i would say that it deserves game of the year, but that bethesda certainly doesn't deserve the second award. the communication with the player-base has been...sparse...and with the infamous patch, the excessive problems on all platforms at release etc, my opinion of them has sunk. i'm certainly not alone in that, and i really hope bethesda takes this to heart and actually pulls their socks up instead of ignoring the issue and settling for complacency.

honestly though, i'm not holding my breath. it's a real love/hate thing, for me.

Haha OP is silly boots.

GOTY IS A PERSONAL PREFERENCE.

I really wish people wouldnt take these things as facts, its just bad.

Sorry, but this whole "quantity is better than quality" argument is exactly why Skyrim does not merit a GOTY award. If you cannot develop a game with minimal bugs to your design parameters, you should not develop that game.

This concept that the level of QA is lowered because of the amount of material you are trying to produce is utterly laughable under any regiment of software development. Bethesda gets a commercial boon because nobody tries to scale with single player TES games - but that does not mean that a studio which meets their design goals without the absurd technical problems that Bethesda hands out with every game should be ignored. Quest level issues like documented above could occur on any version of the game and are utterly laughable in the face of modern QA practices for any platform.

That Bethesda sells a lot of copies should not be in itself the reason for other rewards. But the gaming industry pays them immense lip service every year because of their sales totals, and so every single year they are allowed to get away with absolutely atrocious QA issues.

I wont be responding further to this thread as its obviously nothing more than a rant against Bethesda winning an award rather than a proper discussion. Disgruntled or what.

Not a personal preference. Not even remotely. Industry preference.

Huge difference.

What isn't a proper discussion about it? I offer video evidence of two huge bugs from playing the game off of a normal save for under two hours.

From a quality assurance point of view - that is abysmal. Whether the game itself had positive points ... things like this alone should keep it out of the running from titles such as GOTY, if the gaming industry had any druthers at all other than watching earnings reports.

Someone provide a reasonable argument as to why a game with so many bugs be even offered as a GOTY candidate. Accepting as such essentially means you accept that QA should not be meeting design goals, but simply be a victim and slave to the amount of content which can be thrown at it. Which is counter to virtually every concept of QA on the books.

95 hours in Skyrim on X-Box 360 (before I accidentally deleted all my X-Box 360 saves)

Worst bug encountered: A dragon that I killed outside of Whiterun had it's corpse appear at the gates of Whiterun.

Over 100 hours in Oblivion on X-Box 360 (before I accidentally deleted all my X-Box 360 saves), and probably hundreds of hours combined on various characters on Oblivion on PC.

Worst bug encountered: N/A

Probably over 100 hours in Morrowind on my main character, and probably a good chunk of hours on secondary characters on PC.

Worst bug encountered: N/A

So all this about Bethesda bad quality control? Nah, I just don't see it. At all. I have never experienced a significant bug in a Bethesda game. Ever.

There's no way that I just happen to be the ONE guy that's just THAT lucky.

The spider web issue is [censored] up, not sure I think the map marker is a major problem.

I don't really care whether it gets GOTY or not, I absolutely love it

Not ONE guy, not even a thousand guys - but plenty of documented evidence of a lot of scenarios which can be easily reproduced.

Fallout: New Vegas had an easily duplicated event where you could not enter The Strip if you were not wearing exactly the right ingame hat after completing another mission under utterly normal situations. That wasn't just something that happened to one random guy - that is something that anyone who killed the guy to end the previous mission would find ... and get a black screen crash every single time they tried to enter a location in the game which was 100% required to finish said game.

And let us not even pretend that was some isolated issue with New Vegas.

For Skyrim, you can easily find the issues I am talking about under the Wiki articles for these quests and they apply across every single platform. One of the things that spurred me to post this was that the whole "invincible spiderweb thing" was new ... which meant that completing quests for this game was no longer an issue of reading ahead on wiki articles to see what the hell Bethesda QA had skipped, but the whole engine was unstable enough that it would be difficult to trust any step of any quest.

So congrats to anyone on their pristine record - but that is the norm for most games, especially most console games. The TES and Fallout games are far from the norm on that.

I love it as well. Well, I loved it long enough to feel I got my money's worth.

But the media has given Bethesda a blank slate on these issues years now - and it needs to stop. If any platform wants a truly stable game, the gamers need to stand up and acknowledge that Bethesda is releasing some seriously buggy software, far below the norm of the standard.

Oh to return to the halcyon, bug-free days of Daggerfall and Arena. Congratulations on having an opinion though, well done with that.

To be honest I felt like I was playing fallout new vegas when I started the stormcloak / empire questline.

I miss dagoth ur and the mythic dawn. A group of dedicated villains instead of the grey area of politics where everyone and everything is wrong.

You cant be good in skyrim because the game never presents you with any options to go either way. Really all you are doing is fetching stuff all the time and doing someone else's work.

To me an RPG is about defining choices for your character which either make him good or evil and skyrim just dosnt have that.

It feels more like a action game where the story has been told and you are now reliving it.

Yes I am aware to alduin but a villain who you dont interact with in the slightest is poor one.

Fallout: New Vegas had nothing to do with Bethesda. You can't use that as evidence against Bethesda. They published it. They had zero to do with the development of the game.

And again, sorry, there's no way that my circumstance is the rarity. I'm sorry that you have such a hard time with the game and hate it so much. But you are the unlucky one. Your problems are not the norm.

To amend: didn't play either Daggerfall or Arena to length.

So I'll say this level of QA since at least Morrowind... If anyone wants to show evidence it has been around since even longer, works for me.

Really? Obsidian didn't build it on Bethesda's version of Gamebryo? They didn't build it to Bethesda's specs? They didn't build it based on Bethesda's timeline? Bethesda has nothing to do with the laughable patching of the game? You sure about all of that? All they did was write a check, eh?

Nonsense. Obsidian has plenty of hat to hang on New Vegas, but Bethesda has equally as much.

And most of the problems I've had with the game are documented and easily reproducible. So not so rare. I'm not talking about "lucky" versus "unlucky", I'm talking about this tendency to give Bethesda a free pass on these issues up and into the point where they get GOTY. Games of the Year shouldn't be burdened by easily reproducible game breaking bugs.

I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.
:gun:

Seconded. Well said.

Bethesda games have always been buggy, and fun as hell despite the bugs, and quite deserving of GOTY status in my book. I don't think you're going to change anybody's mind on the subject.

Bugs really aren't fun as hell.

I'd describe my time with Skyrim as lengthy and fun, but certainly not fun as hell - and certainly not of greater value of games which can actually understand what proper QA is about. It's a good game, sure, a great game perhaps - but stupid bugs which could be avoided with the right QA certainly should leave titles out of the running for GOTY.

Take the fact that IGN still give the PS3 the same rating as every other platform despite calling Bethesda out on the carpet repeatedly for technical issues. As long as the media and general forum going population accepts that Bethesda doesn't need real QA, they won't have it. You enjoyed the game, congrats. It's a good game, sure. It offers more hours of general play than every other title out there - OK.

It's still got more holes than Swiss cheese. Quality should be a factor when reviewing games, especially technical quality - awards like GOTY even more so at the risk of being even more meaningless than they already are.

On some level I agree, it has gotten to the point where people expect these bugs in their games unfortunately and as a result, granting them their 'free pass'.

My bad, I thought I was able to form my own opinions on this topic but apparently I need your assistance after all.

Since every piece of software released has some level, or amount of bugs, at what point do we start reprimanding companies for their failures to address bugs? Bugs also occur on some systems, and don't occur on others. Should we punish developers because they haven't addressed a few select bugs only present on dated hardware or software? Should we punish developers because they went ahead released their game on platforms that weren't completely fit-for-the-job (I'm looking at the PS3 here)?

I just purchased Skyrim last week, and have been playing it endlessly since then, and so far I haven't experienced any bugs that totally ruin the game experience for me. I run a core2duo, 4gigs of ram and a gtx 250 card on a 32bit windows xp machine. My computer is a motley makeup, mostly consisting of 4 year old equipment. The only quest that has been relatively disastrous was the butcher quest, but I was still able to complete it. I also would get an occasional lag spike that lasted half a second, but that has since been fixed with the latest patch (core2duo performance increase). I have never encountered a situation where I couldn't advance, either physically or in quest terms, because of a bug...and I wouldn't be surprised if many others haven't had any major issue either.

If console gamers desire "larger" games, such as Fallout and TES, they will have to contend with bugs. PC gamers have been dealing with these pesky things for a long time, and companies have dealt with them via patches. Millions of players playing the same game after its release are obviously going to find flaws within the game that the developers had overlooked, that's what happens when you have a deadline, limited funds, limited resources and limited amounts of capable employees.

This debate sounds less like whether Skyrim deserves GOTY and more like whether developers should be punished for releasing a game with "whatever x amount of bugs" on release (because this threshold would vary between individuals). I would say developers need to find a reasonable equilibrium on when to release the product, and I would say Skyrim was released within a fairly good range of what I would consider a good equilibrium. Skyrim could have been released March of next year and had almost no accountable bugs, but I personally would rather have the game in its current state now and have Bethesda contend with the bugs via patches at a later date. Releasing Skyrim in say, March, would be less profitable for them aswell. You have other RPGs to contend with, and you have missed out on the cash-cow chrismas season. Should we punish them for behaving just as any other corporation would?

The rage shouldn't be focused on companies that release "whatever x amount of bugs" on release, it should be companies who release products and completely fail to follow up on the bugs. From my experience, Bethesda has always followed up via patches.

How about some better-than-nightmarish QA in the crticism? You place a map marker where you suppose you will find a cave. You have neither seen nor visited the cave before. You cannot know its precise location. That doesn't stop you from expecting your marker to lead you straight to mouth of the cave. Your marker does place you at a spot near enough to the cave that the cave's own default marker appears on your compass. You choose to ignore that marker and doggedly persist in chasing your own marker as if it is the authoritative marker. What were you thinking?

In pure coding terms - errors are measured 'per thousand lines of code'. The more code you write, the more bugs you get. The more options you add, the more code you have to write to support that, the more bugs you get.

Basically, the more ambitious you are, the more bugs you get. For an open world game, it's far more complicated with many lines of code/script interacting with each other, along with stupid player decisions - it is impossible to fully test such a game.

So if you wanted Bethseda to release "MW3" aka 'oblivion v1.5', then yes it would be less buggy... but did people really want an expansion pack, or something ambitious?

Bethseda tried to create a world unrivalled in scope, and I'd say they pretty much achieved it. Some bits don't work that great, the UI doesn't come off... but it is still a truly great game.

somewhere around goty, but best studio? [censored] no!
I rate them closely to blizzard, the ones that brought you NWN2, DA2, most talk and no action. this is the last TES game I buy unless they go back to their roots.
Played 30 hrs and bored of it allready, made 2 characters, orc 2h and a mage, that provided me with a chalenge but limited me to make it no fun.
I started to get into it, put aside it's short coming's, But I have not played it in four day's, instead, I'm back to football manager and DemiGod (Great grafix and a sound trak to kill a bbq prawn for!), so what does that say, skyrims boring, take a look at Gothic 4 to see what a open world rpg should be.