I am absolutely sick and tired of the absolutely radically massive number of bugs in this game. Bethesda, if you sell software, you have an ethical responsibility to fix the bugs in it. Your business model seems built around the concept of just not bothering with QA, or even fixing the bugs after the fact. There are entire sections of the game that effectively have to be abandoned because you reach them and followers absolutely refuse to enter them. Followers reach a specific point in Gloomreach and that's it; there is no power in heaven or Earth that can make them take a single step further. That's as far as they'll go - period. You either abandon them, and just accept the loss of a follower, or you abandon the idea of actually exploring that place any further.


I'm tired of it. You've already told us "there are still bugs in the game, but we have no intention of fixing any more of them, don't like it, tough", and I find that appalling.


Either fix the bugs in the software you sell or find a different way to make a living. You have an ethical obligation not to release software filled with bugs that you knew about before release and then literally refuse to fix them.

Maybe I'm just lucky but I've never had any major problems with bugs in Skyrim. Even quests that are supposedly super glitchy like Blood on the Ice always seem to go off without any trouble. Bethesda could, and arguably should put more time into polishing the game and post release patches but none of the bugs left in even come close to being game breaking IMO.

It's the same with me. I spent a few hundred hours playing the game vanilla when it came out. I finished all of the major quest lines and a number of miscellaneous quests and I did not notice a bug anywhere. That isn't to say there were none, I just didn't notice any. There were certainly none that were game-breaking for me. Like you, I did Blood on the Ice without a hitch.

But I know others have had problems with bugs. And that is the problem. Bugs are inconsistent. I have beta tested games and mods and have done intensive Q&A on a number of large mod projects over the years and I know how hard it can be to track down bugs. They do not always happen to everybody and they do not always happen consistently. If a developer cannot reproduce a problem on their end, they cannot fix it.

This isn't to say that Bethesda is good at patching support. They are historically poor at it. Daggerfall is famous for being a bugfest and ther is a skill in Morrowind that does not work to this day. There is room for improvement. I have been very critical of Bethesda's lackluster patching myself over the years. But at the same time I like to give credit where credit is due: I think they have done a better job patching Skyrim than any previous game they have ever made.

Pseron Wyrd's post basically sums up my standpoint on it.

I'm also one of the lucky ones who didn't suffer from any tremendous bugs when playing Skyrim. I also understand that bugs are a nasty matter that aren't easy to fix and can't always be fixed. Especially for such large games with this particular engine in mind. But at the same time I acknowledge (and are also quite vocal about) Bethesda being notorious for their lack of support for their games.

I still see flying mammoths and other animals (in the game!) and other oddities. I'm all for more polishment from Bethesda, but I really don't expect them to lift a finger about that, being bugs gamebreaking or not.

I have never seen a flying mammoth in any my playthroughs on both PC and Xbox 360. I on the other hand have been sent to the moon by a Giant at least once. The characters name was Alice.

I have seen it on some PC playthroughs on Youtube but I believe they have been playing without v-sync and the game was running at higher than 60 FPS.

I play with v-sync on at all times.

Inconsistency of bugs is definitely an issue. Not everyone encounters them. For example I personally have never encountered the dialogue issue with Esbern during the quest "A Cornered Rat", even though it's very well known and gamebreaking bug. Many, many others have encountered it. So there really is inconsistency.

Some bugs go unnoticed due to them being minor or are thought to be intended function.

I have played the game vanilla state and I didn't encounter any major bug. Only after I started using the unofficial patch (and I've been using it since the first release) I started noticing little things, new and previously missing features, etc. Not seeing them doesn't mean bugs don't exist. They're just inconsistent.

I'm on xbox, so vanilla.


I notice loads of tiny bugs, but rarely anything that forces an earlier save re-load.


Oh..and if you wonder just how many bugs are in there.....just go and have a look at the change log in the excellent usleep pc patch....it is thousands and still growing as more are found.


Let me pick a few I've had in my game....


Flying and dropping mammoths...

A flying fox...right across the screen at fifty feet altitude...

Boulder and outcrops you can see under the edge of

A plant or two hovering just above the soil

Slaughterfish swimming just above the water

After a small jump, the landing footfall sound re-repeating for several minutes

Dragonbreath sound not switching off after the fire blast.

The crackling sound of a follower flesh spell still audible minutes later

The first cultists of Miraak have a persistant flesh spell hum well after death

Entire walls of Solitude and Whiterun not loading at all! But if the door is there you can use it!


Game stoppers....

College of Winterhold main doors not opening ( but I got in via the roof door...ha!)

Fighting CoW anomalies in the village...one went inside the steps, therefore unkillable = quest stalled

Blood on the ice...out of twenty plus, play throughs on this....two bugged to a standstill

CoW...stalled by not being directed to Mirabelle after the old boy bites the dust (i.e. Before Labyrinthian)

In Bleakfalls the three pillars to rotate with animal symbols on...can have like three eagles showing as you enter the room, and if you see that the pillars are immovable and you can't open the iron gate.

Once..the three rings on the nordic puzzle door were already aligned upon discovery, and it would not respond!

Sometimes a single cell along a road will repeatedly cause CTD as you enter it.....like five times in a row!


In 12000 hours......the game stopping bugs IN GAME have been very acceptably minor.....thats the good bit


However.....game stability is appalling....I get random screen freezes (CTD equivalent) after anything from ten minutes to two hours.

It is so random you can't predict it....but a few things are very common denominators that seem to trip the game over...

Precipitation...rain or snow

Horse riding

The entire Rift area

Loading screens


So riding around Riften in the rain has a high liklihood of CTD


Some of these could have logical explanations. For example...rain is a lot of little moving parts to keep redrawring...that has got to keep the game busy. Horse riding requires rapid redrawring of surrounding scenery.

It is also not impossible that the game overloads the xbox gpu/cpu.....plus the xbox can get mighty hot in use after an hour or two

Frequently the game stutters or freezes for like half a second then recovers (not low FPS issue...though that happens too in big fights)

The mini freeze is a warning that the game is finding things tough going...better save now, but most freezes are with no warning at all.


Now before some "wise person" says...oh just save often then.......I will tell you xbox 360 only has 9999 save slots and after that you have to reset the xbox and lose all your saves....so if you have been playing like two years and you are approaching maybe save 8000, you begin to realise that at some point...maybe in the middle of a long lived character run......you WILL run out of save slots and your ongoing character has to...well....die



But...I am going to say....despite the fear of random CTDs and the rare game stopping bug, overall the game works well enough to be playable through all quests....even on vanilla xbox


Edit...a little tip for console players to help reduce issues...it should go without saying, but always keep your game disc absolutely pristine. On a music cd, a tiny speck of dirt or minor scratch can be heard as a 'click' in the song playback...no biggie the song continues regardless. But on a data disc like our beloved Skyrim...that speck of dirt is covering up code that the console laser can't read. That means a string of code can not execute correctly..or at all. It will affect something in game for sure. Maybe just one plant texture in one location, or a few missing pixels not drawn....but it could as easily be the code command for load a game asset..a door maybe. Worst case scenario the game boot up code...and Skyrim won't load at all.

The cleaner your disc is the less chance of damaged code.

(Game download over the net is obviously not prone to any of that).

this one has had her fair share of bugs and will not write a list because Rick has done a good job of it already

bottom line is Skyrim is buggy ...............you cant see it as much on PC because of all the Unofficial Patches & updates .............but yea the bugs are still there

if you ever want to understand why things are the way they are you have to stop thinking as the gamer and the fanatic Skyrim fan & start thinking as Bethesda Game Company with a CEO ext ext .......right down to the programmer

So if you where making the big decisions .............the release of Fallout 4 if far more important than fixing a 5 year old game with patches & fixes

In saying that the new remastered version should be sparkly clean ...........BUGS FREE............resources & money where allocated to fix up Skyrim & make this new remastered version so you would hope they fix up some bugs

its a new release after all so might as well call it a new game even though you played it a 100 times

So ... these aren't really bugs?

http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/Unofficial%20Skyrim%20Legendary%20Edition%20Patch%20Version%20History.html

You know I can understand some issues due to time constrants and such, but when modders actually give you a complete list of the bugs AND makes the unofficial patch to fix them and you still can't be bothered to fix the game yourself ... well that's a level of laziness I just don't see too often. Well except with Bethesda of course.

It would be reasonable to expect at least the most obvious and problematic bugs to be fixed. Beth didn't do that. For example the infamous save bloat issue was known from day one, it was among the first bugs fixed by the unofficial patch yet Beth did absolutely nothing for it. To this day it's officially unfixed and propably the biggest cause of issues on 360 and PS3 versions.

Lots of freezing and crashing on my ps3.. Lots... FO:NV was worse. PC had crashes too..

I tried to help them test patches.. I won't ever do that again. What I reported made zero difference.

About Grams 'ethical responsibility': Everybody who did read the Narfi-Tread, do know that there are many people who will argue that what they do is the right thing to do. No matter what, as long as there is payment for it.

So, if Bethesda's management says, that they should invest time and money in new games, they are not so different from us players.

If I would be a manager, I would always thing how much it would cost to let a developer fix the bug, and how many money I would loose because people would refuse to buy the game as long as this bug is not yet fixed.

If I where a developer, I would always try to blame others.

The PS3 freezes if you hit the button to often: It's Sony.

On XBox the system ... when ...: It's Microsoft!

Maybe, that would be right! It will become part of a gray-zone if the documentation is unclear and there are differences between the development-systems and the consoles of the real players.

On Windows: Is your operation-system in the current version supported?

Then there is the thing I call UFO-bug:

There are a lot of people who did make pictures of UFOs. But there is no one who did make a working description how create a picture of an UFO. Except, to fake it with Photoshop and so on.

So, for me (as developer), a bug only exists if there is a working description how to reproduce it.

On an abstract level, the idea that someone making something inherently creates an indeterminate obligation for them to maintain and support said something seems pretty bizarre to me.

The problem with too many managers is lack of good foresight. First objective for them is always seems to be saving money no matter how many shortcuts they take without the foresight of what it will actually cost them down the road. Pay up front or pay for it later. Managers usually seem to choose the latter way too often. Get a good, proper foundation build and you shouldn't have too many problems down the road. Realizing what kind of structure you will be building on that foundation and all the that it entails requires good foresight for fewer problems down the road. Take the time early to do ALL the necessary steps to produce a solid product, instead of taking shortcuts and paying for it later trying to tackle all the last minute issues and then just saying " it" when time is up (likely due to poor time estimates to begin with). Unfortunately it seems like a lot of managers get hired that lack good foresight skills.

Edit: That or communication severely gets skewed between departments. http://www.tamingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/tree-swing-project-management-large.png

I don't expect them to make the game 100% bug-free...but Skyrim is not even close.


Go use something like Excel or Photoshop or Chrome or something and tell me Skyrim doesn't have a glitch rate a thousand times higher than any of those.


I rarely encounter game-crashing bugs either. I think I've had Skyrim permanently freeze once on the Xbox and just shut down my xbox once. Not sure I ever had a problem on the PC with vanilla. But I constantly run into quality of life bugs, often centered around followers. I can't count how many times I've been running down a road and realize I don't hear my follower's footsteps behind me anymore...and so I turn around and find them about two football fields down the road just standing there. Sometimes they wake up, other times I have to run back to them before they'll budge.


Last night I was in that smallish Falmer cave I mentioned in the OP, and there's a point where my follower refused to walk past. Just stood there. Nothing could get him to move except sprinting into him repeatedly. Got him to the end of that cave and there's a small bluff he won't drop off although the height is safe. I dropped off and he just stood there, arms folded, looking at me, like he was thinking "#$&% you, I don't have to do what you say." I had to sprint-push him repeatedly again to get him off the ledge.


I'm just tired of having to baby-sit followers. They like to run off and do their own thing, they like to just stop and refuse to follow, they have an annoying tendency to use fireballs in close quarters, I get #$&%ing tired of the annoyed responses they give when I want to hand them something, which isn't a bug but probably struck the developers as a humorous quirk when they designed it - but which becomes annoying over time since they say it every single time you do it.


Then there's the fact their decision-making is bizarre. Marcurio insists on using heavy armor and two-handed weapons, despite AFAIK all his skill being in magic, not heavy armor and 2H. I have to prioritize handing them stuff they can't equip to work around this.


They go out of their way to step on pressure plates. They trigger a trap, get knocked to the ground, get up, and immediately go straight to the trigger and step on it again. I've seen Lydia in an infinite loop doing this, until I steer her around the pressure plate.


I expect the occasional work-around being necessary, but this is absurd. The pathfinding and general retardedness mean I'd avoid followers like the plague if it weren't for the economic convenience of the extra carrying capacity, and the fact that they're generally combat monsters. I sometimes get two shots in before Marcurio sweeps the field, and Lydia was a good tank when I needed that.


But they're both dumb as a bag of hammers.

How about EA? Or Activision? Look, Bethesda doesn't even make the top 20 worst game developers: http://www.thetoptens.com/worst-video-game-developers/

Anyway, this is besides my original point. I was discussing your originally posted idea that Bethesda is ethically obligated to fix the game to your standards 5 years after its release. I don't think that's very realistic, feasible or altogether reasonable.

I didn't say their games were crap, I said they were buggy. Skyrim is excellent in terms of story and gameplay. It's absolute crap in terms of QA. People tolerate it because it's a single-player game, and they just get used to saving often. Any multiplayer game - and these are an exploding section of computer games - could never get away with the level of bugginess found in Skyrim. Their servers would be dead inside three months.


As for it being five years after release, these bugs were known long ago and Bethesda said they were done with bug fixes long ago. I don't expect them to support the game forever, tracking down and fixing every stray rare bug...but I do expect them not to walk away when the game is filled with bugs.

Well then, your expectations are misplaced since Bethesda and pretty much every other large game developer would fail your litmus test.

Listen, I get it; buggy games are frustrating and sometimes they svck. But when you start bringing ethics into it you are bringing this discussion to an entirely different level. And to be honest your arguments are not very persuasive that Bethesda owes me or you or anybody anything, ethically or not.

Selling bug-ridden software and refusing to fix it is unethical, yes. Try doing that wth a car and see how far you get before your lawyers start telling you to cut it out.

I admit the follower AI could have used a few tweaks (or at least all followers having the Sneak perk that stop pressure plates from being triggered by default) but that's not even really a bug, just a design flaw. As for followers not going where they're supposed to or not equipping optimal gear, I can't recall experiencing those problems either. :shrug:Occasionally having to wait an in game hour or change cells to make a follower catch up to me because they don't sprint is mildly annoying sometimes but definitely not a huge issue. I'm not denying Skyrim has a lot of bugs -the USLEEP patch log is huge- but I've never encountered or noticed 99.9% of them so I don't think Bethesda leaving them in is a huge issue.

And your car comparison isn't really valid IMO. Mechanical flaws in a vehicle could well lead to people being hurt or killed; the worst you're going to get with a buggy game is a less enjoyable playing experience.

Equating legal remedies with ethics is a bold, but futile move in this discussion. Are you arguing that selling bug-ridden software and refusing to fix it should raise possible legal relief for consumers?

Really? A person sells you a somewhat questionable product, you get them to fix some stuff. Some problems remain, you get them to fix that and then that fix brings back some of the old bugs and eventually a year or whatever down the road they can say, alright we're not doing anymore because we've spent "enough" time / resources on it already. No. You sell a product you make sure you sell a properly finished product. Time does not dictate that it is finished properly. You don't mop the floor and miss the corners, then if it takes you a full 8 hour shift then say, that's it, I finished mopping. When you purchase product, you purchase it thinking the whole thing is in working order. That is where that sort of expectation comes from.

The question then unfortunately is, okay so what is the product exactly in detail? Which I will agree can be difficult to define with software. Still. Don't be surprised at the expectation of a finished product as I just described it.

I feel hard-pressed to sympathize with the argument that ethics may obligate a party to do something in this "expectation-reality" paradigm of video game development.

Well, I suppose cars have limited time warranties too, but that shouldn't stop the manufacturer from improving their design on the next iteration. BGS' track record throws their dedication to this sort of iteration improvement into question. Some people say it's unfair to compare Nintendo games to large scale PC games like Skyrim. Let's use Zelda vs Elder Scrolls. How many times in Nintendo's history have they delayed in house product release dates and why do you think that is? Sure, their games aren't in as big of a grand scale, but maybe Nintendo does that intentionally to set a defined product scope for themselves and then work hard not to deviate from that scope. Ensuring they release a quality product. BGS perhaps needs work on defining scopes for themselves and give themselves the necessary time to finish that scope. Not just say "Ah, good enough" and release it. At least that's the way it comes across to some people.

The question I might have for BGS is were a lot of these bugs introduced because they had to scale back content at the last minute due to console system hardware limitations?