By Quintin Smith on October 19th, 2010 at 1:00 pm.
I’m only about four hours into Fallout: New Vegas, and while I’m enjoying myself, I’ve already come to one saddening conclusion. It’s a bit broke.
Below you’ll find a list of all the mysterious happenings and straight-up bugs I’ve encountered so far, a list Jim suggests I call “Getting Glitched In Vegas”. He’s good, that Jim.
- By far the most annoying and prevalent oddity is that the NPCs you encounter in towns and stationed around the wasteland have strange, hairpin senses of danger, and simply walking past them can be enough to trigger some kind of evasive AI routine. The result is that you’ll walk into a town, and four or five NPCs will abruptly start sprinting away from you in endless circles. “WELCOME, STRANGER,” they’ll shout while rubbing themselves against burnt-out trucks and walls. Sound annoying? Now imagine you have to talk to one of them for a quest, so you end up chasing them all around town. Yeah.
- Above you can see a woman at a desk. She’s typing at a computer. You can see her fingers moving, and hear the noise of the keys clattering. There’s just… no computer. Call me a stickler for detail, but that’s, I mean, she should have a computer.
- The Oblivion engine’s back! Now, the thing about the Oblivion engine is that it’s a bit of a charisma vacuum, and you have to work quite hard to make people not come across as stocky puppets. New Vegas doesn’t try very hard. In fact it tries so little that I’ve been having shootouts with people who maintain the same lazy smile or expression of doped boredom that they wear before the fighting starts.
- In four hours, the game’s crashed on me twice.
- I’ve also had a couple of encounters with that strange ragdoll rubberman glitch where somebody falls over, and their body elongates until it becomes an intangible sheet that divides the level. I later died when some enemies happened to ambush me by attacking from the other side of the glitch. True story.
- The new “Hardcore” mode on offer that means your character has to eat, drink and sleep is a touch nonsensical. After 48 in-game hours where I did nothing but walk and fight, I checked my FOD, SLP and H20 meters in the nick of time, because they all showed that I only had about 50 points out of 1000 left. I drank some water, ate some fruit, and checked the meters again. They now read 0. As in, after 48 hours they hadn’t ticked from 1000 to 50. They’d ticked from 0 to 50. I could go without drinking or sleeping for weeks. Also, in Hardcore mode food still heals damage you’ve taken, it just takes a few seconds instead of being instantaneous. So you still have the ability to get shot, bring up the Pip Boy, devour 40 packets of instant mash, exit the Pip Boy and keep fighting.
- I played Fallout 3 on my console toy so I’m not sure how bad Fallout 3′s controls were on PC, but I can tell you that New Vegas definitely does have the controls of a lazy port. It’s impossible to assign hotkeys for anything in the Pip Boy menu, so if you want to check your map, quests, inventory or even turn off the radio, you bring up the Pip Boy with tab and navigate to that specific submenu with a series of clicks. Clicking your way through multiple choice conversations is almost as bad- it’s just that so few buttons do what you’d expect them to, and masses of obvious shortcuts are ignored.
So, yeah. My time with New Vegas is off to a bit of a bad start. If you’re after a more full-bodied conclusion instead of just me whinging, fear not. I’ll be posting my Wot I Think in the next few days.
It’s Barney – but with a dead-eyed stare!
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And that’s why I didn’t pre-order it. Bethesda has ALWAYS released a bugged piece of crap and takes months to get it into some semblance of the game it’s supposed to be… I got burned on Fallout 3 too (and pretty much every release before that), didn’t want to go through it again.
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Yeah, let’s ignore the fact that Bethesda didn’t make this one shall we?
Let’s at least assign blame where due, the blame for this buggy mess rests on Obsidian’s shoulders.
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Both of them are probably to blame, Bethesda’s engines are buggy piles of crap and Obsidian always lets massive amounts of bugs through. Together they obviously make buggy messes.
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There can be no excuses for Obsidian this time, surely?
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Other than “It’s an Obsidian game”.
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Other than, “Bugs or no, every single Obsidian game I’ve played has been made of pure awesome?” ’cause that’s been -my- experience. Also, FWIW, NWN2 shows a history of willingness to patch the crap out of the game if the publisher lets them. The instances where their games haven’t been fixed (KOTOR2, Alpha Protocol – not that AP is buggy for me) are the ones where the publisher abandoned ship pretty much immediately.
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Well, to be fair, Oblivion and Fallout 3 were both bug-riddled messes on release, crashed a lot and FO3 even had a bug that broke the main questline.
So I guess one could use that as an excuse “Bethesda’s own games are just as buggy.”
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How about the fact the engine the game is built on is a glitchy, bug-ridden piece of shit?
I’m sure that doesn’t play a part, no. It must be Obsidian. Embarrassing how this comments thread has morphed into such a hive mind. Look at what you’ve wrought, Keiron Gillen replacement.
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They haven’t had an excuse since KoTOR 2, that doesn’t stop the fanboys from trying to rationalize this stuff every time it happens.
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It must be said: If you expected a game made by Obsidian and published by Bethesda to not have bugs, you really haven’t been paying attention.
That said, I am disappointed to hear that Obsidian didn’t put in more animation work on the character models. I’m a little tired of the eerie buggers.
P.S. I know that there was a “holster” key in F3. IIRC it was defaulted as H for the PC version.
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Bait!
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Holstering is the same as FO3, hold down the reload button.
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Has everyone forgotten Fallout 2? The fact that the initial release was a buggy mess? Disappearing trunk, anyone? Were you guys on the official forum back in ’98? I sure as hell was, and people were PISSED.
And now, hey, it’s a classic.
Not that I’m excusing this, I am simply commenting on the cyclical nature of all things.
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I specifically remember them claiming they’ve revamped most of the character animations and what not. But oh, la la. New Fail.
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“Obsidianized”.
But seriously, what the hell guys? If you can’t even find the talent or energy to polish the games you make… please stop making games. This industry isn’t exactly a charity and half-hearted games do nothing to help the image of PC gaming.
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look at STALKER, it idn’t suck at the 3rd installment! Now tell me why would I ever want to play some FO rather than for example STALKER?
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Yes, STALKER is pretty much THE spiritual successor to Fallout 1 and 2.
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Most of those are related to the godawful engine, no? I mean I had several of those issues with Fallout 3 as well.
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Bugginess of AP has no excuse. None. They had the money, they had the time.
that being said
I don’t give a f—
AP was brilliant
KOTOR 2 was too. Even with the content butchered it is superior to K1 and is still one of the best games (not only RPG) i had ever played
Loved NWN2 too (had to give back my copy to friend so never finished)
and ofcourse
bloodlines, arcanum, Fallout 2 are the best games i ever played and they were bug ridden too.
Unfortunately i am at the moment flooded with games i haven’t played (over 15 of them sitting in my library ready to be played) so im giving FNV a pass till next year. buy GOTY edition?
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Welcome to Fallout 3! Enjoy your stay.
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Maybe she´s writing it down on her invisible typewriter. ;)
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The Noise!
Where does the noise come from”
Somebody stop the noise!
The clattering of keys in my head!
Someon- ok I’ll stop now.
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You know, maybe that person is a quest starter to some Cthulhu horror craziness.
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maybe she gives quest to find her computer , and she shows what her computer was like , what sound keyboard buttons made when they were press and how she pressed them ^^
its an RPG for God sake !
so think rpg …
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massively disappointing considering all obsidian had to do, was cobble together a story and bug test it.
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To be fair, Obsidian is an independent developer which mostly does work-for-hire. I doubt they have the resources to maintain a dedicated QA team. Generally, it’s the publishers, in this case Bethesda, that are responsible for providing the resources necessary to release the game, including but not limited to QA.
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Well can’t say it’s unexpected coming from either Obsidian or Bethesbla. Still, if they’ve delivered on their strong sides, I’d play it with way more enthusiasm than FO3.
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Ah damn, just when I was about to buy it. Looks like I’ll wait a bit more :(
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Obisidian? A broken game?! SURELY NOT!
I reckon they just don’t have QA Testers.
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No, they do. They just made the mistake of hiring people like me to Q&A test, to whom a woman typing on an invisible typewriter would be so awesomely funny I’d demand it was left in.
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I’m mildly autistic so expressionless faces would pass me by as something to fix.
Hence Civ 5 ‘you can tell what they are thinking by looking at their expression’ …. DOES NOT REALLY WORK FOR ME!
What is wrong with words! We invented ‘em let us them to convey information.
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Same i didn’t notice anything was wrong in Oblivion or fallout 3 until someone actually said look at the face properly and really stare at it.
Also another problem I don’t pick up on is bad voice acting. I seriously don’t notice it unless its like Tommy Wausau’s The Room bad. There are many games that apparently have bad voice acting that I really don’t notice. Like The witcher for example.
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One person’s bad voice acting is another person’s… not bad voice acting.
Usually it takes a combination of bad dialog and bad voice acting to get my attention. Unless it’s Robot Alchemic Drive bad. That game featured a TV news announcer who was trying really hard (sometimes) to read her English lines, despite not knowing the language or being told what any of it meant. Luckily for her, she had no idea how bad the dialog was. While giant robots duked it out in the streets, “What will become of Senjo? The city’s fate seems to grow dimmer than a candle in the wind!”
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@Temple just assume they hate you, stockpile more nukes.
Or play a good game, civ4?
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Bad voice acting? Call of Pripyat. Seriously. The Witcher is actually music to your ears by comparison.
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Ugh. Now I’m not looking forward to the launch with the same enthusiasm anymore. You know, I keep wondering how Obsidian keep surviving even though they drop the ball all the time. While other, imho better, developers have gone tits up.
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All the old Black Isle fanboys like me are still hanging around, helplessly buying every game Obsidian put out and thinking to ourselves “maybe this one will be okay, and not bug-ridden”
Maybe at some point we’ll give up…
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Probably because Obsidian have a knack with the writing that keeps you playing in spite of the bugs. Or a knack with the bugs that actually enhance the game. People having deep and meaningful conversations on the nature of loyalty and betrayal with what, if their positioning during the cutscene is anything to go by, appears to be a household plant for example. I find myself caring a lot more for characters who insist on philosophical debates with inanimate household objects than I do for those who think sending the chosen one to deliver some gubbins to the next village is some kind of heroic quest worthy of melodrama.
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But wouldn’t it make more sense for Obsidian to fire all their (apparently worthless) technical people and just hire themselves out as a writing/design studio to technically competent teams that produce bland garbage?
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@perilisk,
Teams that produce bland garbage like, say, Bethesda? They’re not the most technically competent bunch, but other than that, I’d say that’s exactly what they’re doing.
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It’s just Fallout with bugs.
Wait.
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Here is a man who knows what hes talking about.
Bugs are a pain, but it didn’t stop Fallout 1 and 2 and KOTOR2 and Vampire Bloodlines (Troika are kind of Obsidian) being phenomenal games, so much better than templated COD remakes.
Even with version 7.1 (SEVEN POINT ONE??!!) of the Vampire fan patch, its hilarious how people just fly about the streets, teleport to places, and are simply not there during cutscenes.
But the story and dialogue and world make up for it in so many ways. Beats a bugless sterile “AAA” title any day.
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Actually I think it was a clever remark on the ‘Oblivion with guns’ joke that did the rounds at Fallout 3′s release.
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Also, comparing Obsidian’s games to CoD and going “well, they’re more imaginative than that!” is saying very little, and isn’t particularly useful as a defence.
Also also, it just isn’t the case that a game is either buggy and imaginative or bugless and boring, and you know it.
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I’m pretty sure its a reference to the fact that Fallout 1, 2, Tactics and 3 (Brotherhood of Steel isn’t worthy of inclusion) have all been buggy as hell, and thus is should be no surprise that this is buggy.
And about the AAA titles, I wish all games were bug-free, but more often than not the super-polished games nowadays are the mass-market-aimed games like modern-day COD etc, more traditional games like RPGs etc that have a much smaller market tend to get pushed out the door quicker and thus are buggier, but thats a price I am willing to pay if it means we continue to get the more traditional games than aren’t sterilised for the masses
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I still maintain Fallout 3 is vastly overrated, and is infact not that far from being a steaming pile of pigshit.
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As a Fallout (old ones) fan. I can tell you that for all shortcomings of F3 , it was simply fun game to play.
Which is a merit in its own right
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While I wouldn’t say F3 was complete shit, it was certainly mediocre at best. Oblivion with guns, truly – and if you like that, lucky you. However beyond the backdrop it didn’t feel like a Fallout game to me and so I was dismayed over how well it was received as the next installment of the franchise. Alas the bulk of its audience likely never even heard of F1 and F2, much less played them, so they don’t know any better.
I had some hope for New Vegas being in old hands, despite my ever-growing distaste for most things Obsidian. This certainly paints a bleak picture. I guess with any luck they’ll have at least gotten the feel right and it might be worth slogging through with a number of mods in tow.
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Well here, Fox, let me slap my own credentials up on the table.
I still have the discs for the original two games (three, technically, if you include FO:T). I bought and played them when they first came out, finished them, and have occasionally replayed them in the intervening years.
And settingwise, FO3 feels exactly like what those two games promised, but couldn’t quite deliver due to the technical limitations of the time.
Don’t get me wrong: the first two (primarily the first) had great stories associated with them. But beyond the occasional weapon design, billboard, or piece of map art, we never really got to explore the “future fifties” that the title sequences gave us a glimpse of. There was no evocative pop music once you were in-game. The fashions could’ve come from any generic wasteland setting. And don’t even get me started on Fallout 2′s “let’s drop in some modern day pop culture references and call it humor”.
FO3 took everything that was great about the title sequences from those first two games, and distilled it into pure in-game atmosphere. That may sound like it’s damning with faint praise, but let’s face it: the FO1/FO2 title sequences are legendary for their sense of setting.
Even going beyond that, many of the quests in FO3 were just dripping with Cold War-era themes of paranoia, isolation, and groupthink. For me, the Tranquility Lane quest was probably a high point in this regard.
Overall, the writing was mediocre. If you didn’t facepalm yourself over the original ending, then you have an incredibly high tolerance for lazy plot railroading.
But did it feel like a Fallout game? I say, ‘Yes.’
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Yes, Corporate Dog is right, it did feel like Fallout. Until you had tried a mission. It felt railroaded, and without many options. And the dialogs was also without options. Nor did your stats have barely anything to say other than in combat. Not to mention a moral system devoid of any logically moral (giving you karma for doing questionable stuff, taking away karma for no reason at all).
I fell in love with Fallout because of the overwhelming choices, just as i fell in love with games like Deus Ex and Morrowind, and when they suddenly remove what i remember as the key feature of the game, something dies a bit inside me.
Hrmf.. Still two days left until Fallout: Las Vegas release on my Steam. :(
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Oh no!
I’ve been really looking forward to this. Fallout 3 had lots of potential but was let down by the shallow nature of most of the quests and characters. FO3 + the depth of characterisation the Obsidian folks are capable of sounds like it should be wonderful.
Immersion breaking glitches for the lose in a game like this.
Ars Technica also reports random freezes, necessitating saving every minute. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
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Haven’t seen any freezes yet. Just crashes to desktop.
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Oh, well that’s alright then.
:(
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@Quinns
So, Fear of Crashing in Las Vegas?
Ahaha. Ahem. I’ll stop.
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I’m not surprised, but still gutted about this. FO3 is still a buggy mess for a lot of people and Bethe… You know, I’m not even going to rant, because what’s the fucking point? We all know the drill by now. Bethesda games are about as stable as a one-legged scottish drunk on a ladder. Their animation and character design are sub-standard. Throw the remains of Obsidian into the mix and it can only end like this. Fuck the lot of them.
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>Throw the remains of Obsidian into the mix and it can only end like this.
What, with a game that is lauded for its writing and is currently at 85% on Metacritic? Oh noes!
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On my PC it’ll be more like Fear and Loading in Las Vegas. HO!
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Don’t worry guys, when the next Bethesda first person RPG romp comes out in 2014 it’ll be using some decent tech… why do you think they bought id Software?
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Obsidian releasing a heavily bugged game based upon another company’s IP? Say it ain’t so!
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Oh noes, Obsidian did it again. Releasing a bug infested game. So who is to blame. I presume Atari was pressing too much on release date again. Oh what a shame this time Atari was not the publisher. Obsidian will never get their perfect game released achievement.
Have a nice day.
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Surely they used up that line of excuses with Alpha Protocol.
They really need to hire new, better project managers that reign in their projects and stop them getting too ambitious. If they still can’t get the small projects right, then publishers need to stop using them as gotos for jobs that nobody else wants.
As much as I hate to say it, maybe once they fold, their actual talent can go to more technically competent studios?
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@Optimaximal: The entire industry is about making over-ambitious games with not enough time and money. (Unless you’re making under-ambitious Facebook games, or similar.) Can’t really fault them for that.
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That’s just what I was thinking after having read the review on Giant Bomb: Horrible bugs? An interesting world, characters and writing that have you keep playing nevertheless? Now, that sounds like an Obsidian/Avellone-game to me.
Strangely, the bugs were not mentioned that much in the Eurogamer review I checked out as well – which made me think loony things like: “Maybe the console version is more broken than the PC one?”
Anyway, pre-ordered it, so there’s no stepping back now. Even though it might be sitting a bit on the shelf, waiting for the dear old modders and patchers to do their work. It’s not as if we couldn’t have seen that coming. Still, how Obsidian even managed to fuck up a game in a year-old engine is a question worth asking…
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Nobody shouting at Quinn for playing on a tv-extender?
As I read his review I though, oh at least he xbox version will be better.
Wait he’s on a consoulless?
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Well. To their defense, Bethesda was never good at bug testing either. Fallout 3 was also full of bug. More work for the community I guess.
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True. But this this basically a mod, so you’d think less time building your own engine would mean more time polishing.
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Well, you’d also think it would be harder to introduce bugs into core engine stuff in the first place, if all you’re doing is modding the game.
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@perilisk – Yet somehow, Obsidian found a way.
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I’m not sure why people call Fallout 3 bug ridden.
I don’t remember any (serious) bugs. Maybe a quest or two that I couldn’t finish. Certainly no crashes or guys typing in the air.
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People typing on air? No. (I don’t remember characters even using computers.) Hard locking sometimes five times in an evening? Yes. Objects, people, enemies getting stuck in the level geometry? Yup. People spontaneously dying while you’re not around? Yup (to be fair, this isn’t necessarily a bug – it’s just that in this case people were clipping through the world and falling to their deaths). The whole Lincoln Memorial quest being uncompletable for several in-game months because the escaped slaves I helped simply disappeared? Yup. I could go on.
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Haven’t you heard of the invisi-computers in the the Fallout universe? Part of the whole alternate universe thing is that they invented invisible computers when the Chinese invaded so they could post on their blogs about massive stompy robots without fear of observation.
You don’t even have to look at them to check what you’re typing. You just know.
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Well, in F3 you hold reload key to holster a weapon. Assigining hotkeys was possible by going to the weapon selection and pressing a number key.
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IIRC you could also bring up the map et al with hotkeys, albeit still in the Pipboy, but at least it took you straight to the relevant screen.
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Yup. The interface was meant to work with a gamepad. And it does – you can get to any pipboy screen you want in less than a second. Granted, they could have made an enhanced, less clicky, more-information-at-once pipboy for the PC version. But hey, if you just connect a gamepad, it instantly makes sense. So do it.
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Sounds like a polished masterpiece, by Obsidian standards.
(In their defence, 3 and 5 were not of their making)
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Edit.
List numbers changed, now 3 and 7.
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so, a bethesda game, then.
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whoops, my bad, obsidian
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You got it right both times, actually.
Bethesda + Obsidian = Buggy Bugfest… and the obligatory trademark crappy animations (Yes, I have to mention that every time someone mentions Bethesda).
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Come on now, the player animations in Fallout 3 were some of the best I’ve seen in a 3rd person skating sim
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“Above you can see a woman at a desk. She’s typing at a computer. You can see her fingers moving, and hear the noise of the keys clattering. There’s just… no computer. Call me a stickler for detail, but that’s, I mean, she should have a computer.”
Now hey, wait a minute, that might just be a game feature! You’ve found the mad woman of New Vegas who does the accounting on an invisible PC.
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Who is inexplicably capable of reproducing keyboard sounds.
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‘You’re… you’re making the sounds yourself…’
‘…no I’m no- *click click click*’-t.’
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That got a laugh out of me! :D
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Unless they broke the F3 system, you should be able to hold down a number key (1-8) in your inventory and then click on an item to assign it to that number.
Shame Hardcore Mode isn’t. Bring on the modders!
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Really? Man. I’m all for figuring out controls myself, but that’s some cheat code-level secrecy, right there.
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for some reason that is beyond me, 2 is hardcoded to be switch weapon ammo type. It’s pretty bizarre considering 1, 3-8 are bindable.
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also f1-f4 correspond to different tabs of your pipboy
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Why do console ports never support your mouse scroll wheel for weapon selection?
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Is it noticeably more buggy than Oblivion or Fallout 3?
Just, and do please forgive me Master Quinns, many People-On-The Internets’ ideas of game breaking bugs are barely noticeable glitches to philistines like me.
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As I mention in the article, I’m enjoying myself. None of this stuff is game-breaking. Just disappointing.
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OK, cool beans. I kind of have some PTSD responses to the word ‘broke’, as it is usually followed by comparing a game to the holocaust for having clipping issues. I am sensitive, and need holding.
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Your face is expressionless and we cannot tell
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Well, Fallout 2 was fairly broken on launch too, so they are just going on with the tradition. I think it had an invisible car, not computer…
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Yep, or if you were really lucky the trunk would detach itself from the rest of the car and follow you around.
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But Fallout 2 got patched eliminating most bugs after a few months, Alpha Protocol, the previous Obsidian game, has been screaming for a patch since release and nothing, in fact this is true for a lot of games lately, you cant even count on patches anymore
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I’ve not seen any serious bugs in Alpha Protocol worth patching out to be honest. As for FO2, the patch largely stopped the game breaking bugs, like certain quests sending you crashing to the desktop. It was the unofficial patches which sorted out the less gamebreaking stuff.
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The problem is in 1998 it wasn´t too easy to get patches with the crappy conections back then… asuming you had a connection, because at least here, they were quite pricey for what they gave.
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Bethesda, isn’t it about time you fix your broken game engine? You have full access to id tech 5 so what’s holding you back? If TESV is still using the same old engine…
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I hope the controls thing are fixed for the PC. I can live with bad hilarious bugs, and a few CTD if the game have a autosave or quicksave system. But bad controls may make any second of the game painfull.
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This makes me sad. Yet also happy that I didn’t buy it when it was on pre-order a while back. What’s the point of special raider armor with all these bugs?
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Boo. Again RPS chooses to fire away an article focusing only on bugs and nothing else for an Obsidian game on release day.
Reviews so far have been pretty excellent.
http://www.vg247.com/2010/10/19/fallout-new-vegas-reviews-go-for-broke-round-up/
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Another 9/10 review, by someone who obviously played Fallout 1 & 2. Can’t wait to play this game to be honest.
http://www.destructoid.com/review-fallout-new-vegas
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I think there is already a patch out for some of the bugs as well.
This looks like what I was expecting Fallout 3 to be in the first place.
- No more dull dungeons which are pointless
- More interesting NPCs
- No more awful subways and capital city
I will be playing a high speech character as supposedly it really has an effect this time.
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Eurogamer gave it a 9/10 as well. Call me crazy, but I trust those guys.
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Far be it for anyone to have a substantive criticsim about a game when its review numbers are so high!
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Do not preorder, do not buy at launch, do wait for a patch/mods to fix things. Avoid disappointment.
On another note, I really, REALLY hope the next Fallout game is on id tech 5. They really have to dump Gamebryo, they’ve been using it for far too long.
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Do not preorder, do not buy at launch, do wait for a patch/mods to fix things. Avoid disappointment.
This has been my approach to PC games for … well, forever. Or at least since the internet made patches possible.
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The Oblivion has not aged well. They still haven’t introduced dynamic shadows which, even when they were developing the engine, were becoming the norm.
One of the reasons I stopped playing Oblivion after picking it up last year was how flat the world looks. It’s amazing the change that environmental and object shadows bring.
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I’m noy surprised. Glitches are Obsidian’s trademark, after all.
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A- quinns what has happened to onionbog? I can’t go on without finding out!!!
B – I was lookin forward to this game on Friday and now you dash my hopes… Is there any chance yours is a pre-release copy and such massive bugs have been squashed in final version? Please say yes…
*goes into fetal position*
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@ OP – Is anyone surprised?
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I’m not all that surprised. I know a lot of people who love Fallout 3 and are totally psyched about New Vegas. I enjoyed Fallout 3 but have been generally quite skeptical about this title. When asked why I can only say “It’s being developed by Obsidian”, which is utterly meaningless to most of my friends.
I only recently learned of Obsidian when I made the mistake of getting excited about Alpha Protocol. As a guy who loves spies and RPGs, this seemed like a match made in heaven. I starting reading up on Obsidian, which tempered my excitement somewhat, but not enough. Somehow I couldn’t accept that the game was going to be anything except fantastic.
Well, we all know it wasn’t. Since then I decided when it comes to Obsidian I will keep a cautious eye on the games. If it turns out to be good, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. If not, I’ll nod solemnly to myself and move on.
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No, I’m sorry, we do not “all know that”. Alpha Protocol was (and is) fantastic in my book. Do I find a few of the design choices a tad frustrating? Sure. And I wish they’d fix hacking to be a little less wonky controlwise. But in terms of the meat of the game, I love it. The conversations, the intel gathering, the little bonuses from everything you do, the way the narrative reacts to seemingly minor actions…
I mean, I grant you I’ve only run into one of the many bugs other people have reported (reloading repeatedly hangs the game), so that stuff hasn’t gotten in the way of my appreciation for it. But I really don’t feel like it deserved a lot of the negative reviews it got.
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I wish I could agree. I appreciate your perspective but I tried so hard to like the game, but all that I got was disappointment. The things it does well, it does really well, but not well enough to outshine all the flaws in my eyes.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the game unplayable and I’m all for overlooking flaws in favour of the “greater good”, but to have to struggle through the tedious missions and ridiculous hacking mini-games (One of which forced me to use a controller as it simply was not working properly with a mouse) to get to the admittedly well thought-out and implemented story parts just wasn’t a worthwhile trade off.
It’s not like I wrote off the game without giving it a chance, I tried so hard to like it. I read all the reviews and decided that it’s probably just a game that isn’t for certain types of people, but that I would fall in love with. That’s not strictly untrue, either. I don’t care about the fact that accuracy is a calculation, and that your character is supposedly an experienced spy yet initially cannot seem to even fire a pistol properly. They’re just RPG staples.
Despite the reviews, I still bought the game expecting to like it, I still gave it a chance and I tried to fight through the bugs and tedium to find something worthwhile. Ultimately all I was left with was disappointment. A completely average game that could have been something really special. That should probably be Obsidian’s tagline or something.
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Yeah, I dunno. I just finished it and loved every bit of it aside from a few niggling things like the hacking minigame (easily circumvented, not -that- hard either, just a bit annoying), Thornton standing up to use sniper rifles (thus making sure everyone in the area sees him), and one or two forced battle sequences that are a tad frustrating when using a stealth-built character. Which is not to say that stealth has nothing in its toolbox for such sequences – a full Shadow Operative charge can allow you to subdue several guys while they can’t see you. And if you’re also wielding a pistol, well… it’s not the best stand-up-and-brawl weapon but maxed critical hits to the head from cover drop guys nice and fast, to say nothing of the tactical-nuke-vs-bosses that is Chain Shot.
I thought the missions had a nice mix of variety and settings, enough twists to keep things going, some alternative routes for getting the drop on enemies, and I never really got tired of sneaking up on guys and brutalizing them (or headshotting from cover, then shooting the next guy as he runs to check on his friend). I do wish there’d been a bit more variety in gear, but ah well.
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You might be quite interested in This retrospective. The author shares quite a lot of my current views of the game but ultimately goes on to say that he’s really enjoying it.
I admit I still intend to play the game more, though when I don’t know, and I think it will have a place in my heart. But all I will ever think of when I hear the words “Alpha Protocol” is wasted potential.
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I was going to say “Well I’ll just get it on console,” but then find it’s just as bad there? Microsoft has pretty stringent QA. Big, game-breaking bugs or imbalances make it through QA all the time, but they’re typically behind-the-scenes ones, not glaring obvious stuff like invisible objects or floating sheriffs.
I’ll probably get it on the PC. Patches come faster, fans can mod fixes, etc. It’s telling that, even with all these nutty bugs, the game’s landing good reviews, score- and text-wise. I think a bunch of people want a Fallout 3 with personality and character that better matched the Fallouts (especially 2 in this case) before it, and Obsidian seemed to have delivered that.
In other words, god bless Obsidian for making interesting stories, even if they essentially make expansion packs to other peoples’ work and yet still manage to completely bug things out. Gaming needed Troika, and I’m glad someone stepped up to the plate to fill the role.
Also, Obsidian gets like 20 free passes from me due to Mask of the Betrayer. Best RPG, story wise, since Torment? Without a doubt.
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Telling? Not really.
Fallout 3 got rave reviews.
Fallout 3 was not very good.
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Now THAT wasn’t expected, surely?
And worse, Obsidian is just that. They don’t have the balls to do something epic such as Planescape: Torment again… So we end up with this crap.
(And I agree with an above poster who said FO3 was a vastly overrated piece of steaming bullshit)
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You should probably go play Mask of the Betrayer.
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Indeed, I checked it out briefly… But nah, it doesn’t get near it, if even. If I wasn’t clear enough, I was talking about something seriously original and with a certain amount of designer lunacy, hehe :D
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lol @ you thinking you’ll ever see a game like Planescape: Torment again. No wonder you can’t seem to enjoy good things.
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Wait… Planescape was epic? I’m sorry but no it wasn’t. Well written, funny and engaging? Yes. But epic? Compared to Baldurs and the Ultima games Planescape was tiny, linear and with a lot of missing voice work all running on a 2 year old engine.
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@Pijama
Weren’t we all complaining the other day that the first couple hours of P:T was hardly bearable? And now you won’t give MotB a second chance? Is your thinking cap correctly fastened? MotB is a beautiful game.
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Question, since people are talking about Mask of the Betrayer:
I’ve never played any of the Neverwinter games. MotB is an expansion pack. I don’t really care enough to play through the vanilla campaigns as I have way too much too play anyway. Can I jump right into MotB? Will I not be leveled up enough? More importantly, will parts of the plot make no sense without the backstory? (I also am fairly unfamiliar with D&D backstory in general)
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@jad
> Can I jump right into MotB? Will I not be leveled up enough?
Yes, you can jump right in. Your new character will be given enough XP that you can level them up exaktly like you want them before start.
>More importantly, will parts of the plot make no sense without the backstory?
There are a few references to you being the same character as in the main campaign, the Captain of the Keep or whatever the title was, and one or two faces that pop up again, but you are free to ignore it and them completely if you want to. “Nope, don’t remember you, I must have gotten amnesia from a bump on the head!”
> (I also am fairly unfamiliar with D&D backstory in general)
All the necessary lore will be explained to you. Having played D&D titles before (like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape, NWN 1) will help you a little bit in combat. You will know which spells and powers are strong against a certain monster type and so on, but it is not rocket science.
I really recommend it, for story, characters and conversations it is almost as good as Planescape, Vampire:Bloodlines and suchlike.
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It’s mystifying why people are placing the blame on Obsidian when it clearly lies with the horribly creaky Gamebryo engine. Fallout 3 had identical issues to this which had to eventually be remedied by mods.
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I’m sorry, but that’s just nonsense. None of the other Gamebryo games have those problems. So it’s either Obsidian’s fault or fault of the changes Bethsoft made. Propably both. Altough honestly…Unreal 3.0 is very nice to work it and yet look how bad Alpha Protocol was. I wouldn’t go blaming the engines, Obsidian just plain sucks when it comes to doing anything but writing scripts.
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Are you insane? Fallout 3 and Oblivion were both notoriously, infamously buggy.
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Fallout 3 had identical issues to this which had to eventually be remedied by mods.
If these issues were eventually remedied by mods then, surely, the developers themselves could have get rid of them in the first place, no? Just means that they didn’t have the necessary resources (time, testers, volition?) to address all the bugs.
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>None of the other Gamebryo games have those problems.
As Some Person says said, they were, and are, very buggy. I’ve experienced the infinite stretchy rubberman, crash to desktop, and disappearing objects bugs on these games, so they are part of the engine.
>look how bad Alpha Protocol was
Alpha Protocol is a pretty good game, and I’ll challenge anyone who disagrees with me to fisticuffs.
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I thought the game crashing to desktop was a feature of the Oblivion engine, as both Oblivion and FO3 both did it all the time.
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@W Main: She’s so mad that you can hear the keys clattering? That’s impressive. Actually, if you look real close, you can probably see her lips moving.
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Word on the street is it’s buggy, but not *that* buggy. Certainly not enough to seriously diminish the game’s overall quality.
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Even though FO3 was buggy as all hell, I still spent more hours on it than any other singleplayer games in the last 3 years. I had my money’s worth and it was still possible to bend your imagination a bit to immerse yourself.
If NV bugs/wooden characters are on a FO3 level (after a couple patches I guess), they can be tolerated.
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Well, bugs can be fixed a bland story and boring quests not so much. I don’t blame devs for releasing buggy games – I just keep my money until a game is patched enough. Most of the time it’s much cheaper already too. Patience hooray!
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That’s an approach that I’ve now sworn to employ. I’ve had enough of buying unfinished light crap on release.
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I believe bugs and glitches are canon in the Fallout universe. Something about radiation and FEV…
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Ah, for fucks sake… I was looking forward to playing this game on friday, and now you’ve ruined it. That is, they’ve ruined it, but you’re the messenger.
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“Oh, and there’s no button to put your weapon away. If you want to be anything more than an accidental left click away from shooting someone, you need to go into the menu and unequip it.”
Oh, and this is wrong. You hold R to sheathe your weapon. A bit more fact-checking, a little less of the “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” method of criticism.
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Fact checking? Is it in the manual or something?
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Actually, I remember reading a piece on Fallout 3 – I think it was the PC Gamer review – in which the author stated that there weren’t hotkeys to select weapons… I was confused, because I knew there WERE hotkeys for this.
I think my Oblivion instincts made me do it automatically, but they’re not actually mentioned in-game at any point.
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I only realized there were hotkeys on my second Oblivion play through, and boy was it a godsend.
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ohh, it’s buggy, eh?
well, forget buying this game anytime soon, back to STALKER CoP for me!
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Stalker Cop: New York Nightmare
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Doesn’t actually sounds and more glitchy than plain old Fallout 3, honestly.
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Mmmm! Instant mash!
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Obsidian in “RELEASING BROKEN GAME” Shocker.
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What’s with the crazy colour saturation? Looks like somebody just gave a child some crayons and said ‘go nuts’
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Yeah it looks pretty weird, especially in game. Hopefully there’ll be a mod to change the way it looks (like fellout does for fallout 3). A bigger problem is the nights, they are almost as bright as the day is.
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Maybe they have used the American color scheme from Arcania. The LSD-induced one.
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So I’m playing New Vegas on my XBOX at the moment, I got a pre-release copy (don’t ask how) and you can actually holster your weapon by holding the reload button, X. You can also assign different weapons to different directions on the D-Pad, as hot keys. In fact this game is so similar to F3 I couldn’t believe it at first. They even have a big sewer system under Vegas full of samey steel walls, the same you’d have seen in the Metro area of Washington in F3. It’s almost a shame, but I loved the last game so much that I am happy just to have a huge add-on pack for it.
I have noticed one or two bugs, but… nothing I don’t remember being in F3 as well?
I think the NPC’s are running away from you Quintin because you’re aiming your gun at them. If you learn to holster your weapon (hold the reload key) then you’d be all good.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s quite as buggy as you let on and I’ve had no crashes on the console version. Sure there’s bound to be differences with the PC version but chances are they’ll patch those issues within a month of it being released anyway and it’s bound to be totally playable in that time.
So yeah, those people being dissuaded from a purchase can calm down, it’s really not that bad. In fact I’m enjoying it as much as I enjoyed any part of Fallout 3.
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Fallout 3 I just ran out of steam with though.
I had a bunch of quests I did not really care about about half way though, so really got bored and gave up.
I cleared out the Dunwich Building and found …. nothing. Pretty pointless.
That pretty much summed up my FO3 experience. A nagging “this is pretty pointless”.
the writing in this is supposed to be far, far better.
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The Dunwich Building has a) a fair few audio recordings scattered about and b) ties into a quest you get in Point Lookout. If you have Point Lookout, which you should because it’s great.
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I gave away my FO3 copy yonks ago ….
I never felt compelled to pump hours upon hours into FO3 though.
I completed Risen.
I got to the Lake area on Witcher then got bored.
Not sure what that means. Perhaps I just burn out after 20 hrs or something?
Its frustrating.
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@huggster.
Nothing wrong with that. Happens to me too. I just go off playing something else. Do that. Get bored. Return to previous game, which then feels good and fresh again, and finish it. Then return to the other game to finish that one too.
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I think a lot of people here are overreacting. It’s only a bit broke. It doesn’t mean that it’s a bug-ridden piece of unpolished code. More than that. CTDs and other possible graphical bugs may be hardware specific which, of course, doesn’t mean it’s normal but may also mean that they are quite possibly some rare engine problems you would never experience. Yes, controls are honestly bad, and the PipBoy, sporting some nice arm-to-the-face animations and the necessity to click a lot trough things, may add to the immersion at first but after a while becomes downright annoying. However, one still would have good times with it. Well, at least in the beginning, that is. Fallout 3 was so overwhelming at the start, with all its apparent possibilities, only to show its true slo-motion boring nature afterwards. What I’m really afraid of, is that this iteration of a “new age” fallout game would go the same road.
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Aww man, there’s definitely an ingredient missing at Obsidian.
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Also, this is GFWlive isn’t it? Bleugh… Obsidians on a role with the buggy games.
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No, it does not use Games for Windows Live. If you are going to knock someone, perhaps you should get your facts right first.
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And spelling!
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Also, your flies are undone.
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What? Who is this cruel man that squashed the good lad’s flies?!
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I wasn’t sure. Thats why I asked first. ROLL. Good of them to drop GFWlive.
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Obsidian surely did hire that “will сode C++ for food” guy.
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Damn. Please let it be a good but flawed game, and not just a flawed game.
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Quinns says he hasn’t played Fallout 3 on the PC. This sounds A LOT like it. I’m not worried.
And apart from the bugs, the controls might be something to get used to, but I’ve spent way too many hours with the game to say they’re even remotely unusable.
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No surprises here. I never intended to get this game anywhere near launch. It’s going to need at least 6 months before it’s playable.
The body stretching is due to the fact that the game uses Havok. Not that it should be forgiven for doing so. But it’s not a bug that’s going to be fixed by Obsidian (and clearly no Havok either given that it’s always been like that).
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@ Quinns:
Not to niggle, but wouldn’t 40 packs of instant mash (or most food) be a pretty hard thing to carry around during a dangerous quest/in the wasteland? I mean, I assume they all have weight in the same ways as bullets and guns do and only heal a little bit each, so you’d need to carry a lot of them. :-)
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I’m betting that half the people leaping on the “Obsidian == Bugs” bandwagon have never bothered playing any of their past output.
Not that it wasn’t buggy, but heaven forbid that Obsidian could possibly make a better game than the mighty Fallout 3! After all, Bethesda are the unassailable gods of NEXT-GEN roleplaying!
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>>I think the NPC’s are running away from you Quintin because you’re aiming your gun at them. If you learn to holster your weapon (hold the reload key) then you’d be all good.
Could this be the new HOW DO I GET IRON?
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I find that, while there’s the occasional bugs that quinns has mentioned (most of which I haven’t run in to but I have seen the odd npc stuck inside a rock), it really doesn’t affect my enjoyment. On the whole, F:NV is like a much improved Fallout 3. It’s a much more of an RPG, you can’t be the ace of all trades and there’s a lot more depth to stats/perks/skills. Each SPECIAL stat affects multiple aspects of the game and it makes it much harder to choose which one you want to focus on.
It also has a genuine difficulty curve that was missing from Fallout 3, I’m still at the beginning of the game but I get absolutely demolished by these flying insects that are north of the starting area. In fact, I’ve basically given up on trying to clear them out for now, I’ll probably stop by in a few levels and see if i can take them. I also really enjoy realtime combat now, I hardly ever find myself using vats which is the complete opposite of how I used to play Fallout 3 (when I wasn’t using bullettime).
As far as annoyances go, my biggest complaints so far are the mouse acceleration which I don’t know how to turn off at the moment (I’m sure there’s going to be a fix) as well as constantly having to type FOV 90 in to the console (again, going to be a fix at some point). The interface is giant and clunky, as soon as proper interface mod comes out I’ll definitely be grabbing that. Other than that, I don’t really have any other complaints.
The game is a marked improvement over Fallout 3, especially in terms of the questline and gameplay.
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Fix for Mouse Acceleration: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3048
Fix for FOV from Tweakguides:
“Change Field of View: Some people don’t like the default 75 degree field of vision in the game, and prefer something like 90 degrees which is normal for many first person games. Use the FOV command to set a new field of vision, e.g. fov 90. Note that this is reset every time you start Fallout 3, and on most transition loads, so you must manually set it each and every time. Update: You can now permanently set the FOV in the game by adding the fDefaultWorldFOV variable to Fallout.ini as detailed in an update on page 8.”
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Thanks for that, it wasn’t working at first but found a solution on a forum. You have to modify the relevant section in your FalloutPrefs.ini instead of Fallout.ini and then set it as read only (so it doesn’t get reverted, not sure why it does that). Now both of the settings are working and the game is much more playable.
[Display]
fDefaultWorldFOV=90.0000
[Controls]
fForegroundMouseAccelBase=0
fForegroundMouseAccelTop=0
fForegroundMouseBase=0
fForegroundMouseMult=0
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Good to know, thanks !
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Well, i see. Obisidan fail it again. Cool Story, Bro! That´s why i skip Obsidan since KotoR II (and give it a last try on NwN II).
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The Eurogamer review seem to suggest that a day one patch is coming.
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Biggest bug (at least in the PC version, dunno if it’s cross-platform) is that Autosave/Quicksave are completely broken. Everytime you start the game up it reverts to the very first auto/quicksave the game made, so if you aren’t manually saving periodically you’ll be in for a nasty surprise.
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I think this has to do with steam cloud being used for syncing savegames, I’ve run in to similar problems. For now turning off steam cloud for F:NV works, hopefully they will patch this.
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Ouch
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Is this really a problem for everyone using the PC version? I simply can not believe this got past QA. And I’m not saying the analysts were at fault because you often you report a defect and it doesn’t get addressed.
But if they tested they must have found it, and if they found it and left it that’s just a scary, scary process that makes things like invisible typewriters totally understandable. Imagine the size of the issues they were fixing for a defect in the autosave/load not to be deemed a priority.
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I’ve disabled the steam cloud and it’s still a problem. Either way, regular saves work fine.
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Yeah you’re right, it still hasn’t fixed it, oh well.
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Shocking?
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Weird, now it’s working. I think Steam may have applied a stealth-patch.
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Did Quinns fail to read the manual? I’m pretty sure the hotkey assignment stuff is in there, at least it was in Fallout 3.
I won’t open my copy until this evening.
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Jesus, Temple, you are mildly autistic.
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Oh well. I’ll be buying it. If only because this sounds unmissable:
‘“WELCOME, STRANGER,” they’ll shout while rubbing themselves against burnt-out trucks and walls’
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He was probably in combat at the time which causes the NPC’s to behave like that. It still looks weird though.
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a lot of the criticisms seem to be “if you didn’t like the level of polish in fallout 3 this is the same 2 years later” which mea if you didn’t mind the (lack of) polish of fallout 3 this should be fine 2 perhaps? i remember you guys were pretty down on fallout 3 too, so maybe i’ll still enjoy this?
i’m genuinely in a muddle about whether i should give it a go, I’ve generally loved everything Bethesda’ve done and thought everything obsidian have done was poor except alpha protocol, which was poor but also new.
if it’s anything like their shades of bioware games it’ll be worth playing i reckon.
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Trivial bugs like the ones mentioned in the article never really bother me….. in any game really. I think people too often ignore the safety net that is the patching system. In a short time these already trivial bugs will become even more trivial as they get patched out, but I suppose everyone needs something to moan about.
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Moaning is what comments threads were designed for
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The hardcore mode comments are a bit of a dissapointment. Does the difficulty affect the rate at which you need to sleep drink etc?
Quinns what difficulty are you playing on? As I understand it you can have hardcore mode on and also play on easy?
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Yeah that’s right, you can.
I would like to know this before I start.
Also about melee combat and if its worth it.
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I am internet man! I have opinions! Let me tell you them!
Seriously though, this reads like RPS vs. Obsidian: Round 2.
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I thought one big advantage of console toys was that they worked first time without the “its on PC, wait for the first patch” problem? Have consoles fallen so far?
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Where have you been living in the past 5 years?
The moment consoles got the ability to easily get patches, the moment the game’s required level of polish dropped across all console games.
At least on PC, the community can take it upon themselves to fix things should the developer not bother. That commodity is not available on console… well, not yet at least.
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Nothing against consoles, but that community will likely never exist on consoles. The thing is is that the primary boon of the PC is open architecture. We see our filesystems, we can open files, we can dink with files, and this is why piracy exists, even, but all these things go hand in hand. Like you have ambitious games going hand in hand with bugs, you have piracy going hand in hand with open architecture. But this open architecture is something I’d never, ever give up. I love being able to modify everything on my PC. I love being able to hex edit files. I love being able to setup my computer just as I like it. Consoles work on a Trusted Computing ethos, with encrypted proprietary operating systems that aren’t at all malleable. In fact, this is reason #1 of why I’m a PC gamer, and not a console gamer.
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Consoles have always had games that were just as bug ridden. It’s just prior to them having hard drives the standard practice was to quietly fix and release a new version. IIRC Rockstar got through three versions of GTA III on the Playstation alone.
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The xbox soft mod was amazing also the halo 2 xbox mods were amusing,
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I’m thinking Bethesda handed over their engine to the Obsidian people, but forgot to mention all the undocumented little tricks they have to use.
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Is “undocumented little tricks” your way of saying “fanmade mods that are EXTREMELY necessary to make the game playable”?
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When will they ditch the infernal Oblivion engine? I don’t want any more screen tearing! And V-Sync doesn’t fix it!
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Ewwwww …. reeeaally?
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Have you tried forcing it through drivers, or maybe something like D3DOverrider?
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Seems you have issues with your GFX card or drivers. I can play Oblivion and F3 with frame rate set to 60 per second and no tearing, though I admit that triple buffering has to be activated outside of game.
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Yeah, I’m playing a heavily modded (McCollough’s insane mod pack, with quite a few changes because I know how to compile mod packs too, but that saved me some time) Oblivion and I’m seeing zero tearing.
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Oh noez!
I love Obsidian (for what they try to do) but do not understand why they keep screwing up the QA. Jeebus, any other company would be dead by now from all those awful releases. They keep switching from one publisher to another for now (bye-bye Atari & Sega, hello Zenimax and SquareEnix), but how long before everyone on the block hates them in the guts for the failures they brought them and noone aproaches them for new projects?
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Try to find/play to/see a video of the Witch in ArcaniA. If that wonderful gem of voice acting will pass you by, well…
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WOW
O_O
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Despite being an old Fallout fan and enjoying (though falling some way short of loving) Fallout 3, this has so far failed to raise any interest from me. Obsidian to me are a troubled developer, they’ve essentially ridden Biowares coat-tails making their sequals with the exact same mechanics but far less solid, and when they created their own game mechanics in Alpha protocol they were pretty horrid in most cases. Seems they’ve followed the same path here.
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Aaactually… Knights of the Old Republic II is known for having a far better story, setting, and characters than I, this is said commonly around the Internet, it also has one of the best characters in gaming (those who’ve played the game will know whom I’m talking about). Furthermore, Mask of the Betrayer, an expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2 (by Obsidian), was critically acclaimed as the only RPG that could match Planescape: Torment. It was a truly moving experience, and a brilliantly written one. Nothing like that was ever said about the games they were riding on the coat-tails of.
Obsidian are known for well-written, ambitious, and yes, buggy games. That some people can’t get over the ‘buggy’ bit to get at the juicy, delectable ‘well-written’ and ‘ambitious’ bits amazes me.
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You mean when Obsidian actually finishes the story in their game. The ending to KOTOR2 was tacked on.
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Yes, but their other games were finished, story-wise. The reason why the ending was tacked on with Knights of the Old Republic was because Atari said, about 60% of the way through development “Your time is up!” So they had to quickly cobble together an ending, remove their half-finished content, and then string everything else together.
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Oh, and there are mods that restore that content too, BTW.
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Played the original Fallout 3 for about an hour … maybe it’s fine for your average console gamer, but I’m used to PC games which feel like the controls I’m pressing are in some way connected to what’s happening on the screen.
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I got 30 hours out of it. Just like I did with Oblivion. Then I realized I couldn’t take any more.
Clearly, I did find some enjoyment out of it and even looked past a lot of what I thought was horrible about it, but it wore on me pretty quickly like its predecessor as I found nothing interesting in the game. At least Oblivion had those crazy side quests which were amusing for a while.
I guess I’m just not a Bethesda guy at the end of the day. I’ll be sure to steer away from their next game.
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…but it wore on me pretty quickly like its predecessor*…
* Oblivion, BTW. Just in case that was not clear.
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Yeah the burn out on those games is kind of odd.
You know, I think its because after that time you realise the RPG world is one big façade … and seems lifeless?
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Actually, Obsidian are good for creating games which don’t feel lifeless, they’re great at doing characters you care about. Also, both Oblivion and Fallout have mods that add scripted life to the world, some of these mods are amazing. Fallout: New Vegas will not lack these mods, I can assure you.
Moreover, Fallout 3 has a mod which makes it play VERY much like an FPS, and by golly it works. Look it up on the Fallout 3 Nexus (I love the Nexus sites, so much that I have a lifetime subscription with them). I suspect that New Vegas will also get the FPS mod, too.
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>any other company would be dead by now from all those awful releases
You may think they are awful, but enough people like them, a lot. For me they are the only company whose games are purchase on day 1.
>but how long before everyone on the block hates them in the guts for the failures they brought them
What? NWN 2 had a good run over several years. Alpha Protocol did ok in sales, even if it was criticized heavily. This game seems to both sell well and get good reviews, and Bethesda are hardly strangers to bugs themselves, so I don’t think they will be angry with Obsidian for this.
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Gamebryo games (according to the Wiki):
Oblivion (buggy)
Fallout 3 (buggy)
Civ 4 (not so buggy, at least after official patches)
Sid Meiers Pirates (have not played, but not well-known for being buggy)
Warhammer Online (many problems, but not well-known for buggy engine)
Dark Age of Camelot (not well-known for having a buggy engine)
Bully: Scholarship Edition (some problems with camera, not large issue with crash to desktops)
So it seems Bethesda is doing “something” with the engine…
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That version of Bully had very bad problems on consoles. Not just camera.but also weird frame drops and either crashing or a saving bug, I don’t remember it now.
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Aaactually… when playing Sid Meier’s Pirates, my room-mate encountered no less than three game-breaking bugs. One of the worst was surrounding the map pieces you had to get, all of his map pieces kept turning out blank.
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Warhammer online has a fucking awful engine.
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@ Tony M
There’s nowhere left for consoles to fall. In fact they’ve already tunnelled through the Earth’s crust and mantle and are rapidly accelerating towards the planet’s fiery magmatic core. Another decade of COD sequels and they’ll be done.
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A new Bethesda/Obsidian game has some bugs? I’m shocked, SHOCKED. Well, not that shocked.
I also don’t really care. So long as there are mod tools it’ll get fixed, whether by the developer or the community, it’s not like I’m going to spend the majority of my time playing it vanilla anyway.
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Eurogamer’s Dan Whitehead seems to have liked it: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-10-19-fallout-new-vegas-review?page=1
Also the game’s from Obsidian. Did anyone actually expect it not to be buggy? Really?
It’s prolly gonna be just as amazing as Alpha Protocol (which I loved) and just as full of technical problems.
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Why is this tied into Obsidian though? I don’t get that. The two most buggy games I’ve ever played were likely Morrowind and Gothic III (without the fan patch). Ambitious games are buggy, why blame Obsidian for trying to be ambitious? Shouldn’t we be encouraging that?
This is why we can’t have nice things.
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@wulf: No, we can’t have nice things precisely because people – like you, right now! – look at bug-ridden games, cry out “At least they tried!” and give the developers a great big money hug. Then the developer learns that they don’t really have to do QA or make sure their typewriters are visible; as long as they throw in some suitably deep dialogue (actual game ending not required) enough people will forgive all their sins that they can continue to be aggressively lax on the technical front.
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You’re falling for a time-old flaw, Ateius. This one: I believe that the creators of things have unlimited time and unlimited resources, and can therefore create perfection.
If reality doesn’t even pull off perfection, how in the hells do you expect a game developer to?
The thing is, you can get something close to perfection, but this is only if you spend most of your resources/time on polish, but then you end up with a decidedly shallow game, one that’s basically linear and not at all challenging on any level. I said this elsewhere. We have to accept that developers do have limited time/resources. They have a choice: they can make a shallow game which is incredibly polished, or they can make an incredibly deep, ambitious, clever game with emergent gameplay that has some bugginess as an inherent part of it being so complex.
The reason we can’t have nice things is that we have shallow gamers demanding shallow games. I’m actually kind of fed up with that. I’ll take my bugs and love them, thank you very much. That a game isn’t perfect tells me that it’s likely ambitious, and loved, and deep, and complex. Obsidian games tend to be all of these things and more, and yes, buggy.
This is life, this is how humanity works, we are not perfection and the only things we can create that come close to perfection are very, very simplified.
It’s like damning the painter of a beautiful work because they got some angles off in their work, it’s baffling that people would ignore how simply incredible Obsidian’s output is to niggle over some bugs. It seems so petty that it’s actually kind of depressing, and it knocks my faith in humanity.
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I don’t want perfection. I just want a modicum of responsibility. Someone, somewhere, allocating the limited budget, needs to say “We need a little bit left over so someone can nose around the game and make sure there aren’t any really obvious bugs” or “Save enough of the animating budget so the conclusion to our grand narrative can be more than a text screen saying ‘Rocks falls, everyone dies.’”
I’m sure, somewhere out there, there is a man capable of such responsibility so as to strike a golden balance between Reaches for the stars only to fall flat on its face and crawls along the floor eating paste. I would like to see that man hired, so that the next ambitious game can proudly stand tall without immediately falling over because his left shin didn’t render.
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Yes, but you’re kind of missing my point.
My point is that the further we push toward qualilty, the further we move away from ambition. My point is: Do ambition! To hell with the bugs. Like one of my favourite artists says, if you have vision, then quality can come later. That’s what I’m getting at. Let the patches, the modders, and later work take care of the polish. Shoot for brilliance! Aim for the stars! Create something beautiful.
I don’t think we should be reigning in creators the way we are. It seems petty to damn a work of brilliance just because of a few bugs, and if we keep doing that, we’ll never have gaming’s Citizen Kane. :p
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It’s not really a worthwhile investment of anything more than a few pennies. An invisible computer is likely to ruin the game for about 0.01% of people. Since they’re likely the same people who complain about the wobbly sets in the original Star Trek or the dodgy rendering in Babylon 5, the rest of us would much rather they spent the money finding some way of eliminating those affected. Forcing them to watch the entire original run of Dr Who and collating all instances of dodgy effects, set cock ups and similar before bludgeoning them to death with the resultant million-page tome would be favourite.
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That’s a false dichotomy, though. Quality in a title doesn’t necessitate a lack of ambition. A lack of imagination is what leads to no ambition, and while it seems that lack of imagination and high technical quality go hand-in-hand thanks to the big publishing houses pushing “Big Name Shooter #X” that isn’t a law of the universe – just the law of focus-group marketing. It’s entirely reasonable and possible to have a brilliant vision while also keeping track of the budget to pay for QA and an ending to the game. The idea that in order for a thing to be narratively compelling it must be technically shit is, quite frankly, rubbish.
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Mass Effect is ambitious, and not bugged.
Its one thing to have ambition: Good!
Its another to have a lack of quality control: Bad!
The two are not synonymous.
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Artists, when given unlimited artistic freedom, generally produce shit. Its this same bullshit attitude and lack of quality control that timewarped Duke Nukem FOrever and kiled Real Time Worlds.
Listen to any of Prince’s “Symbol” albums for an example, then listen to Sign O’ the Times for an example from another media.
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@FunkyBadger: Mass Effect not glitched? In ME1 I periodically had extreme difficulty accessing the Galaxy Map: the option was there but greyed out and I couldn’t get close enough on the podium. ME2 has CTD’d a few times on me, and once kept the zoomed view from a conversation after it had ended, forcing a reload as I couldn’t see anything. Oh, and Unexitable missions forcing a replay of a couple of boss battles.
As long as bugs aren’t game-breaking, this doesn’t really bother me. I played Stalker: ShoC unpatched as well, mind, and found it fine as long as I kept out of the Red Forest. I also did FO3 without a manual patch (few months after release, but boxed not Steam) and found it fine. I suppose some people’s definition of terribly bugged is different from mine.
- Chris.
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Wasn’t that Discworld?
“Did anyone catch the number of that donkey cart?…”
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reply fail :\
Was to the comment about Fallout 2′s car trunk following you about.
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I’ve seen promises from Obsidian to patch something and they have never bothered – Alpha Protocol, KOTOR 2, and NWN2 stayed broken for a long time.
I’ll wait for the patch to be released before buying …
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The decision to release patches is up to the publisher, not the developers.
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Also the fan community. And both Obsidian and Bethesda have some of the most rabidly obsessive yet incredibly intelligent modders around, supporting them.
Combine the two for win? >_>
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Looks like a job for… THE MODDING COMMUNITY!
*Trumpets etc*
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Pretty much. C:
Yay modders! The saviours of PC gaming.
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Oh, and here was me holding out hope that the additional time with the old engine would allow Obsidian to produce a more stable game than FO3 was.
I suffered through some terrible bugs in FO3, and just don’t fancy doing that again but worse.
I will watch and see if this is patched correctly, or dropped like a hot potato like other Obsidian games.
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You know, in all fairness, both Oblivion and Fallout 3 were incredibly broken too, Oblivion was almost as broken as Gothic III when it initially launched. It was, however, fixed up not only by patches but by an incredible fix compilation created by the community called the Unofficial Patch, which is fitting. If you were to try to play Oblivion without it, you’d probably find yourself bugged up pretty quickly (I know I encountered this a number of times, hence why I use it). In fact, in the PS3 version of the Oblivion GOTY, if you get infected by Vampirism, the Cure quest breaks the game. So you either have to live with vampirism or start over, should you get infected. And that’s still not fixed.
So Fallout: New Vegas being a bit broke doesn’t surprise me. Why? It’s an ambitious game, like Oblivion was an ambitious game, like Gothic was an ambitious game, like Vampire – The Masquerade: Blodlines was an ambitious game. In time, it’ll get fixed by both official patches and fan patches. There’s one saving grace about all games that use Bethesda’s engine – they’re incredibly moddable.
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I must have a PC made with the ol’ screwdriver-of-the-gods… I found FO3 to be nothing less than stable and smooth in its vanilla format. Either that or my perception levels are below par, and missed half of the bugs. Dunno.
I ended up running a heavily modified version which did fall over from time to time, but that’s to be expected when you’re running 30+ user made mods of varying quality. Still ‘hundreds of fun’ though.
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I have a better title for this post:
Meet the new Obsidian, same as the old Obsidian.
Even when given enough time, money, a solid publishing back – they still manage to cock it up somehow.
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So did Bethesda with Fallout 3. So did Troika with the money they got for Vampire – The Masquerade; Bloodlines. What’s your point? Bugs are an artifact of an intelligent, ambitious game that has emergent gameplay, give me an ambitious game over a bug-free game any day of the week. Really.
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Tell it how it is. Always why RPS is one of the best.
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I’ve been playing it on PC for review and I have to say I’ve only had it crash on me a few times – I haven’t seen any of the other issues you mention. This is after about 20 hours of play.
I have seen a man waist-high in floor, though. No idea what he thought he was doing.
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I am stupidly excited for this game – it looks great. I’ve got faith in Obsidian to spin a good yarn (even if it is a buggy journey through it)
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PC game devs peddling bugridden crap in a shiny box?
Surely this can’t be real??
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An important question I have is: Are there any companions as enjoyable as Jericho this time around?
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@Quinns: I dig a lot of your stuff, but seriously, man – should you really be making a “bug” post for a PC gaming site based on your experience with the 360 version of the game? I mean…even if the bugs are cross-platform, how do you know? And how can we figure out how much of your experience will be transferable to ours, playing on a PC?
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I believe he meant that he had played the basic Fallout 3 on the console, not New Vegas.
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I won’t be touching this one for at least another month or so to wait for official and unofficial patches and inevitable balance fixes and whatnot. Playing games this complex on release is a risky, risky business nowadays if you value your time and nerves.
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Yep. That’s reasonable. But the modders will get on this… errr… something fast that gets on things. There’ll likely be an unofficial patch out with loads of fixes for the worst bugs within the week, I can definitely see that happening and I’ll wait for that, too. I can definitely take lots and lots of even medium to bad bugs, as long as the game-breaking ones are gone. And that’s what unofficial patches are for: to kill game-breaking bugs. I’ll say it again: yay modders!
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Holy crap geez guys, a major RPG with bugs. Whoda thunkit.
Any game breaking ones? No? That puts it in better shape at release than roughly half of all CRPGs released since 1990. Moving along.
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There are hotkeys. Go into pipboy, scroll to a weapon or item, press a number key between 1 and 8, and then click the mouse.
That’s how it works in Fallout 3 on PC. There’s no tutorial for it, but it’s in the manual.
Same as how the flashlight is switched on by pressing TAB. Obviously if you have a Steam-only version then you’ve no physical manual and who bothers to look up the PDF version? (And only some games bother to include this in a steam release.)
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Bugs can be a sign that they were focusing on other things, like story, and neat gameplay whatsits and things. Of course, they can also just be a sign of shit. I’m going to assume we’re dealing with the former here.
This game sounds fucking brilliant, and perhaps even a worthy successor to the Fallout name.
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Yep, that’s what I was trying to say, put more succinctly. They have limited time/resources, and they can either focus on polish, or on a compelling/complex experience, and in the case of Obsidian they always focus on the latter. I don’t really give a shit about bugs, bugs can be fixed later.
In fact, hang on, let me pull up a line from one of my favourite artists…
As long as you have a idea, a vision on a piece of paper, quality can always comes later.
I love that guy, he does the most amazing werewolves you could imagine. But I digress, the point is that he’s one hundred per cent right. The vision is important, creating a compelling experience that you probably won’t find anywhere else in gaming (Obsidian does this so well) is important, Gods damn it! Polishing a game can happen later, in patches and in mods. If you make a game moddable, then the polish will take care of itself, because people will be passionate about the experience.
In creating an imperfect thing, you create art, art is in complexity, it’s in something amazingly compelling but also flawed, that’s where I find beauty. And to be honest, I think we should be encouraging developers to do this. Less polish! Game breaking bugs fixed later! MOAR focus on creating an entirely new experience for gamers!
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And then you are crushed by the studios that do vision & quality.
Sorry, I’m not buying this line of GIVE ME BUUUUUUUGS. No, dont give me bugs. Give me vision. And give me a fairly bug-free product.
It is possible. Other studios do it. Obsidian has my support for always trying to do something more than average on story, setting, narrative, whatever, but they are never going to outlive this reputation if the idea is to praise them for that AND for the bugs.
The bugs have to go. They need to look hard and see why are they getting this track record.
You dont tell a writer that because they have a very original idea and a very personal style to deliver it, spelling like a 6 year old is ok.
MORE on better experiences for the players; that covers BOTH vision & quality.
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Latro: Name one deep, compelling, complex game that didn’t have serious bugs.
One.
I actually ran this exercise in my brain a few moments ago, all the bug-free games I could think of were actually incredibly shallow. You’re falling for the time old failing of believing that developers have infinite time/resources, again, it’s unreasonable to expect perfection when not even reality gets this right. The only time we come close to perfection, or ‘quality’ as you call it, is when we create shallow, simple things.
Whenever we create something of depth, it is also flawed, there is a direct correlation between how deep something is, and how flawed it is. This is shown best by Obsidian games, which tend to be incredibly deep, but also buggy.
“You dont tell a writer that because they have a very original idea and a very personal style to deliver it, spelling like a 6 year old is ok.”
This also bugged me because there are flawed writers. Pratchett purposefully writes with grammatical errors and without chapters, and yet, he’s known to be one of the most amazing authors Britain has to offer. Someone picked him up once on his ‘lack of professionalism’, and he actually quoted the guy on the back cover of his next book. He was called a ‘hack’ for that, if you can believe it. So yes, it is okay for writers to not be perfect if they have vision, complexity, and beauty in their work.
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Nothing is bug free. I’m not falling for anything; games will have bugs.
But there is a reason why people thing “Obsidian” and “bug-ridden” in the same sentence.
Obsidian is batting way below the average. No amount of vision should cover it. They need to examine why, and consumers have all the right in the world to complain about it.
Again, given that everything has bugs, and no major product ships without them, the fact that Obsidian has this reputation is tellling; they are doing worse than normal.
By all means, give me vision, but at this point Obsidian doesnt have to work on that, they have proved they have that – they have to work on quality. Or all that vision is going to disappear when people stop hiring them to do games cause the reception is tarnished and people wait for too long to buy anything with their name on it.
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Yes, they’re doing worse than normal at quality. I don’t see why this is so hard to understand. Further up the page I found a great way to explain this; humans can’t create perfection, or even anything as perfect as they are, therefore, the closer we try to get to that, the more complex something is, the more flawed it will be too. But I think there’s a beauty in that. I think we should try. Bloody hell, I mean, really we should strive. Otherwise why don’t we just stagnate for all eternity?
What I’m getting at is that Obsidian might stink at quality, but they also rock at complexity. Their quality is below the average curve of games, but their complexity is waaaaay above the complexity of other games, too. An Obsidian game sort of snorts and laughs at most other RPGs, and some developers will never understand the sort of complexity that goes into an Obsidian game, they won’t know how to actually put together something that complicated. This is what I’m arguing for.
See, you have a scale…
Complex Simple
Buggy Quality
So, the further you go along the line toward quality, the further you also go toward simplicity. If you could point out a game with less bugs than Obsidian games have on average, then you’re also pointing out a game that is by far a great deal more simple in its design. What I’m saying is that I’d rather have the left end of the scale on both counts; complexity and bugginess, than I would the other end. My argument is that we should continue moving toward complexity and bugginess. We can fix the bugs later, but we’ll also have a brilliantly complex base game to work with.
I think we should keep trying at this. This is where the art in games is, in my opinion.
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Gah, damn HTML tags. Let me try that scale again:
Complex >——————–< Simple
Buggy >——————–< Quality
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I fail. :p I too am imperfect. Hopefully you can see what I was trying to get at. I hope. Please see.
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I think you’re overstating your case a little, Wulf. It’s hard to disagree that ambition is something to be encouraged, but I don’t think ambition and quality are mutually exclusive. There are plenty of things that have good ideas but also put the effort into presenting those ideas with flair.
You could assume that a lack of Q&A means they focused on more important parts of the game, but it really is only an assumption. Plus, while I take you’re point that these games can be patched and modded, if it came down to it I’d want to make sure there was nothing that would stop people engaging with the game. A buggy game can be a barrier, one that not everyone is prepared to push past. Now, someone like you would claim that is the customers fault, but really the designer should want as many people as possible to enjoy what they’ve made. A game that crashes to desktop is going to get in the way of that.
Although, having said all that is Fallout: New Vegas really that ambitious? I mean sure I can’t wait to play it, but what exactly is so ambitious about this game that they couldn’t remember to give that woman a computer.
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Tell it to Real TIme Worlds, Wulf.
Build Quality vs. Invention is not zero-sum.
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Hold on, is this even out yet? I swear Steam says the 22nd…
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Gold disc review copy, most likely.
It’s not out until the 22nd, you’re right.
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It’s out for Americans. Which probably explains why.
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I would play it, but I haven’t hit the right combination of bemusement and horniness to quite rouse myself from my enormous bed yet.
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I knew this would be the case, and neglected to blow my last £50 on the pre-order. Thankyou for letting me feel less horribly guilty about that.
Fallout 3 was not an awful game. It was better than Oblivion, far inferior to Morrowind, and incomparable to the namesake originals. NV might edge a few paces closer in style, but in exchange for the constant immersion-raping bugs and inconsistencies.. Not a worthwhile trade.
Baaaaaaaaaah.. Damn Obsidian for being so predictably incompetent =\
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Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaah… damn Bethesda for being so predictably incompetent.
From what I’ve heard, it’s about as buggy as Fallout 3 was.
And besides, why on earth would you want to spend £50 on it when every website that sells it prices it no more than £30 (and usually a good few pounds less)? (Unless you want the Collector’s Edition, of course).
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You know, the original Fallout games were also buggy…
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I dont remember them being “buggy”.
As I said earlier, everything has bugs. Past some point in number and severity, what you remember is the bugs.
Now, I dont have the game (DAMN REVIEWERS! :-P), so it may not be a big deal. But Obsidian has acquired a reputation for something, and its not against a backdrop of bug-free games in which their small transgressions are magnified.
And … they have also, IMO, have shown not to deliver… dont know how to say it….their games are full of unrealized promise. Sometimes they come close, very close, but you still see that it lacks something, that it has the structure to build something higher and the aim to go for it and in some way they never reach it.
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But for the love of God dont take that criticism as being in favor of dumping all attempts to reach higher and instead aim at mediocrity.
(Arcania, I’m looking at you. Probably for the last time tonight :-P)
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Dude, Morrowind is still *horrendously* buggy, even two expansions, countless patches and a decade or so of modding.
Doesn’t stop me playing it constantly, though.
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Morrowind was complete and utter trash.
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Planescape with guns.
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Being a spoilt brat and quite naiv… I’d buy that anytime.
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And even in Oblivion you had people doing things to invisible stuff all the time. Like hoeing up the cobblestone road instead of their garden.
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My favourite was the way the Imperial game wardens attacked each other on site.
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Archonsod: Hah, yeah. I was never sure whether that was intentional or not. Either way, it was unintentionally hilarious when you found them about 2 meters away from each other firing arrows. Both with about 20 arrows stuck in them.
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Agreed. Fallout 3′s combat was atrocious. And the writing was among the worst I’ve ever encountered in an English-language game — Bethesda should be ashamed. Instead, they win the Interactive Achievement Award for Outstanding Achievement in Original Story — beating GTA IV and Fable II.
Up is officially down.
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Ouch. To think I enjoyed the combat and found the story at least ~serviceable~.
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Fable II? You’re seriously citing *Fable II* as an example of good storytelling?
They should disconnect your power.
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If I remember correctly, those were the games up for the award… which only shows the sorry state of narrative in PC games for that year. Or perhaps the sorry state of those who made up the list of nominees. It wasn’t a particularly inspired list.
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http://www.interactive.org/awards/2009_12th_awards.asp
(all the way at the bottom)
Out of those mentioned plus Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, and Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
Personally I’d pick Layton over any of those.
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Maybe he played on a console, that would explain why combat was shit.
On PC I found it to be fairly well done myself, including hitzones, which indeed did surprise me, as I had expected a mess(and I don’t mean the VATS shooting, but actual normal adventuring).
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What I want to know is if the game itself is actually fun, if you ignore the fact it’s buggy as hell. Bugs can be patched eventually. A crappy game can’t be patched to make it not crappy.
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I’ve never had problems with oblivion or fallout or any of it, I don’t know what you’re all on about.
I do play the console versions though, so maybe it’s a PC thing ;)
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It’s not.
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If you play Oblivion on console (thereby missing out on half a million mods and at the very least the handful you pretty much want to have installed to make it a lot more fun / bearable), then you do have problems.
Big problems.
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Fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twenty times, I’m a retard.
I’m done pre-ordering stuff after Mafia II. If you can’t trust previously awesome studios, who can you trust. From now on I’ll only buy released, reviewed and most likely patched code.
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I made the mistake of pre-ordering Civ 5 and I’m kicking myself. I figured how could they possibly mess it up after number 4. I apparently was wrong.
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Unfortunately however, even if I listened to reviews of Civ 5, I still would have bought it. I should have just tried the demo before buying anything.
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I see what you are saying. I’m not agreeing, thats all :-P I think they are not precisely doing rocket science here and redefining RPGs; what they do well, better than the average, is characterization, dialogue, narratives, etc. They have that side of the business ok, and better than ok. The other side of the business, quality, they need a lot to do to get to a good grade. And it is not something that steams out of complexity IN their games design. Probably, they need to review their processes.
This is half art half engineering. Fail at the art and the engineering is pointless. Fail at the engineering and the art collapses on itself.
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And that was on my debate with Wulf, but I hit what I shouldnt, or the blog crapped itself, or something.
Kind of appropiate while talking about bugs.
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I know what you’re getting at, but all I’m saying is that it doesn’t hurt to shoot for crazy ambition ta the expense of polish. The most ambitious games out there have the worst bugs, this is a fact that cannot be denied, they’re crazy things, like Vampire, like Morrowind, crazy games and there’s nothing quite like them, but they’re as buggy as all hell. My worry is that if developers care too much about polish, they’ll care less about ambition. All I’ve been saying from the start of this is that if I had to choose between ambition and polish? I’d choose ambition. Every time.
As long as the game can be modded, a dedicated community will bring the polish. Earlier on, I quoted one of my favourite artists, I’ll do it again.
As long as you have a idea, a vision on a piece of paper, quality can always comes later.
Really think about what he’s saying there. You only have one shot at making an ambitious game, you can’t add ambition to a game after it’s been completed, but you can add polish, for years after the game has been released. So I think that we shouldn’t be too hard on developers for being ambitious, lest we damn ourselves to an unending stream of tripe and mundanity.
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Really, that’s all I’m saying. Be ambitious, you only get one shot at being ambitious. Give the middle finger to anyone who’d harry you about bugs, patches and a good modding community can fix games later. You can’t jury-rig ambition into a boring, simplistic game. But you can shine a flawed gem for years, until it looks as close to perfection as anything could be.
And that’s why I say… yes, bugs are fine. We can fix bugs later. Let these developers be ambitious and have their crazy digital dreams of games that are ahead of their time, let them be the dreamers, and let the modding community deal with the bugs. It worked for so many other ambitious games.
I don’t know why so many people are so eager to see gaming damned to unending mediocrity.
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Whatever the quality of game proper, I would warn people waiting for a patch: most of these glitches were in Fallout 3, and in Oblivion before that. It’s been a long wait already.
P.S.
RPS staff: WordPress asked me to tell you that there’s an update available.
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Set: The bookstore.
Youff: Sir, I have a complaint about this here book I bought!
Working person: Complaint? About what?
Youff: Well, there are several pages missing and the words are all scrambled on one page!
Working person: I think you just need to clean your glasses, son! That’s a very ambitious piece of work you have there with big words in it! You can’t very well expect every word to be in the right place with ambitions like that, can you!
Youff: I… I guess not, sir. But the pages that are missing, sir! You think someone would have noticed!
Working person: Pfft! You keep your eyes on that there bulletin board over there by the door, boy. If there really are missing bits, as you say, then the AUTHOUR himself will come down here and pin the pages to that very board!
Youff: Gosh, sir!
—–
Cue more nutty analogies and mad apologists snapping in two from bending over too much.
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Not everyone actually understands all art, there have been some brilliant works that took years to decipher, I’m not saying that games are at that level, but what I am saying is that it wouldn’t hurt if occasionally they tried to be. Of course, you have the odd right-wing blue-collar nuttah screaming about how he knows what he likes and that isn’t it, but you get that with anything that’s outside the norm.
I can make cheap shots too, you know. :p
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And I’d still rather read a great book with a few pages missing than a boring and mediocre one with all pages intact and a shiny cover.
Ideally, we have both, but when you say “apologists”, I say “realists”, and people going on about bugs all the time set the wrong priorities. Or only play a couple of games per year, where greatness and polish come together. Of all the games I’ve played this year, that would probably only apply to Uncharted 2 and Starcraft 2. That said, UC2 has a brutal bug where it can ruin your savegame.
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Fair enough, Wulf! ;)
Being an artsy person myself, I agree with your comments on artistic ambitions, but you know, with great art comes great responsibilities, and I genuinely think it’s high time for Bethesda try a bit harder with their art and a lot harder with cleaning up the artistic debris afterwards. As long as the former outweigh the latter, things are fine, but I think Bethesda are cutting it very close at times.
All this is my opinion, obviously, and I speak of Bethesda products in general.
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Thing is though, if it’s the appendix that’s missing or screwed up, the vast majority of people are not going to give a damn, hell most of us probably don’t bother reading them anyway.
Tis the same with the game. If it causes a BSOD whenever you select a dialogue choice; screws up a quest or otherwise prevents you from completing the game it’s a problem. If on the other hand it’s just missing scenery or the odd voice line not being in sync with the text output it’s irrelevant. And if it’s police stations exploding when hit with crossbow bolts it should be considered a feature.
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“And if it’s police stations exploding when hit with crossbow bolts it should be considered a feature.”
I’d consider that an achievement, even. :)
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>None of the other Gamebryo games have those problems. So it’s either Obsidian’s fault or fault of the changes Bethsoft made.
As others have stated Gamebryo engines from Bethseda are always far more buggy then any other game releases. For starters the unoffical patch for Oblivion (trying to fixing all the stuff Beth couldn’t be bothered with) is well over a gig in size. Secondly in my experience Fallout 3 was so temperamental on my PC that I gave up as I couldn’t stand the game freezing every 15 minutes, no drivers or patches or unoffical fixes ever fixed the problem (nor did trying it on another PC).
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Hear, hear! The unofficial patch makes vanilla Oblivion a decent game. It still has moments of weirdness, but at least it’s playable. I wish Bethesda would hire the author for QA and bug-fixing for all of their Gamebryo games. That, or just switch to idTech.
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O-ho-ho, mister, UOP is “well over a gig in size”? Clearly, you’ve no idea what are you talking about.
Have a look at this.
~122 megabytes.
And in all fairness, the patch doesn’t make the game playable, as it was absolutely normal before it. It is dealing mostly with minuscule stuff which never even caught my attention on vanilla play-through.
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>O-ho-ho, mister, UOP is “well over a gig in size”? Clearly, you’ve no idea what are you talking about.
You are right I was looking at the wrong file. Still 120MB is still vast compared to the 4MB patch Beth managed. The fixes all appear minor until one of the bugs occurs in your game. The fact that it fixes some CTD bugs that Beth didn’t bother with says a lot in my book.
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Pick it up in a year then, for half the price, when the official and unofficial patches have cleaned up all the bugs, the modders have fixed the interface and added a bunch of cool stuff, and there’s a goaty version with all the DLC out?
May aswell.
[Point of order: Bethesda fixed most of the FO3 bugs themselves - poking around the FO3 modding scene, very few people there suggest using the unofficial patch, as it breaks as many things as it fixes. That no-one picked up the project and made a clean, functional version speaks volumes to the degree Beth fixed the game themselves]
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>[Point of order: Bethesda fixed most of the FO3 bugs themselves - poking around the FO3 modding scene, very few people there suggest using the unofficial patch, as it breaks as many things as it fixes. That no-one picked up the project and made a clean, functional version speaks volumes to the degree Beth fixed the game themselves]
Or that this time no one could be bothered to fix problems that Beth didn’t care about :P. The game still contained some of the bugs that have been around since Morrowind, see the floating stuff (or other items falling through the floor/table) after picking something up. The freezing problem I had in F3 has been around since Morrowind as well though F3 was the first time it has actually effected me.
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I just can’t believe people *really* care about the odd thing floating in the air or other clipping issues. Is it mildly annoying? Yeah, when you get stuck on scenery or something falls into a spot you can’t grab it.
Does it matter? Not in the slightest.
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>Does it matter? Not in the slightest.
It’s minor I know. It’s symptomatic of Beth’s attitude to fixing problems, they’ve been releasing Gamebyro engine games for well over 8 years and still haven’t fixed those problems.
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first of all: FPS on computer… only…
secondly, fallout 3 had many glitches too BUT because of the being easy to mod many glitches where quickly fixed AND a billion awesome mods came too, making the game even better (pc!), so they will be fixed, either by new vegas developers or modders.
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the engine they use to make these games is hideous.
Also, captcha is being mean, I cant tell if the l is a lower-case L or an upper case i, for example
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Morrowind’s crashed 3 times in about 3 and a half hours of play today.
Still playing it, though.
I don’t care about bugs if the game’s good, frankly, as long as they’re not gamebreakers.
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I don’t see the correlation or relationship between buggy games and ambitious games. Especially when the bugs result in wiped saves, CTD’s and guys typing/sweeping on invisible typewriters/brooms. Has there really been any “groundbreaking” game that was buggy because it was so groundbreaking?
What we’re witnessing here and for, i suppose, the last couple of years, r publishers WILFULLY shipping out games that they know are, for the lack of a better term, BUSTED in some way. And then you get software patches that may or may not fix all issues an indeterminable period of time later.
From the publisher’s POV, it’s quite simple. I contract with developer X to make this game, using this IP, by this day. Developer X agrees to it. Then they don’t deliver by the stipulated date. Or they do but there are still kinks in the game. Is it really the publisher’s fault for going ahead with release? Remember that the promise of commitment was made by the devs. It is their responsibility to release game X at day Y. If they can’t do that, then don’t agree on the bloody day. The release of a game is a very delicate process which requires a careful control of marketing/PR in terms of rate, quantity and medium all anchored along the indicated release date. How fair is it to completely halt the marketing impetus of the product because the people you have contracted to work on stuff “needs more time”?
I guess what i’m saying is that the devs need to shoulder some responsibility as well. Publishers/devs, whichever applicable, should also allocate a bit more on testing…
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The problem is that when a game slips due to bug fixing, it usually misses it’s release window and has to be released months later.
The way the game industry works these days, it’s vastly less expensive for a publisher to throw money at a Day 1 patch than it is to ever allow a game to miss it’s carefully timed release schedule. It’s a consequence of the games industry going blockbuster.
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If they continue that way they’ll go Blockbuster, Inc.
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>>>Has there really been any “groundbreaking” game that was buggy because it was so groundbreaking?
*cough* Deus Ex, VtmB, Stalker, Flashpoint, Buggerfall *cough*
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Operation Flashpoint, Armed Assault I & II ;)
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Not to mention that if you buy it now you have to pay for all the extra now-mandatory add-on’s later and end up spending 120$ for a video game.
Buy the “Game of the Year Edition” next Christmas for $40 and it comes with all the patches too!
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i played almost 30 hours of it and never ran into a single glitch
reviewers are just trolls these days i suppose
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it’s not a review by a reviewer – it’s an article about New Vegas bugs by a games writer. Writing about a game.
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I’m really surprised it’s so buggy considering the amount of time they’ve now had to get used to the engine they made.
Half-assing games is their trademark though… I think they’re actually so good that they have to program the bugs in themselves.
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Okay, a first impression from someone who enjoyed Fallout 3 in spite of a somewhat lame combat system, and occasionally bad writing. I liked the idea and the atmosphere of Fallout 3, and the open world. If you didn’t like Fallout 3, you probably won’t like this game because it looks and feels just like it, with just a very few minor tweaks.
I haven’t played many hours in FNV yet, but I think the bugginess is overrated. Or at least I haven’t hit any major problems yet. I’m having fun exploring the environment. Some of Quinns points aren’t valid, either because he’s playing it on console or just isn’t familiar with the game. People will run away if you waltz into a town without holstering your weapon. That’s pretty basic (hold down R on the PC version). The hotkeys are there, and can be reset to user taste. It may not be as customizable on the console version, but why do we care about that here?
My main complaints are just generic ones that applied to F3, like the huge text dialogs, which can probably be modded. They aren’t game-breaking, just annoying. The odd-looking animation for your character when he’s walking are the same as they were in F3. All the non-combat NPC animations are a bit off, but not enough to completely break immersion. The lack of a cover system (sigh)… I’ve been spoiled by FPS games, and it just feels weird not to have cover when shooting now. OTOH, maybe I need to do this one as a dumb brute, Leroy Jenkins type with heavy weapons and just run into danger, instead of my usual stealthy sniper type character.
Anyway, the point is that I know the graphics are a bit crude, and the combat won’t be that great. But combat and state-of-the-art graphics are not why I want to play a Fallout game. I want a huge open world to explore, interesting situations, and decent writing. If it has that, then that’s enough. Besides, I need something to take up my time, while I wait to see if Civ5 and/or Elemental get patched up.
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I loved Morrowind, i played that game like a freak, made mods, enjoyed the game a lot. Indeed the introduction was rough, the interface omg, and other things, but at the time it was good maybe on par with Gothic on some cases.
Now Oblivion was a pile of crap from some lazy designers and level designers, with that idiot Tom Howard in front of them. I really hated Oblivion. Even now, they have probably the worse 3d humanoid modelers i saw in my life.
Now on Fallout 3, dont even get me started, its mediocre at best. The only few things i liked were the environment, some parts of the AI gameplay which scared the shit out of me with headphones, mostly because of sound and those running zombies ( 28 Days later anyone:) ), but the story behind the cities, the npcs, how the act and react was fracking awful. And the slowmotion combat was interesting approach but not finalized and limited. For me it was a 7/10 game at best.
Of course somewhat polished games, based on a popular IP with lots of advertising will sell like pan cakes no matter how bad they are.
Fallout 2 kills this stupid game at any hour even after so many years.
“my subjective opinion” Rawr!
+1
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Fallout 3 is still a fucking garbage? Oh hamburgers!
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I know it’s wrong to say it and there’s nothing we can do about it, but imagine AP and this one in Fallout engine(which was probably a branch of the infinity) and hey presto you got masterpieces.
Isn’t it wrong that games are ruined by bloated and pretentious engines?
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“Has there really been any “groundbreaking” game that was buggy because it was so groundbreaking?
*cough* Deus Ex, VtmB, Stalker, Flashpoint, Buggerfall *cough* ”
Um VtmB? The quests were incredibly simple/straight forward and had few different permutations depending on dialog chosen (often not) or whether dominate/persuasion/dementation were used. It’s not like you could approach every quest in a free form manner. The inherent bugginess (much alleviated by Wesp’s unofficial patches) had – or should – absolutely nothing to do with the game’s alleged complexity.
Deus Ex: I’ve only played a bit (up to *spoiler* Denton’s brother contacting him after being branded a traitor; put off playing coz i’m waiting for a graphics patch) but never really encountered any bugs so far. But yes, the various different approaches available to the player might conceivably break something or another. However, the level as obviously built with the approaches in mind, rather than the level just being amenable to the various strategies available to the player, so we’re not talking about an infinite permutation of events ala real life, or anything even remotely close to it.
Stalker: open world; few scripted moments; free roaming – again I think we’re dealing with performance problems/ctds and stuff like that and maybe a broken quest. But remember that most of the faction elements in Stalker don’t have some kind of daily routine like Oblivion [was aiming for but failed] where you see guys hunt for food, find shelter at night, interact with other NPCs in meaningful ways etc. And if you look at the bug list…most of the problems stem from oversights with a few quests or whatever.
Daggerfall: never played, but I know they have the whole procedurally generated world thing going. This might possibly be a valid point if devs could ever attempt to create natural, balanced environments + NPCs…but then at that point we’re talking about its even feasible at all, not whether it’ll be buggy or not.
I think what i’m trying to say is that there aren’t going to be games where the developer is developing a gameplay system that is so complex, so revolutionary, that there is difficulty implementing it fully. These things just get cut out. The bugs that remain are just oversights of what the developers thought they could nail down without any technical difficulties but still failed to do so due to time and monetary constraints.
Um anyway seems like i’ve written alot for just a very simple point: bugs are unacceptable and devs have no excuses even if their game is good.
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Since Fallout 3 crashed every 15 minutes for me until they made a patch that fixed the problem roughly a year after release, and New Vegas hasn’t crashed or even glitched in three hours of play, I’m willing to forgive it.
I’m not willing to forgive the introduction that makes me some guy who apparently works around the Wastes except…no one’s seen him or met him before, and he doesn’t know anyone, and he doesn’t know how to shoot a gun. How did he survive that long without omniscient me behind his brain?
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You know, everyone’s reacting like Obsidian just shoved a mass of bugs loosely held together by game out the door, and as if they have a history of this.
On the basis of…what, exactly? A couple of CTDs? One invisible typewriter? Really? Windows software CTDs all the damn time, depending on what else is going on on the system. Fallout 3 certainly did. And, yeah, the missing typewriter’s a bit sloppy, but unless there’s an epidemic of missing objects or it’s key to a quest, I don’t see why we should care. If anything, that sounds -less- buggy than a lot of other well-regarded games I’ve played, and far less buggy than some of the genuine horrors of the gaming landscape. (Check out videos of Superman 64 or Big Rigs sometime.) Beyond that, my experience with Obsidian games has been that KOTOR II has a famously rushed ending (due to publisher pressure) and NWN2 has a rubbish camera. Alpha Protocol’s hacking minigame is floatier than it ought to be and it occasionally has problems loading from a save.
I dunno. Either I’m super lucky, or the games weren’t actually particularly broken (KOTOR II ending aside) and gamers just like to latch on to the meme that Obsidian = bugs.
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Gods, I hated the NWN2 camera, I had to use a mod to fix that. Though, in all fairness, what was wrong with the NWN2 camera was the same thing that was wrong with the NWN1 camera, and it was fixed by a similar mod in both instances (by the same author, I believe). Entertainingly, the broken AI in NWN1 and NWN2 was fixed by the same person, too. Wouldn’t it be funny if some of these bugs were simply because Obsidian use the engines of other developers, and gamers are, on average, too unobservant to notice?
I agree, though. I mean, I’ve seen bugs in Obsidian games, and Obsidian games do have a lot of polish, but I’ve never encountered anything that’s ever killed my experience. And I’ve had a lot more fun with Obsidian games than I’ve had with either Bethesda games or Bioware games, truth be told.
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These are the same problems that have been in pretty much every game running bethesdas gamebyro engine.
Gamebryo, Gamebyro never changes.
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Sounds like a game I’d best wait for a $20 box price and lots of patches before buying.
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To the fine people who say that F:NV has no real bugs:
1) Take a look into bethesda’s tech support forums for the game. Notably, the PC section.
2) List of major bugs for those who are too lazy to even try & back up their opinions:
a) Game crashing right after intro cinematic.
b) All autosaves and quicksaves are wiped when you start the game (and Steam cloud on/off doesn’t help)
c) Looking at a character (NPC) brings down the FPS by a large margin. Just looking at them (having them on your monitor).
c.2) Initiating dialogue with NPC drops framerate three-our-four times (from 60 to sub-15).
d) Water special effect level bringing down performance even in inside environments with absolutely no water in the cell.
e) Steam trying to download the entire 6.4GB of game data when attempting to install from a DVD.
f) Crashes at seemingly random points in the game. Quests being non-finishable due to NPCs aacting daft or not being there.
Yeah, you keep saying that Oblivion and F3 had worse bugs. I certainly don’t remember those two dropping into ten frames per second by an almighty presence of an NPC.
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Well done, former Interplay members, you’ve produced a bug list that successfully evokes nostalgia for pre-patch Fallout 2.
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Certainly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Fallout 3 had similar problems. I do remember one bit of DLC in particular shipping out flat broken. As I pointed out elsewhere, one of your problems is Valve’s fault anyway, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar number of people had similar problems with Games for Windows Live.
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The water bug with no water was/is certainly present in Fallout 3. It was introduced with specific version of nvidia drivers, and apparently remains unsolved. I’d bet it’s not really game creators fault. I have a second installation of windows 7 with older drivers just for bugs like that. Also crashing to desktop right near start were quite common in Oblivion, till they were somewhat muffled by some patch.
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The real question here is whether the Bethesda-nature stacks with the Obsidian-nature. Experience has shown that the only sensible way to approach a new Bethesda game is to download the torrent on day one (when it’s nice and seeded), stash the files in a corner of one’s hard drive, wait six months for the modding community to polish it to semi-playability, install, play for a bit, uninstall, wait another six months to a year for the goatse edition to come on sale cheap on Steam, buy, install several gigs worth of mods, and play. Given the same basic pattern holds true for Obsidian’s games, does this mean the standard six month wait for mods/unofficial fan patches, or should one hold out for an entire year before attempting to play?
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It’s very disappointing to see an otherwise excellent PC gaming website as this descend to crying about bugs and glitches on a platform where many of the most admired classic games were buggy as fuck on release.
It would have been fine were there some actually discussion about the game to balance that out, but no, just bitching about bugs after four hours of play, and laying blame solely at the developer without once even mentioning the notoriously messy engine they had to build the game on. This is the type of shit I’d expect from IGN, Quintin Smith. What the fuck, man. You’re better than that.
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…
…
Boo-hoo?
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I kind of agree. Shockingly.
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What a ridiculous sentiment.
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Most of Quinn’s list of points seems forgivable to me. (Probably won’t get it though, hated Fallout 3, but oddly loved Oblivion despite its many many flaws).
Bugs are a funny thing though. I swear half the games that people have warned me are bugged to hell are fine. Admittedly the other half are unplayable…
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Wondering why there aren’t hotkeys for the PIP boy is a bit silly to be honest.
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Especially as there *are* direct hotkeys for the PipBoy sub-menus on the function keys. Oh wait, console doesn’t have F keys, right.
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Purchasing an inherently limited platform to then complain about limitations is..
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E) is a Steamworks bug. There was complaints of it for every Steamworks launch since Empire: Total War.
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Reply fail, was at X-2.
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It’s well known that fallout is absolute shit if you don’t grab mods to do what Bethesda was to lazy to complete.
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lol, awesome article, cracked me up!
Let me say tho, F3 was perfect on PC tho, wtf were you doing playing it on a console? Controls were perfect and also totally customizable. Just get F3 on PC with expansions and awesome mods and have yourself a treat! ;)
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Yeah, all those crashes and stuck in scenery things, falling through the world, borked animations and stuff must just have been a huge group hallucination.
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New Vegas is no more buggy than Fallout 3, if anything Obsidian did a pretty good job making a solid game.
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@Wulf: Don’t see the suggestions and complaints here as prioretising bug fixing over design – see them as prioretising bug fixing over this and other parts of its multi-million dollar marketing campaign.
Not having features like this one on RPS is its own kind of marketing.
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Obsidian has no control over advertising..
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This is the exact same stuff I heard about Alpha Protocol, and was the sole reason I, despite having pre-ordered it, let it sit on my shelf for a good month or so.
Finally I got fed up and decided to play it anyway, bugs and glitches be damned–and you know what, best darn game I’ve played in a long while.
I liked it so much I played through it twice–twice I say–I never do that!
I’m not saying these bugs aren’t real, but that I hope that just like AP, they add, not take away, from the experience.
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Obsidian coding and bethesda engine is pretty much a perfect storm of bugs, no surprises here.
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Argument: Fallout: New Vegas was buggy
Counter-argument: So was Fallout 3!
Counter-counter-argument: So was Fallout 1!
My counter-counter-counter-argument: So what you’re all saying is that there’s been something like fourteen years of Fallout development and they’re working with a two year old engine that’s based on a four year old engine that’s derived from an eight year old engine and they STILL can’t get it right?
I dunno ’bout you guys but back in my day things were a little less buDERPDERPDERP VIDEO GAMES
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This is just plain wrong on a number of points. Maybe just stick to derpaderping to yourself.
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I agree, we need more Onionbog!
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Fallout…what have they done to you?
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Fallout 1 and 2 came out buggy as shit on release, so nothing, really.
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My own personal bug report:
1) Occasionally NPCs have pathing problems or behave in ways that don’t immediately make sense. This happened in Oblivion and Fallout 3 also (and probably in Morrowind but it’s been a while), so is probably inherited.
2) Small but distracting graphical artifacts popping in and out on a semi-regular basis. I have a GTX 470 and a couple of other GTX 460 and 470 users have reported the same thing. May be driver-related. Doesn’t happen in Fallout 3. Not really ruining my game but it would be nice if they fixed it.
3) Autosave and quicksave are overwritten by the first autosave and first quicksave ever done, apparently due to Steam cloud syncing after quitting the game. Easily worked around by simply manually saving at appropriate times and when quitting (quicksave/quickloading while in the middle of play would seem to still work, but I’ve not tested it), but unquestionably a glaring bug that needs prompt fixing.
That would be it.
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Is everyone’s reading comprehension bad?
Doesn’t he state that he’s playing New Vegas on a PC? It was Fallout 3 that he played on a console.
He also clearly states in the firrst line “I’m enjoying myself“
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Funny thing is is that I recognise that Quinns is having fun, and I take no umbrage at him writing this. It was actually a good chance for me to talk about my feelings about bugs in general, how most games with even a smidgeon of ambition seem to be as buggy as shit, and how bugs don’t inherently make for a bad game, on the contrary, it can make for an amazing game that’s slightly flawed due to bugs.
So… I actually hope Quinns keeps posting like this, it makes for good talking material, eh?
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That 40 packets of mash thing doesn’t work. Food is a buff, much like drugs. The HoT effect doesn’t stack, so you’d have to eat a packet of mash every five seconds for three minutes to get that heal you were looking for.
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Listen to me very carefully, this game will have bugs and that is to be expected but still what has been released by this company look to be a decent game that is even better then Fallout 3. Don’t you tell me that you don’t think this is a good game, we all know deep down that this game is something that we will remember years on from now.
I am going to play this game tomorrow and yes I am planning to get the collector edition for this because I know this will be a good game to play. Also another thing, KOTOR 2 was rushed because the company was put on a strict time limit by Lucasart so that couldn’t finsih it properly. So don’t tell that it’s crap because they did it that way.
Remember guys games are to be loves and it takes a lot of time and patitentce to do something like this.
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Known haters of FO3, CanardPC, have written their first impressions here: http://forum.canardpc.com/showpost.php?p=3671139&postcount=3496
For those of us that aren’t french-speaking, there’s a translation over at known FO3 haters NMA http://nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=56505
There are bugs (as Quintin has confirmed for us) but it would seem that, gameplay-wise, this game has much more in common with FO1/2 than with FO3, which is what I (and, I hope, everyone else that loves good cRPGs) was looking for in this title.
I kinda wish that Quintin had written a bit more about the game itself (i.e. the writing and how it fits into the FO1/2 world etc) instead of just focusing on the bugs.
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“I played Fallout 3 on my console toy”
You’re dead to me.
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Don’t mean to rub it in or anything, but I have only had 1 crash in 11 hours of gameplay. I’ve still encountered a fair few glitches, but nothing to hinder my experience so far *knock on wood*.
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I’m glad I’m not the only one having these problems. Luckily I haven’t seen the whole system freeze yet.
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That’s the general consensus that it’s terribly buggy but the writing is so endearing and the gameplay so improved that it simply dwarfs those problems and keeps you playing. My copy of the game hasn’t even shipped yet. Well worth the wait, says I – rather have a physical disc to place next to all the other Fallouts.
I’m glad to see Bethesda improved their writing, they’re truly one of the best developers in the industry! Oh hi, I’m the majority of the gaming community. Obsidian? They’re the guys who ruined Knights of the Old Republic 2 right? They stink!
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I figured that out around 45 hours into the 50 or so I sunk into FO3 so I laughed out loud at that
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To be fair to it, I’m currently playing Fallout 3 for the first time with all the patches and this doesn’t stop there being bugs every few hours. The other day I was in a town chatting to a couple of NPCs in their house because they were giving me a quest when a Sentry Bot entered the house from nowhere and minigunned the NPCs to gibs before leaving. After I’d finished laughing I reloaded the game because I wanted the quest, but the violent intrusion never occured again.
Magic.
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I didn’t buy this game for one reason: It’s made by Obsidian. Sure it’s Bethesda’s engine, but it’s not the first time Obsidian has used a Bethesda engine and made a game that’s broken. Obsidian is a garbage developer. This game might be worth a purchase though just to see some of these funny bugs like the spinning heads and elastic people. Say what you want about Bethesda but I’ve never seen any retarded shit like that in any of their games. Obsidian has some great ideas it’s just their games are bugfests and broken right out the box. NWN 2 is a great example of that. After about a 3 days of trying to play the game and seeing nothing but glitch after glitch (and this was years later after the patches), I decided never to buy another game from these morons.
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Boy, that’s a lot of whining. The game works fine. They
put out an update right after release. The only bug I’ve
seen so far is the same one I’ve seen in Fallout 3 (where
you can get stuck on an incline & have to reload a save).
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You know… exactly this.
No ambitious game ever has been bug free. Name an ambitious game, any one will do, go on… I’ll wait. How about Ultima VII? Oh, that was bugged up to the eyeballs, wasn’t it? Any of the Gothic games? Those too. Anything that was ever released by Bethesda? Yep. All Obsidian games? Indubitably.
In fact, I actually don’t mind bugs, because bugs tell me that the game is being very smart. If something is bug-free, I tend to expect an over-commercialised, linear, theatre experience, which is as interesting as it is challenging (not very, on both counts). Bugs are the price we pay for getting an ambitious game, and there has never, ever been one ambitious game that hasn’t had a serious bug in it at some point. Not ever. Not anywhere. It’s just human nature: we can’t possibly test an ambitious game from all angles in QA, it’s impossible, and if we create an ambitious game that has thousands of possible permutations, then there’s no way in hell we can test all those. All we can do is fix the issues when they come up.
Look at Oblivion: the fan patch project is still finding bugs and fixing them. Hell, people are still finding bugs for Morrowind! (Yes, seriously.) After all the years since Morrowind was released, there are still some permutations not covered. Gothic III, with its shiny Enhanced edition, still has a few bugs after years of testing and fan patching, and they had some bloody dedicated testers. The Enhanced edition doesn’t have many bugs, but they’re there.
Now, we can either have a boring, polished experience, or an ambitious, buggy one. Them’s the breaks, it’s not hard to understand. Really? I’d opt for the ambitious experience, any day of the week. The reason is that in an ambitious game we see emergent gameplay, things that actually go well beyond the very basis of the game, stuff happening that the programmers didn’t intend, cool things that happened simply because the game was created to be smart on some level, things that actually really impress you and leave an impression.
I want my gaming to be an experience. So, yes, there’ll be bugs. I’ll deal with it, for the emergent gameplay I’ll also get? I can deal with bugs.
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Boiling Point was bug free. Or rather the bugs were so good I consider them “features”. In fact I was gutted when they fixed the exploding police stations in the patch.
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@kobzon
I think he meant that ambitious games always have bugs, not that bugs are necessarily an indicator of interesting games in anything more than a personal, quirky way.
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“Saying that buggyness is a sign of an interesting game is like saying that schizophrenia leads to amazing creativity. Sometimes true, but mostly not.”
I’m… not entirely sure I buy that. Look at Einstein, brilliant man, anomalous brain. We’re finding out more and more that the most insanely creative humans are broken in some way, on a physical level. I think that if you were to round up every incredibly creative human out there and run an MRI on them, you’d find some flaw. This is just my personal theory for how it all works. I honestly do believe in a direct correlation between broken and brilliant, I think it’s just the way reality works.
And as time goes on, and we’re finding out that mental illnesses are actually caused by physical brain anomalies, that even bizarre behavioural patterns are, this is looking to be more and more true. When a human is capable of going so far outside the human norm, there’s probably something strange about them on a physical level, they’re a bit broken. So yes, I do actually think that the most creative humans are. I really want to see the MRI thing done at some point.
And I think that likewise, in games, you can’t have a compelling, deep, complex game without a sizable amount of bugs. I think that’s just as impossible, I think it’s an artifact of our own nature. We can create brilliant things, but the more brilliant they are, the more flawed they are, the more beautiful they are, the more broken they are. There are numerous cases throughout the history of art that can be made for this point. As an artist and an art-freak, I observe it in artists all the time.
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@tomwaitsfornoman
That’s pretty much what I was getting at. I think bugs are an artifact of complexity, as an aspect of human nature. I don’t think that you can look for a buggy game and say it’s brilliant, that’s silly, but I do think that all brilliant games will have a sizable amount of bugs as, again, an artifact of complexity. Since I don’t believe that we, as humans, could create anything more perfect than we are. So the more complex the things we try to create are, the more flawed they are.
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@Wulf
Sorry I’m talking to you on two different comments now, but I wanted to reply directly to this…
The problem with your argument is that games aren’t pure art. They have a function and a design element, they have systems and engineering. They are a commercial product. These things are not improved by imperfection.
You’re right, we aren’t going to create something totally pure and untarnished, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try
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@ Wulf:
A little reductionist, don’t you think? Creativity is a result of physical imperfection? What about those cases where someone has a mental disability and aren’t creative or intellectual in any way (by far the vast majority, sadly), or in those cases where someone is creative and has no disabilities (again, by far the vast majority of very clever people)? I get the need to feel there is some karmic re-arrangement for the handicapped, I really do, but it doesn’t exist. It’s fantasy.
And what the hell was wrong with Einstein’s brain?
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“The problem with your argument is that games aren’t pure art. They have a function and a design element, they have systems and engineering. They are a commercial product. These things are not improved by imperfection”
Yes, but by the same token they’re not necessarily made worse by imperfection either. I can overlook the odd mysteriously airborne corpse or invisible computer without losing any enjoyment of the game, in much the same way I can overlook the inevitable twitch of an actor whose supposed to be dead on stage without losing any enjoyment of the play.
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And what the hell was wrong with Einstein’s brain?
He was autistic.
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