I'm sure that Skyrim is going to be an excellent game with decent graphics,gameplay,sound,etc...

There is only 1 thing I fear that could possibly go wrong and hurt the game,and I wish it won't be the case.

Random crashes.
Honestly,the single thing that annoyed me much while playing Oblivion and Fallout 3 was that at some random points the game would crash to desktop with no apparent reason. At xbox360 the game freezed instead of showing up the desktop screen.

That's the only thing I think can possibly go wrong,so I please Bethesda to make so that's not the case with Skyrim.

If I remember correct,the games had this problem because they had a bad way to use the RAM of a system,and it was because of Gamebryo.
I think that since the engine is going to be a new one,there won't be the same case.
But that's my only fear for a game I know that in every other way is going to be excellent!

Well actually, I'm playing OB on the 360 since the end of 2008, and it only crashed twice for me... and that was when my first console was about to die, so...

I understand you pain. But I really didn't have it crash or freeze many times. Just once or twice.

iv had maybe 3 with oblivion and iv played alot but fallout happens like every 5 hours i really hope this isnt gona happen for skyrim

The Elder Scrolls games are not "Elder Scrolls Games" if there are not crashes. It's one of the few features that's been in the series since the first title! :thumbsup:

Nothing can possibliye go wrong.



I'm sorry, possibly go wrong.

Heh.. that's the first thing that's ever gone wrong.



I can see Bethesda now

"Oh, people didn't like the crashing feature we implemented" "Okay bob! Remove the crashing feature!"

Seriously though, crashes happen because they cannot get an opportunity to test the game on every possible hardware configuration, and due to the large and complex nature of the games, there's a myriad of things that can cause the game to crash. Though; I think gamebryo was a route of a lot of hardware issues, so maybe this new engine may be more stable.

Crashes are just one of those things that will need to get dealt with over time. What would be nice is if they could make a bug report system, where it would send in your crash dump file, and the crash dumps would be sorted by hardware configuration and error type, that way they could get the patches done hastily and efficiently.

There are some games that have that no matter what. I had it happen all too often with Oblivion, but it was manageable(though ridiculously frustrating). However, that's not as bad as other games that are completely broken by it. For instance, I loved Far Cry 2 (Xbox 360 btw), but it started to have a huge problem freezing over and over, to the point where I couldn't make progress. Since the only way to save was to make it to one of many spread out safehouses and sleep, any time the game froze while you're actually out playing would ruin the past 1-3 hours of gameplay. It broke that game, and I'd never want to see that happen again.

I'm sure Skyrim will be vastly improved, and hopefully it won't have an issue with freezing even like OB's.

I don't think they can do anything about random crashes.

That's why they're random crashes, and not statistically probable crashes.

Actually, there is nothing like "random" in the computer world, everything has a reason. Always, even when you generate "random" numbers, it's not random. The same comes for these unintended crahses, the reason may be unknown to us, but it's not random. Enough testing and the reason will be revealed and then it might be fixed. But I agree, the only thing so far that indicates that Skyrim would be a even the slightly bad in any direction is crashing and of course epic loading times.

True, however often it’s not possible to find out the reason for the problem, when I upgraded my core2 duo with a 8800 graphic card from win xp to win 7, Oblivion refused to run and Fallout 3 crashed after a few minutes. It was a clean install so it made little sense. Got a new computer and it works well.

It'd be nice if they could remove crashes, and y'know what, they're already doing their best: Assuming they haven't recycled any code, every last single bug from the old times is gone. Every one.
There will be, of course, new bugs. Some may even look the same as the old one. However, crashes come from interactions you didn't expect, so hopefully designing the entire structure from scratch rather than adding on to one for many years will let them absolutely understand everything it's doing, and make it near-impossible to do something it doesn't. Hello World will never crash - it's possible skyrim can be the same. Insanely difficult to get absolute stability, but we don't need that, nobody gets that. Just good stability.

On the other hand, I think I've had maybe 3 entirely-vanilla crashes, ever?

Actually, the only thing that could possibly go wrong is if Skyrim can't utilise all my cores. I have a 6 core CPU, it's not just for show Bethesda! Please let Skyrim have multiple threads if it detects a multi-core CPU.

You said it yourself. New engine.

Cross your fingers

There is no way to guarantee all crash reasons to be removed.
Sometimes as with NV a whole series of bugs in other software updates creates a huge problem, such as Aviras memory bug close after the second patch that NV released.

However I hate to say it but testing of games does not seem to be that thorough, in a few days of gameplay I'm able to see dozens of minor faults often.
A week or so I've tried to pull stuff the devs did not predict or build for, all looking for bugs or game breaking glitches.
All just by playing and no modding, all it takes is actually trying out random and anarchic playstyles.

The amount of bugs in some games, would suggest that either most testers are more focused on playing by numbers than looking for issues or faults.
Or that the companies would rather side line issues until after release or ignore them in the least.

Madocmayhem, the least they could do is what the weOCPS DLL did: if there's an error, don't have the game CTD. Just log it and keep going unless it's unrecoverable in every sense of the word.

I'll probably continue with my habit of F5 spam...

Hmmmm the only thing that could go wrong.... Hmmm.

1. The world could end.

2. A massive EMP attack over the US that fries all computers.

3. I die.

I think that's the only things that could go wrong for my Skyrim experience at this point.

While I finding crashing annoying, it is the shutting down part that annoys me more. It just turns black for me. It stays that way until I hit ctrl + alt + Delete and bring up the task manager. Then the black Oblivion or Fallout 3 screen gets smaller. It takes it about a minute to ajust the resolution, and then disables my controls. I have to bring up the task list again to reenable the controls, and then wait a few minutes while repeativly hitting the end program. And still I sometimes get a message saying the program is already running, which then I need to restarting. So I would prefer easier ctds that less of them.

What if they reveal that you don't get to create your own character, and can only play that one nord from the trailer with only that armor.

#1 - Alduin eat it. bliviongate:

Best, well thought and hilarious comment around this thread, good job!
I agree with everything you have said.

This. At this point, having played MW/OB/FO3/FO:NV, I'd probably think something was wrong if it didn't have random CTD's. :tongue: It's the one bug that doesn't "bug" me.


(Of course, going to a completely new engine instead of Gamebryo, we may have to bid adieu to this. /sadface )

Hmm, could that lead to problems if you recorded the error state into your saved games? /ponder

weOCPS logged it in an external log file in the Oblivion directory.

With the immense spectrum of hardware that is going to be running the game it's impossible for them to test everything with each possible combination of hardware so there is going to be some people that get screwed more than others. It's pretty hard to have a game of this size and have little to no crashes even if it was on a standardized hardware just on the pure size and freedom of the game. They can only really test the main things that a gamer may do in the game, but there are random stuff all over that will crop of that no one would think of.

Overall you can't blame Bethesda for most of the random crashes as it's most likely just impossible for them to catch. Now if there is a huge issue with the main quest or something then there's some major oversight on the testing team.

I never had a problem with Oblivion untill I got about maybe 75hours in and that was just every once and a while, but then it started getting really bad, FO3 was wonderfull for me, hardly any crashes, NV had a little bit more but not nearly as many as Oblivion