Poll: Bethesda: Their fault or not?

[4RM3D]

Bethesda type open world games offer true exploration in that you actively search and explore unknown territory and find quests, dungeons and treasure you may not have even known existed in a previous playthrough.

That would be great if there was actually anything worth exploring. But Oblivion is an empty, hollow world where every cave looks the same, feels the same and has the same nothingness in it. Also there is little stuff to do, few quests and few NPC's to interact with. The world is unfinished. The only good thing about Oblivion are the mods that flesh out the world. But IMO the game should already be great without the mods and that is not the case with Oblivion (or Morrowind).

One more thing: I think one of the reasons a game like ME or DA:O has to have so much more QA is because of the nature of its triggers and activations. Imagine if a door in DA:O that is crucial to open during a quest bugs out and simply cannot open (or no need to imagine, cause this happened to me). What can you do? Look for a patch update? None for a week. Look for a fan-made fix? Not available yet. Can you open console and open it manually? Ok, but you need a mod to access the console, and then the door opening was supposed to trigger a crucial dialogue, and that doesn't start either. Now your up shit creek. Whereas in Oblivion no door is truly necessary to open due to the non-linear nature, and console access is as easy as pressing ~ and typing unlock. Because you can engage in conversation with anyone at any time you don't need to worry about those triggers. Oblivon can work with bugs because of its nonlinear nature and ease of access to its mechanics, whereas in a Bioware game a glitch can be much more disastrous because of certain key moments that are crucial for advancement.

That Oblivion can work without bugs is not much of an excuse. The only thing is that a non-linear game is usually more complex to debug. As such Bethesda lets users buy the game and be actual beta-testers. Then a month or so later comes the patch to fix and finish the game. Or to put it differently; Bethesda is releasing a version 0.9 of the game to the public every time.


Now, I am not saying Bioware is better than Bethesda because I have issues with both of them. I just pointed out the Oblivion issues. The Bioware issues are for another time. ^^

 

[Irriduccibilli]

You know, I really never had any problems with glitches and bugs in Oblivion or Fallout 3, well, only minor stuff, but not something that really bothered me. New Vegas wasnt Bethesdas fault since... cant remember the name right now, but Bethesda didnt really have anything to do with New Vegas. Falllout 3 and Oblivion wherent buggy for me, so i'm not afraid that Skyrim will be

 

[Azure-Supernova]

I put the blame at both ends. Gamebryo isn't a fantastic engine and past experience with it has been... tumultuous. However it's reached its expiration date and now we have something new and hopefully less bug prone.

That would be great if there was actually anything worth exploring. But Oblivion is an empty, hollow world where every cave looks the same, feels the same and has the same nothingness in it. Also there is little stuff to do, few quests and few NPC's to interact with. The world is unfinished. The only good thing about Oblivion are the mods that flesh out the world. But IMO the game should already be great without the mods and that is not the case with Oblivion (or Morrowind).

I get the feeling that you didn't do much exploring in Oblivion; because I can think of several notable locations I felt were an achievement for discovering. It's not hollow, everywhere has a history and there are stories to a lot of towns and landmarks. For it's time as well it was pretty good in terms of having a full world of that size and depth.

Every cave does not feel the same at all, if you'd explored any of the Ayleid Ruins you'd know that. They're all similar architecturally but when in comes to the inhabitants of them there are some very notable ruins.

 

[4RM3D]

I get the feeling that you didn't do much exploring in Oblivion; because I can think of several notable locations I felt were an achievement for discovering. It's not hollow, everywhere has a history and there are stories to a lot of towns and landmarks. For it's time as well it was pretty good in terms of having a full world of that size and depth.

Every cave does not feel the same at all, if you'd explored any of the Ayleid Ruins you'd know that. They're all similar architecturally but when in comes to the inhabitants of them there are some very notable ruins.

On the contrary I've visited every location I could find. The "main" locations are varied enough for the most part, but the optional/filler locations are just, well pretty much what I have said.

I have never completed Oblivion though, because of a critical bug making it impossible to continue. So, to return on topic. Yes, it's Bethesda's fault.

 

[desaaron777]

Gamebryo. It doesn't matter how much playtesting a game is subjected to, millions of obsessive players will ALWAYS break a game.

this is what i was going to say.

 

[viranimus]

I cant say who is to blame.

However I fully expect Skyrim to be buggier than what we have seen thus far, because, well, its a completely new engine. Typically with any new engine you fix all the nagging problems you had with the old engine, but in doing so you create all new bugs you never could have anticipated. Given this will be the first release out of this engine and thus no road experience, I feel there is a good likelihood its going to be exceptionally buggy. Perhaps not for the same reasons as Obl & Fo3/NV, but buggy none the less.

 

[Mxrz]

More to the Elder Scrolls than just Morrowind and Oblivion, you know? Might want to ponder that before making universal claims about the series or some such.

Glad they finally switched engines. Maybe we'll finally have ladders again.

 

[vance32]

What glitches? i have never had Oblivion freeze or glitch up fallout has a couple of times but whenever my fallout freezes it usually auto-saves and it takes two minutes to get back to the game but hey what other games are fps and open world?

 

[Fenix7]

As others have said, Bethesda made games are usually so huge that bugs tend to slip through oftentimes. Blaming Gamebryo is the same as blaming Bethesda to be honest. At the end of the day, I'd rather play a deep rpg with some bugs made rather than a shallow generic quasi-rpg (*cough*DA2*cough*).

Things are different with Obsidian though. Their games are buggy beyond the acceptable limit. Game-breaking, save-destroying, frustrating bugs. Sorry but I never managed to forgive Obsidian after they took two of my favourite games (NWN and KotOR) and made sub-par sequels for them.

I never, in my 60+ hours of that game came across one broken quest or one destructive, or otherwise benign, glitch. Neither did my girlfriend. These sorts of crashes and broken quests only really came about from Oblivion onwards, when the Gamebryo engine started it's run at Bethesda.

Ahem [http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Glitches]

 

[nexekho]

These sorts of crashes and broken quests only really came about from Oblivion onwards, when the Gamebryo engine started it's run at Bethesda.

AHEM

Morrowind ran on an older version of Gamebryo. It might have been called NetImmerse at the time but it's the same engine with a different name. Case in point, both engines use nif files to store mesh hierarchies though the internal structure is a little different to expose new engine features.

Bethesda are the ones who designed it, so yeah, it's their fault.

AHEM

It was made by Emergent Games Technologies and licensed by Bethesda.

Anyway, the problems are almost always in the stuff they've built on top of Gamebryo. Scripting issues, largely.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

I shall explain my position with what should be their motto:

Bethesda, makers of the finest games you may never get to play.

 

[darth.pixie]

Divine Divinity 2 has the same engine and you can't even tell. Their re-worked edition is almost flawless. In fact, it's almost never the engine. They simply implemented stuff poorly. Like the Havok physics.

So Bethesda. Their work is sloopy and the programmers don't work properly with the artists. If they would...

 

[Snowy Rainbow]

Bethesda make buggy games? Never happened to me. The closet thing was a mob getting stuck in the terrain of New Vegas and they (Bethesda) didn't even make that.