can revert back to.

If 10 is the worst, I'm guessing about a 7 for Skyrim. New engine, history of difficulty, complex product. It'll be down to a 3 or even 2 after a few months, though.

I'm going with 3 or 4. While I do remember frustration with some annoying bugs in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3, they were nothing when compared with some of the nearly game-breaking bugs that I encountered in New Vegas. I would probably like New Vegas better than FO3 if it weren't for some of those bugs. I guess it has given me optimism toward Bethesda's games, and hope for Skyrim to be much less buggy.

Plus, this time I'm playing on a computer, so I'm looking forward to mods helping eliminate what got overlooked.

Agreed. The technical side of that game made me very unhappy and I'll never touch anything with Obsidian's name on it again. Great story and the world was alright but it was unstable and unpolished and just plain unprofessional in presentation from a technical standpoint. It sill is. The game still crashes to desktop so often that I avoid playing it nowadays (my hardware platform is rock solid and vastly exceeds the recommended system specifications).

I expect Skyrim to be more polished than Bethesda's previous titles simply due to the number of people working on it versus the numbers they had for previous games.

I still expect a rough ride for at least the first six months because major game studios (with the exception of a select few) really don't give as much attention as they should to quality assurance because they see it as an expense rather than as an investment in the lifespan of the product and in the reputation of the company. I'm not saying that's the case with Bethesda as I have no knowledge of their priorities or their internal practices. I'm just saying that I never expect a smooth launch because the industry standard is to push a product out the door 3/4 of the way to completion (or less) and to expect consumers to fund the last part of production. What if you went to see a movie and had to wait for the last 30 minutes to be made until a certain number of people bought tickets?

Hoping for the best... bracing for the worst. I probably won't pre-order it. I'll wait and see if people are able to get it to run before I buy it. That's kind of a new rule for me when buying games. I used to rush out and acquire a license for them as soon as possible when I heard about one that I wanted but the industry has trained me to be wary and not to purchase until I'm sure that the game will perform as it should technically and mechanically.