How could you purchase the house without completing "Blood on the Ice"? The stewart doesn't sell it, just says there has been "unpleasantness".

It's funny how many posts in this thread prove the OP's point. Case in point;



And why shouldn't it be? If it's full of bugs, it's a fault, period. Bethesda doesn't get a free pass because the game has lots of content (note that I said free pass; I can certainly understand having more bugs than smaller games, but there's a limit) or because previous games ere also praised to all hell despite the bugs.

If the argument is open-world, well Assassin's Creed, Just Cause 2, Read Dead Redemption and GTA4 (on consoles, mind you) were huge, intricate open world games. And they had much less bugs than any Bethesda releases.

Really, the culprit is known in this. It's clunky old Gamebryo engine Beth refuses to abandon. Once they finally stop renaming it and just actually use a capable engine, good things will happen.

After bring one character to 48 and another at level 30 now Skyrim has lost it's sheen. I kept chugging along figuring at some point the game would find some moment to impress. Some moment that allows for the sense of agency a good RPG should. Some sense that my actions actually effect something. As it turns out none of that's the case. The game is a Faberge Egg. Sparkly and beautiful on the outside but empty on the inside. The game is an endless stream of fetch quests at this point and every encounter is incredibly predictable. Rather than being able to pick up every head of lettuce that you see Bethesda needs to use all that wasted processing to flesh out the NPCs and the combat mechanics in their next TES game.

When I first started the game I thought for sure it would be my personal GOTY. Turns out it took a while to figure out it isn't. I don't actually care about GOTY as a title but I can say they are many games this year that have given me a more fulfilling experience. Portal 2, UC3, Arkham City, InFamous 2, Catherine, Dark Souls, Deus X HR, all off the top of my head. As you can tell I'm not FPS guy, hence those obvious omissions. I don't know, after delving into Skyrim for weeks now and trying to find it's depths I realize what you see in the first hour is what you get in the 200th. Bethesda missed a big opportunity in my eyes.

Don't embarrass yourself.

i tolerate many bugs but when the college quest line is broken for my mage character i'm like F this game and lack of quality control...for a major quest to be stopped by a bug shows little, if any, testing was done. The patches aren't even tested properly and end up breaking more then they patch

They should test more and fix whats broken

The game definitely has some annoying bugs. I've Crashed to Desktop (without a recent save, but that's my own fault) more times than I care to recount. I've had visually annoying bugs, like the background flashing from time to time, or my wife standing on top of the table cooking, instead of by the fireplace. I would definitely like to see considerable work done on addressing bugs.

All that said, I can't ignore the fact that I can't seem to step away from the game. I've only had it about three weeks, and Steam shows 132 hours. So despite the bugs, my play time alone tells me that the game is far more fun to play (for me at least, and I'm pretty certain lots of others) than anything else I've played in several years.

I think you either like the game or don't. I have always been a fan of Bethesda games and I can live with the bugs for a great first person RPG. Nothing else has come close for me as I play my games on the console. But at the same time to each their own.

It never ceases to make me smile when non-developers call successful developers bad developers.

Should the playtesters take a portion of the blame?

I've always thought so.

My friend was a playtetster for Sega years ago and their standards were very exacting. I'm sure Bethesda are just as concerned with the final outcome of their product and are willing to correct any bugs which escapes the net, but surely alot of the responsibility rests on their playtesters to actually find the bugs in the first place.

Most bugs aren't across the board, some are caused by YOUR computer. If they were everyone would have the same issue, but they don't.

If you have a fixed deadline, and your design goals exceed what you can achieve in that deadline - and you continue with those design goals .... then you intentionally and knowingly shipping a shoddy product to the public.

That is not a grey fuzzy line. People who have not gone through a QA process like to think that a QA process is some grey fuzzy experience where a couple of guys sit down and play through a bunch of stuff in the hopes of breaking things so that they report back to developers. This is a lie. This is not how QA works. Proper QA starts before development even begins. QA engineers know what should and should not break software. Good QA managers think outside of the box to include parameters the original design goals did not include. This is why it is not called "QA guesswork" but "QA engineering".

There is no infinite number of inputs into these scripts. Assuming that a player might have a briar heart in their inventory prior to having started a quest which requires a briar heart is not a factor of infinite possible situations. That's a situation which should have been somewhere near number two or three on any professional test script.

And if it is a bug caused by more random factors in the code like NPC's suddenly not responding, or spiderwebs which suddenly turn indestructible - then that's because proper QA wasn't done properly on an engine coded in 2002 which is still being used in 2011. That the QA debt was created in 2002 makes it no less an issue in 2011. While Fallout: New Vegas was a crash fest for me - and the whole "entering The Strip without the right hat" routine was ridiculous ... it seems easier to stumble into quests where if you didn't remember to have multiple saves - you may not be finishing the quest.

A good game, sure - but the industry should be factoring these things into before rewarding Bethesda with multiple awards and 9+ review scores.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why on Earth does anyone care about a worthless award? It doesn't change what Skyrim is, and I certainly won't enjoy any more or any less because of it, or in spite of it. It's just gaming industry back patting, worthless :shrug:

On the OP's videos: The spiderweb thing looks to be a bug, and one that I have yet to read about anywhere online. It almost seems like it is set to be indestructible unless some other trigger fires off. The map marker issue is, however, not due to the game, but due to the map being in 3D and you placing a marker on a spot where the cave is not. Next time try rotating and scrolling the map to see exactly where the cave is and placing a better marker. Really, that is a frivolous complaint and a real stretch in calling something like that a bug.

After 250 hours and 6 characters here are the bugs I have witnessed:

Excessive crashing in Bonechill Passage.
A puzzle in Raldbthar being reset in an unusable state.
Companions quest sharing the location of a Helm quest and not triggering properly.
Some guy getting stuck waist deep in the terrain at Whiterun stables, followed by more of him being spawned in the same location (quite hilarious actually).
One cave where I found a hole in the geometry and was able to go into the terrain and just walk out of a wall*. Sadly, I forgot to write down the name of that cave.

* Actually, I was quite surprised by this, as most games have geometry as a 2-way blocker, meaning once you get on the other side of the geometry you cannot go back through. The fun part was sneaking out of the cave wall behind an enemy for an execution.

I'm on xbox and i'm not the only 1 experiencing this bug and like i said it's part of a major quest so it should've been tested...i'm sure they didn't test most of the quests outside of the MQ

To the poster of the video and to the Op I say this: "WAHHHHH!!" :violin:

He couldn't hack it apart with his sword, or burn it or shout it apart. But he did say he could run through it on two different occasions. So, whats the damn problem? You know what. If your sick of the stupid little bugs (that will be fixed via user made mods/patches or through official patches) then go back to playing MW3 or whatever crap you normally play.

Oh, and if you come at me saying, "Wahh...I play on PS3 or Xbox. So I can't use user made content." well sorry, that's your own damn fault. Some games are just not meant to be played on a console and anything from Bethesda fits that bill.

Hey! It's another person who thinks they deserve recognition because they believe Skyrim shouldn't be GoTY because of bugs! How totally original.

Yes, OP, we've heard this argument before. So did the Spike people. And guess what? They decided it had no merit.

Get off your soapbox.

Skyrim does deserve recognition as a fine game, I have not played any games this year that were nearly as fun and immersive. The only game I found that came close was Deus Ex Human Revolution, but even that had problems.

I do agree that bugs damage the enjoyment, but they were not so bad that the game was horrible to play. I also do agree with Phoss that at the end of the day the award and all such ceremony's are worthless and northing more than the industry patting themselves on the back.

Skyrim can't have a GOTY because the year technically is not over. It also encourages Bethesda to release buggy games because those mentally challenged kids can't tell the difference and give it GOTY regardless.

But these kinds of errors are everywhere and nobody gives a damn. Just like Miss Universe is always won by a woman from Earth, for example.

Consumers only care about the finished product. If they're given a bad product, it speaks volumes about the makers, no matter how successful they are. Success in sales, they have that. Quality? Can't say I agree. I would use the word competent instead of successful. In that regard, judging by their past games, I don't think Bethesda is competent enough to move forward and deviate from their 'success' formula, which hasn't changed in years.

Precisely. Man these forums are dreaded.

Fine, but if you think that Skyrim doesn't deserve GotY because it has bugs, then you obviously also think that the other titles didn't deserve GotY. Otherwise you're just a hypocrite.




My argument isn't just that it's "open world." It's that it's a great game. Hell, I barely experience any bugs.





Yeah, except for the fact that they built a new engine for Skyrim. Now you're just spouting misinformation.

Rememer bashing the op doesn't make skyrim any better. And Bethesda is marginilizing pc gamers whether u like it or not.

This has always been the way that markers work in the TES games. There is no point in arguing that it's bad game design. It's not. It's bad gaming on your part.

actually skyrim is designed for xbox, thats why PC users are having control/UI issues. Like i said i can deal with all the many minor bugs but when i cant continue the college quest line thats just rediculous..

Amen.

And all the console fanbois can go back to their dens of breathing by mouth and shoot things, claiming they are playing true gaming paradise. If you hate Skyrim so much, either don't play or wait for a freaking patch. I have had some bugs, and they were fixed by patch or mod. But hey, I bought this on PC because I actually had experience/did my homework on this.

You can always recognize the comments of people who actually code games in this forum, and I have to say, they make most of you whiners look pretty hilarious. This game is a step in the right direction, and for all of it's flaws, all you youngins will look back one day and remember just which game marked a zenith in scale for its time.