Previous Elder Scrolls titles have a lot in common, despite the all changes.

- They're all quality games that gives you your money's worth.
- They're heavily moddable, thanks partly to Bethesda's construction sets and most of all, to the excellent ES modding community.
- They're unstable, subject to crashes.

Crashes. Some will say "quit complaining and either drop some mods or choose them more wisely". Others will nod and agreed that ES games are, to date, pretty unstable --- unacceptably so. Most are probably somewhere in-between.


Personally I was reminded today why I stopped playing both Morrowind and Oblivion (not at the same time, obviously). I just got tired of having to reload the game all the time, navigate through those badly designed [Oblivion] menus and try not to lose interest (hey, it's not like I didnt have other things to do). You install mods to make the menus less frustrating: you get more crashes. You spend some time trying to find mods that arent going to crash your game, and next thing you know, it's not really a game anymore, more like a chore.

Enough with the drama, though. It's just a game, and nobody's life is going to get worst for a crash or three. Morever, Skyrim runs on a different engine. But out of curiosity, just how unstable previous titles were for you?

Mods shouldn't be able to cause the game to crash. That's what error handling is for.

That being said, I have never seen a Bethesda Softworks game that didn't have more bugs than an amazon rainforest upon release. This goes all the way back to at least Daggerfall. It's not so much incompetence as it is the ambitious nature of the games. Daggerfall in particular, was probably the most ambitious of all of the Elder Scrolls games and they simply ran out of time to do everything they wanted.

I dont remember getting CTDs in Daggerfall though. Certainly the game was buggy (mainly regarding quests and (holes in the floor)), but I found it was more stable than the latter games. That said however, that was a vanilla game.

Vanilla TES is pretty stable. Modded TES is as stable as the amount of time you put into making it stable. The reason mods can achieve so much is because they can change a ton of stuff. So if you get conflicts, you're going to get a crash, no matter how stable the engine is.

For example, if mod A deletes reference A, and mod B calls reference A, something is going to break. A nice new engine really won't change this. If you make a dirty mod/use dirty mods/don't read read-mes nor invest any time to research how to get a stable game, then the same thing will happen to you in Skyrim.

@c3141bsf

Mods should be able to make the game crash. Why would Bethesda invest time in something that won't affect their development of the game AT ALL, just so users have an easier time?? If mods couldn't make the game crash, I'm pretty sure that a lot of mods wouldn't have been able to be made.

Well, there's no desktop to crash to in a DOS game

DOS is a much simpler environment and you don't have other programs running in the background. There are a lot more exceptions in Windows/Direct3D that can cause a program to crash than in a DOS environment. In addition, the fact that you have programs running in the background and have to share system resources is a wildcard.



Because it's proper programming. Why do book authors invest time using proper grammar and engaging in editing?

The situation you described is not a fatal situation and can be handled safely without having to resort to a crash simply by disabling the offending mod and presenting the user with an error (that does not close the game) that says the mod was disabled because of conflicts. If some guy in his spare time can write a program that looks through ESPs and ESMs and anolyzes conflicts, certainly Bethesda can do it in the game itself.

its really the mods fault if it causes crashes, its like if you put a code in wrong and you expect someone to make something that would automatically correct it
the games did have a corrupted save game issue though, they do need to fix this, and they did pretty well in Fallout

But at the end of the day, no matter how much you check for errors, and how many warnings you print out for the user the script has still broken. Say if it's a quest, and the quest breaks, is disabling the problem going to solve it?? No. What your basically saying is you'd rather play a potentially broken game, than get a CTD, and thus have to fix the problem. If the mod doesn't work/gets disabled, your pretty much in same situation as if you had a CTD. If the mod breaks, why continue playing (assuming you want to play with that particular mod)??

I found my games quite stable. However i found that editing the ini file can cause crashes as can having a large amount of mods. The more mods and the bigger they are the more often you'll get crashes. The vanilla game without mods is actually rather stable.

Disabling the plugin prevents you from loosing unsaved data. In addition, by identifying the mod that caused the issue, it makes troubleshooting easier. Cryptic access violation errors are of no use without a debugger and knowledge of assembler language.

Of course they should! If they can change the game, they will inevitably break the game.

I'm not really sure whether there's a "bsetmoderrorhanding 1" command in the game engine, but we have to remember: the game is not tested for mods prior to release because we haven't made the mods yet! If the xbox version works fine for me, I accept the game is fundamentally OK (I don't think I've had more than one crash ever per game on the console) - it's only when I start putting mods together that the problems occur, and even then it's when mods weren't tested with other mods i.e. the modder has satisfied themselves that the mod works fine for them on their rig. Even very high quality mods cause crashes - Ascadian Rose Cottage with Necessities of Morrowind; Wizards' Islands with Balmora Expansion ... it's part and parcel of the modding experience.

There were fewer mod-induced crashes with Oblivion because they built in an "isolation" to stop ID conflicts, but that meant that you couldn't have mods dependent on mods, and now have to work around that with e.g. Bash, which introduces problems of its own (i.e. potential for the very ID conflicts that the vanilla game avoids).


Very, very true.

I haven't had a vanilla CTD. However, I would hope the modding structure is such that bad scripting can't cause CTDs, though obviously it should make the errors very clear in another way. We certainly have the resources to sandbox each individual mod, though the engineering behind doing that in a structure like previous TES games would be... highly difficult.

Making your own scripting language not crash the host is a design decision, not something you spend additional time on - it'd just be nice if Bethesda made the other choice this time.

Oh, I would like it if the game didn't crash quite as much if it's being starved of resources, though. I should be able to zoom across Skyrim at a million miles an hour without having to worry about it crashing as it struggles to load areas. I'll even take freezing until it has enough loaded!

edit: Oh, and while we're on the subject, when I disable a mod and try and load a game, *please* can I be told which mod you can't find? It'd put my mind at ease!

Well I experienced mod user so CTD was not so frequently, I must say thanks for support of modders, they awesome tutorials and utilities

I'm all for a debugging system that prints an error file, but what I'm saying is you can't write the engine in a way that means it will never crash unless you limit what mods can do. So, it's either face the fact not all mods work together (at least with out checking for conflicts), or have mods that don't really change an awful lot.

I think I answered the poll incorrectly. I experienced very few CTDs on Morrowind and Oblivion, but only vanilla Morrowind and Oblivion. Once I started modding, CTDs became more frequent.

Also, I'd consider myself someone who makes heavy use of mods, but I don't think I've ever exceeded 50 mods at once, so I answered light to medium.

CTDs in a heavily modeded game aren't unexpected, I average one every 4 hours with around 100 mods in oblivion. Perfectly acceptable given the vanilla game is rock solid (for me).

Morrowind was perfectly stable with me. The few crashes could always be distributed to an faulty script in a mod I was beta testing. Outside of beta tests I play vanilla.

Oblivion was the other extreme. I wasn't able to play Oblivion anywere stable. CTDs or more (complete crash, restart) every 20 minutes (average). Mods didn't have any influence with this. I never had more than 5 mods running (not counted DLCs) and all mods were really wide spread, no one encountered problems with them. Now I've got Windows 7 and so fra had never a single crash. Maybe I'm able to "finish" one character before the game chooses to corrupt my savegames...

@OP: The poll is very inconclusive. 0 - 75 mods is a really wide window. You should have splitted this in more answers.

Just because you can't get the system perfect doesn't mean you can't do it a bit better. While crashing on error does produce very stable scripts bethesdaside, it can be annoying when it's a minor bug in an otherwise fine mod.

Yeah, they probably could do it a bit better. But the amount of effort they'd have to put into making the engine not crash probably wouldn't be worth it. Because a bit better still won't stop all the other mods from crashing. And it's not a "minor bug" if it causes the engine to crash. The engine isn't inherently unstable, it's just that mods can change so much, that they can easily break it.

And again, if the mod makes the engine crash, then you're not going to want to keep the mod running whilst you carry on playing. Some things, like corrupt spawn points and such, should be looked into, but there isn't much Bethesda can (or would want to do) to the engine except limiting the capability of the mods.

Perhaps I misworded, I didn't mean the engine was unstable enough that a minor bug would crash it, I meant that the only explanation for the engine crashing was that it was dropping as soon as it saw scripting failures. This is great for debugging, less great for the end user. While nothing will ever be crashproof, especially nothing as incredibly modifiable as a TES title, every little helps.

And yes, it'd be nice if things like corrupt spawn points never happened. And my god, when something crashes, give me a damn bug report. I don't care what, just give me *something* to go on.

Bug reports yes, but again, if it's something that will make the engine drop then it's not something you want to be carrying on playing with. Not all errors will cause the engine, and those that do do so for a reason.

Yes, often not continuing is preferable. A more graceful exit would be nice, though, having to kill the process in order to stop it isn't very nice.

I suffered from CTDs from Morrowind sometimes, but not often enough to really annoy me. And I can't recall any CTD with Oblivion at all.

With Morrowind I played with a bunch of plug-ins and with Oblivion I only played with 10 or so

Yeah, having to kill the process is annoying. That shouldn't be all that hard to program in. But again, why would Bethesda want to program it in when nothing they will ever make will cause the game to crash and hang. Not saying that I wouldn't want this, but from a business point of view, it's not likely to happen.

I love mods...they add so much to the game. My current game of Oblivion is using all 254, and is working pretty well.

Bugs get fixed. Mods improve.

I just feel that instability is the necessary evil that comes with the outstanding level of imagination that Bethesda produce. The great thing with their games is, the whole game itself is subject to improvement upon release. And if i had the choice of designating where Bethesda should spend their time, be it thinking up and producing great functionality, stories or set pieces, or working on making the game bug proof and stable on varied specifications, i know where i'd have them.