- Broken mouse control
- Must click multiple times to click anything
- Mouse-over text does not work 80% of the time
- Mouse selects wrong text
- Scrolling is buggy
- Buttons stick between menu's
- NPC's comment on things you are not doing... (Careful with that fire, while I have my bow out.)
- Constant crashing to desktop
- Constant over-looping of sounds/conversations making it impossible to hear locked dialogue that does not repeat
- Delayed sounds, stacking infinately, playing all at once, once dialogue is finished. Again, making it impossible to hear "critical non-repeating dialogue."
- Broken missions
- Items not being removed
- Millions of arrows and dropped items not cleaning-up once dropped or left behind
- Creatures and players getting stuck on everything, including invisible things
- Items being invisible, but still selectable
- Animations failing, going fast-forward, or wrong times, or not at all
- Game "staples" not functioning. "Time between shouts 0%" does not reduce time between shouts to 0 seconds. Magic resistance, or specific resistances not working. Armor not actually resisting physical damage. ... endless list...
- New-cell loading seems to constantly crash the game, frozen screen, randomly.
- New sounds seem to crash the game, or create horrible static sounds.
- Shadows are horribly rendered on almost all cards, banding lines all over, unshadowed edges of players and items...
- Fog and lighting seems to kill framerates and game speed, where it should not.
- Lights fail to load randomly, yet still cast shadows.
- Textures get "stuck", or flicker, or pop-in/out when they should not. (Wrong LOD's and LOD's not being obeyed.)
- Water-mapping is tied to a game-setting, which, if not selected, causes water issues with most effects. (Those who have that option selected, do not see the issue. Those with it off, by the games settings for that card, have nasty water in rain, or while entering the water.)
- AutoSave on "Fast-travel" and "Exiting doors" and "Auto-interval" crashes the game a lot, and behaves in undesired ways, over-writing manual saves and other players auto-saves, and no options for number of saves, leaves 4 that re-write over one another. Making auto-save almost useless, unless it is used only for crash-recovery... Ironically, caused by auto-saving.


I could go on, all day...

You're pretending that management saw a known bugs list that looked like this:

1. Resistances don't work.
2. Dragons sometimes fly backwards.

and said, "Who cares let's release it!!!"

That's not the case at all. As I said, it's absolutely possible that any given bug can 'get past' any given QA process (whether that is QA activities performed by the QA team, or by the Dev team). That's especially true when the teams are under intense time pressures.

All I'm saying is that, unless a person has internal knowledge of whether a specific issue was reported, then any blame applied to a specific group is based purely on assumption and to me that's not really fair.

Show me one game that doesn't have any bugs.

I'm thinking it's more along the lines of judgement calls and goal setting.

Are you making this request because you think having one bug is the same as having many bugs?

Please, do go on, because 99% of the problems you just listed.. I've never experienced. The other 1% are totally minor bugs.

So, please.. continue.

No, I said show me one GAME that doesn't have any bugs.

Hell, show me a game that only has one!

What I'm saying is, every game has bugs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game)

HTH

Now that flooble has shown you the light, you are free to explain what your point is.

That's right, your personal exposure to an issue dictates if it should be solved or not.

So, do you have cancer? Or are you living in poverty? Or are you currently being robbed?

I need to know so I can inform the authorities and let them know if these things are an issue yet.

I assume the OP, as a programmer, is familiar with things like regression testing. Whenever you change code on a project this big, you always do regression testing to see exactly what changes the code modifications have effected.

The Skyrim Script Extender team has already identified the problem; Bethesda changed the location of resistance calculations in the code (from MagicTarget to Actor) without updating where the functions call. The fact that they were touching resistance code at all means they should have done regression testing and identified all variables that were affected by the changes.

The fact that some guys on their free time were able to fix this issue in less than a day is fairly telling as well considering that we have not heard a single peep out of Bethesda (and don't say the programmers are busy, this is why you have people whose job it is to communicate with the customers).

This is so full of loaded statements it's hardly even worth responding to, but I will anyways. The justification for the level scaling is that your overall level is a representation of your character's progression over time. Id est, if your character spends his time smithing iron daggers and making potions instead of leveling his fighting skills, he will be disadvantaged in combat. This is called "specialization", and is an integral part of RPGs. It's your fault if you break your character by grinding crafting skills to 100 before your character learns how to swing a sword properly.



A bug or glitch is something that is broken, meaning not functioning as intended. You're making the mistake of assuming they're mutually exclusive; a bug is broken, but not everything that is broken is a bug. And, if you read my point above, you'll see why Skyrim's scaling is not broken.

I do think that the QA team probably have a large part of the responsibility for the poor standard of the released product, though it is of course possible that Bethesda's management simply ignored all of their feedback; and nobody's telling, so we can only speculate. What is apparent is that Bethesda have always been blighted by exceptionally poor project management: this is the common factor that has the largest single influence on software development, and I can only assume that either Bethesda has no project managers, or they're simply very ineffective. It is something they should take a long, hard look at though: it'll save them a lot of aggravation let alone their poor bloody customers.

In response to the OP:

Indeed bugs are a fact of anything coded. Everyone should know that by now. And the definition of what a bug is has gotten broader the past years, but in general, bugs occur when the binary or script runs into an unknown situation and does not know how to handle it, so it stops working the way it was meant to work: in the case of a video game, this could be a CTD, a broken quest, etc...

Now, as with any product, before the product goes to the market, it needs to be UAT'd to verify that the functions it is supposed to perform do indeed work, even if the testing environment is a homogeneous environment, and this, it seems Bethesda did not do with Skyrim.

A small example:

The game is composed of quests, which in the case of Skyrim, runnig these quests would be the functions it is supposed to perform. You don't need to be a software engineer to know that Skyrim's quests are broken down in stages, and you go from one stage to the other by your character performing some action. Action is performed, stage xx is set, you get a stage marked completed in your journal, and a new entry as to what to do. Well, I have come into at least 2 minor quests in which there seems to be a missing quest stage which prohibits me from continuing said quest. And while I don't have the construction set to go inside and 100% verify if indeed the quest stage is there or not, the console commands tell me that stage is just not there, therefore making completing the quest impossible., unless I skip that stage with a console command that puts the quest further along, or stops the quest altogether.

Wouldn't you agree that, at the very minimum, QA should have had someone play through all the quests to make sure they complete, or end the way they were coded to complete? That seems like THE most basic testing you'd need to do is UAT, since that's the core of the game. Right?

Speaking for myself, the main reason I still buy gamesas games, is that I get the construction set and I can fix stuff like that, so while annoying, I still can fix it myself And besides, most of the entertainment value I get from Bethesda games is in the modifications I make to the game. But I can see how Joe Q. Gamer will not be happy encountering these bugs, especially if they don't have the ability to fix them playing in consoles.

http://www.curtisbright.com/msx/v0/minesweeperbugs.html

And a quick google search of "minesweeper bugs" will return a lot more.

Nice try :celebration:

I agree %100

Cheers

Hi! I'm a gamer!

I play games.

I understand that any problems I have with a game will be worked on after they've been reported.

I also understand that companies as large as Bethesda can not make a worldwide releasable patch one day after a bug has been found and confirmed; there's a [censored] ton of paperwork, red tape, and compiling to be had.

The actual fix is more than likely already known and written, it's the actual release and distribution of the patch that is a [censored] to finalize.

I absolutely agree, and to be perfectly honest I have to hold my hand up and say that that was my first response too.

However, as I touched on in the OP, regression suites can't be written without the time and costs being allotted for their creation (and maintenance). So for me to jump straight to the assumption that the developers didn't write them because they svckzor! (or even more ridiculously, didn't care), would be absolutely wrong.

Bethesda regression tests = 2 hour speed runs through the main quest =D

This is true, but they really need to pull some strings and get this next patch out to fix resistances like...NOW.

The game for me, is now 100% unplayable. I depend on my resistances like a warrior depends on Heavy Armor. I don't want to wait until next year to play Skyrim again.

That's not incompetence; it's a conscious design decision. They've done that for every RPG they've ever made. Those sorts of builds can be fun to play, but they did two things that piss off people like you:

1. They didn't let you restrict which skills level you, so instead of doing that thinking ahead of time you now do it as you play.
2. Skyrim doesn't always have sufficient very obvious rewards for using non-combat skills in most situations. New Vegas did this better. Even though it had the same type of level scaling and let you level any skills you want, it gave you xp for winning quests and let you do it with speech if you wanted.

However, as a developer myself, I do h ave to say they must have some awful issue tracking and prioritization. I can see they put loads of effort into making the game more accessible to a wider audience and then neglected some nasty bugs they've had at least since the launch of Oblivion. The best example I think is disappearing container items. They don't really disappear; they just don't render in the list until you take some other stuff out. The limit isn't even more than a few dozen items. This is a very frustrating bug when you have a house with a limited number of chests and should be very easy to fix. Sometimes I wonder if they've even noticed it.

Uh yeah, except proper RPGs usually allow you for alternate approach to quests than just bashing skulls in, so you're not gimped by investing in social skills. Skyrim doesn't. And in other RPGs it's usually you who pick what skills to increase on level up. Skyrim forces you to level up.

Your argument is apologist and invalind. Scaling off of non-combat skills is broken.

Um, I'm still having fun leveling non-combat skills. If it's still fun, and it's working as intended, how can it be broken? "Not the way I would do it" is not the same as "Broken". There are other games if you want everything to be an even challenge, but I'll take the freedom to make things harder for myself if I wish and run with it thanks.

I had a good read, thank you.

I used to work as a QA and developer and i understand that there are too many factors that would determin the quality of final product.

can't really expect the average players to understand how software development work though, especiall for those who are too young to work. your writing is likely only appear as "excuse" to them.

but hey! these people pay for a game that the quality does not match one's expectation, they have very reasons to voice their disatisfication. i just hope the development team dont get discourage by the angry words, but then, we (the developers) are too taugh for that lol.

thanks again for the good read