Poll: Will Bethesda's next big title suffer in sales because of Skyrim's notorious glitchiness?

[Johnson McGee]

Everyone knows Bethesda games are glitchy but they're usually good enough most just ignore it.
I personally have a 'don't play Bethesda games until X patches come out' policy in effect.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Not saying it is glitchy or not (there's enough threads for that and it's obvious some suffer, some don't, and even some who think they don?t but do); this thread isn't for that so I don't care if you've had no problems or if it crashes every 5 mins on you.

What I want to know is do you think sales of their next big release will suffer (especially on the ps3) because of the notoriety of the issues.

On the one hand, there seems to be as much publicity of the issues as there is of the content. On the other hand, previous Bethesda ports have been just as notorious and that didn't seem to affect Skyrim sales.

I think Bethesda will learn how to do Q&A testing right - especially now that other massive single player RPGs such as Kingdom's of Amalur are coming out that are significantly more polished than any Bethesda game.

Consider this a case for capitalism working.

That's a good point. People have been seeing how well liked the Bethesda games are and are trying to clone them. It's only a matter of time before someone does a better job. But even then, I don't think they're actually going to try and improve until sales suffer.

 

[Agow95]

Even Skyrim didn't suffer because it's glitchiness, I don't think sales will suffer.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

What I want to know is do you think sales of their next big release will suffer (especially on the ps3) because of the notoriety of the issues.

If Fallout 3's bugs didn't put people off of Skyrim, then nothing will. Besides, a number of the bugs are often pretty funny. Hello flying mammoth. ^^

Also, for the record, I have the PS3 version of Skyrim. I'm level 61, and my save file is 11 MB. The only place I have ANY noticeable slow-down is in towns, and even then it's only a minor annoyance at most. Out in the world, or in dungeons, I have no problems at all. So yeah, not really sure why everyone says that the game becomes "unplayable" when the save file reaches 5-6 MB.

Or maybe I just have a Magic PS3 (like the poster above who has a magic PC) that can play Bethesda games glich free?

Edit: Oh, and for the record, Fallout 3's save file hit something like 22 MB, and I still had no problems with it on the PS3. So, as a PS3 user, I have no problem purchasing future Bethesda titles.

... just probably not more Fallout. I found the game kind of dull compared to Skyrim.

 

[suitepee7]

never had bug issues with skyrim, so not for me

 

[Nexxis]

I don't think their sales will suffer. A friend of mine told me how buggy the previous games were and was still excited about the release of Skyrim. This may have been the same situation for other people as well. So if a new game is announced, assuming the story, gameplay, and other aspects of it sounds good, then I think people will still be eager to purchase it.

 

[RuralGamer]

Can't say for certain, but if I'm still regularly gaming when it comes out, probably yes, because like Oblivion before it, I've racked up an enjoyable 100+ hours and I'm not finished. Not even close.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Bethesda's titles were always criminally buggy. Doesn't stop them from being a huge success though.

Bethesda is like a GM who has a noticeable and annoying stutter (or a mild case of tourretes syndrome) yet always manage to run incredibly fun, empowering, and memorable campaigns.

Not at all like those terrible, dick hole GMs who railroad everyone and constantly wank to their own NPCs.

Good metaphor but based on my experience, I would add narcolepsy.
Very persistent & chronic, narcolepsy that could snap back in the moment you wake him up.

 

[Hyper-space]

Not saying it is glitchy or not (there's enough threads for that and it's obvious some suffer, some don't, and even some who think they don?t but do); this thread isn't for that so I don't care if you've had no problems or if it crashes every 5 mins on you.

What I want to know is do you think sales of their next big release will suffer (especially on the ps3) because of the notoriety of the issues.

On the one hand, there seems to be as much publicity of the issues as there is of the content. On the other hand, previous Bethesda ports have been just as notorious and that didn't seem to affect Skyrim sales.

The Elder Scrolls series went from Daggerfall, which was so buggy and broken that ENTIRE FEATURES were unplayable, to the worst buggs being crash-to-desktop in a handful of situations. Anyone with a modicum of perspective and experience of their series would agree that Bethesda games have improved dramatically (in terms of Q&A testing) from their earlier work. Even Skyrim had less buggs than Oblivion, despite being less of a graphical leap than from Daggerfall to Morrowind or Morrowind to Oblivion.

Their games are in a whole different strata of content, the amount of things to explore and do is unparalleled. Basically, games such as Skyrim (or any other 300+ hour title) have the right to be a bit buggy.

 

[vivalahelvig]

WHAT. FUCKING. GLITCHES?!
I have not experienced A SINGLE GLITCH in Skyrim! All these people have horror stories about Skyrim's "horrible buggyness" but I haven't noticed anything! I loved VANILLA Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind, something must be wrong with your computers.

OT: The next game won't suffer. People like me are going to buy the game, because we love Bethesda, and think their games are great, despite all the foretold glitches and haters.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

i had no problems at all except for a missing face once in a while, and that was on multiple playthroughs with 150+ hours of playing..... i like skyrim.

I would like it too if that was the biggest issue. Hell, if that was the only issue I had with the Fallout games, I would?ve actually bought Skyrim.

For one I found Skryim to be rather glitchless. But on the other hand, I had literally no problems with Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. My rig is basically a magic box that runs all Bethesda games perfect.

On the other side: Skyrim ist not the first "buggy" game Bethesda released. Sales will not suffer.

Same here. I'm not saying some people don't have glitchy experiences, but I find it hard to believe that I'm so lucky that I've only had very minor ones in all these games.

yupp, i'm quite curious on these people's hardware who have all these problems with bethesda games...any problems i do have are literally a 3 minute fix, with either turning off a setting until it gets patched or something extremely easy.

but like said, as long as:

fun output > glitch output from the game, then i am one happy camper. i would much much much much much rather buy an amazing game with glitches than to have a technically sound game that was average, example here would be: kotor 2 vs dungeon siege III

Okay genius; then how do you explain two people playing the game on the same exact machine (but in different accounts) - one get's through the game with no problems and another who's game starts crashing almost immediately after starting.
I've also heard of this happening in the same account: where the same person starts a new playthrough and the game is all of a sudden broken for them.

But as was said in OP, that's not the point here.

As for fun output>glitch output, how much do you think the average gamer will put up with for a game as big as Skyrim? Because it seems to me that they are willing to put up with a hell of a lot.

genius? calm down there, i just merely mentioned how i was curious to see what hardware they were running. and it would depend on the machine they are running it on, but depending on that, i would say something in the temporary cache probably triggered it, if the only thing that changed was the account (which makes zero difference) then it had to be from something the first person had done. more than likely is my random guess.

I actually had this happen on mass effect once, funny thing really, the quick fix for it? rebooted my system and it ran flawlessly.

the average gamer? i have no idea, i've put up with days worth of troubleshooting for bugs before, but that didn't stop me once i got it and enjoyed the hell out of the game. and i have no idea where you have been hearing this, but I have heard of very little game breaking glitches at all in skyrim, the occasional body drop the floor or physics of the game glitching a bit, but besides that I haven't heard/seen much, at least nowhere near as much as fallout/oblivion/morrowwind, and i'd call that a win in their book.

Yea, I?m really frothing at the mouth. The fact is that these freezing problems have plagued people on all sorts of different PCs, 360s, and PS3s and not just with Skyrim but with the Fallout games too. There isn?t much of a pattern in the hardware. And who cares about the issues with the PC; the modders usually have these games patched up in a month or two. It?s the consoles that have to depend on the mercy of Bethesda. Rebooting might work for Mass Effect but I know people who have tried re-formatting completely their console or PC just to play a Bethesda game and still had the same problems.
You really haven?t heard about game breaking glitches in Skyrim? I find that hard to believe considering you?re in a gaming forum. It?s become pretty notorious. It was all that came up when you Googled Skyrim after the review hype died down.

you just seemed to have some personal vendetta, beyond what i merely stated. but anyways, you didn't mention what specific system you were playing on, and yes i had heard of problems initially,as in the first few weeks for SOME people, i have heard of next to nothing the past month or two on anything relating to skyrim bugs, and for the consoles i would just say that really sucks, they must have a really goofy version of it, idk what model they are currently having installed but i remember when they switched to the JASPR chip on the 360's and they seemed to work better, and for ps3, bethesda has always had horrible support for, like quite a few 3rd party developers seem to have for the ps3 unfortunately. Point out to me on the escapist the rampant amount of skyrim game breaking glitches you apparently see, because i have seen very little or next to none in discussion, and unfortunately for you i don't go to google in my free time to creepily search and see who is having problems with what game and as to why.

 

[lord.jeff]

No, every Elder Scrolls game ships with it's share of bugs and they fix most the major bugs shortly after release.

 

[newwiseman]

Yes, they always have and always will be buggy. But that is the price you pay for they ability to go literally anywhere and do whatever you want (especially now that the creation kit is here).

 

[GonzoGamer]

WHAT. FUCKING. GLITCHES?!
I have not experienced A SINGLE GLITCH in Skyrim! All these people have horror stories about Skyrim's "horrible buggyness" but I haven't noticed anything! I loved VANILLA Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind, something must be wrong with your computers.

OT: The next game won't suffer. People like me are going to buy the game, because we love Bethesda, and think their games are great, despite all the foretold glitches and haters.

So what are you all pissed about?
You should be very pleased. The ones who should be pissed are the people who have to give their console a hard shut down every 15 mins.

Good point - the poll should've included options that indicate if the voter had personally experienced the crashing issue.

Not saying it is glitchy or not (there's enough threads for that and it's obvious some suffer, some don't, and even some who think they don?t but do); this thread isn't for that so I don't care if you've had no problems or if it crashes every 5 mins on you.

What I want to know is do you think sales of their next big release will suffer (especially on the ps3) because of the notoriety of the issues.

On the one hand, there seems to be as much publicity of the issues as there is of the content. On the other hand, previous Bethesda ports have been just as notorious and that didn't seem to affect Skyrim sales.

The Elder Scrolls series went from Daggerfall, which was so buggy and broken that ENTIRE FEATURES were unplayable, to the worst buggs being crash-to-desktop in a handful of situations. Anyone with a modicum of perspective and experience of their series would agree that Bethesda games have improved dramatically (in terms of Q&A testing) from their earlier work. Even Skyrim had less buggs than Oblivion, despite being less of a graphical leap than from Daggerfall to Morrowind or Morrowind to Oblivion.

Their games are in a whole different strata of content, the amount of things to explore and do is unparalleled. Basically, games such as Skyrim (or any other 300+ hour title) have the right to be a bit buggy.

I will agree that the overall amount of glitches have gone down, however the ones that persist are the really annoying freezing ones that have plagued every release of this generation.
If they fixed the really annoying old problems and all new ones popped up, nobody would probably care.
You're also talking about the PC here (which is the only platform I would play a Bethesda game on at this point) but I guess the poll should've been platform specific.
I'm thinking that the sales of the PC version wont suffer at all but the PS3 version might.

 

[Hyper-space]

I will agree that the overall amount of glitches have gone down, however the ones that persist are the really annoying freezing ones that have plagued every release of this generation.
If they fixed the really annoying old problems and all new ones popped up, nobody would probably care.

The thing is, they decided to tackle the biggest issues first (such as entire features in Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind being broken), then tackle the smaller issues. They pretty much did what EVERYONE would do in their footsteps, so dunno how they could go about this any other way that wouldn't result in a lesser and more broken experience.

 

[GonzoGamer]

i had no problems at all except for a missing face once in a while, and that was on multiple playthroughs with 150+ hours of playing..... i like skyrim.

I would like it too if that was the biggest issue. Hell, if that was the only issue I had with the Fallout games, I would?ve actually bought Skyrim.

For one I found Skryim to be rather glitchless. But on the other hand, I had literally no problems with Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. My rig is basically a magic box that runs all Bethesda games perfect.

On the other side: Skyrim ist not the first "buggy" game Bethesda released. Sales will not suffer.

Same here. I'm not saying some people don't have glitchy experiences, but I find it hard to believe that I'm so lucky that I've only had very minor ones in all these games.

yupp, i'm quite curious on these people's hardware who have all these problems with bethesda games...any problems i do have are literally a 3 minute fix, with either turning off a setting until it gets patched or something extremely easy.

but like said, as long as:

fun output > glitch output from the game, then i am one happy camper. i would much much much much much rather buy an amazing game with glitches than to have a technically sound game that was average, example here would be: kotor 2 vs dungeon siege III

Okay genius; then how do you explain two people playing the game on the same exact machine (but in different accounts) - one get's through the game with no problems and another who's game starts crashing almost immediately after starting.
I've also heard of this happening in the same account: where the same person starts a new playthrough and the game is all of a sudden broken for them.

But as was said in OP, that's not the point here.

As for fun output>glitch output, how much do you think the average gamer will put up with for a game as big as Skyrim? Because it seems to me that they are willing to put up with a hell of a lot.

genius? calm down there, i just merely mentioned how i was curious to see what hardware they were running. and it would depend on the machine they are running it on, but depending on that, i would say something in the temporary cache probably triggered it, if the only thing that changed was the account (which makes zero difference) then it had to be from something the first person had done. more than likely is my random guess.

I actually had this happen on mass effect once, funny thing really, the quick fix for it? rebooted my system and it ran flawlessly.

the average gamer? i have no idea, i've put up with days worth of troubleshooting for bugs before, but that didn't stop me once i got it and enjoyed the hell out of the game. and i have no idea where you have been hearing this, but I have heard of very little game breaking glitches at all in skyrim, the occasional body drop the floor or physics of the game glitching a bit, but besides that I haven't heard/seen much, at least nowhere near as much as fallout/oblivion/morrowwind, and i'd call that a win in their book.

Yea, I?m really frothing at the mouth. The fact is that these freezing problems have plagued people on all sorts of different PCs, 360s, and PS3s and not just with Skyrim but with the Fallout games too. There isn?t much of a pattern in the hardware. And who cares about the issues with the PC; the modders usually have these games patched up in a month or two. It?s the consoles that have to depend on the mercy of Bethesda. Rebooting might work for Mass Effect but I know people who have tried re-formatting completely their console or PC just to play a Bethesda game and still had the same problems.
You really haven?t heard about game breaking glitches in Skyrim? I find that hard to believe considering you?re in a gaming forum. It?s become pretty notorious. It was all that came up when you Googled Skyrim after the review hype died down.

you just seemed to have some personal vendetta, beyond what i merely stated. but anyways, you didn't mention what specific system you were playing on, and yes i had heard of problems initially,as in the first few weeks for SOME people, i have heard of next to nothing the past month or two on anything relating to skyrim bugs, and for the consoles i would just say that really sucks, they must have a really goofy version of it, idk what model they are currently having installed but i remember when they switched to the JASPR chip on the 360's and they seemed to work better, and for ps3, bethesda has always had horrible support for, like quite a few 3rd party developers seem to have for the ps3 unfortunately. Point out to me on the escapist the rampant amount of skyrim game breaking glitches you apparently see, because i have seen very little or next to none in discussion, and unfortunately for you i don't go to google in my free time to creepily search and see who is having problems with what game and as to why.

But you don't even have to creepily search for problems; and I really don't want to know what you do when searching google if things can get creepy.
But you just have to search "Skyrim ps3." It's all been talked about for a while. Maybe you're just not very preceptive.
Of course I have a personal vendetta against them: they've charged me $60 a pop to beta test a couple of their games. I have a vendetta against anyone who even tries to rip me off.

 

[GonzoGamer]

I will agree that the overall amount of glitches have gone down, however the ones that persist are the really annoying freezing ones that have plagued every release of this generation.
If they fixed the really annoying old problems and all new ones popped up, nobody would probably care.

The thing is, they decided to tackle the biggest issues first (such as entire features in Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind being broken), then tackle the smaller issues. They pretty much did what EVERYONE would do in their footsteps, so dunno how they could go about this any other way that wouldn't result in a lesser and more broken experience.

Honestly? All it would take for me to start buying Bethesda games again is for them to fix the chronic freezing problem (especially on the ps3). That's the big issue that stops all the fun. Weird visuals, leaping corpses, and crap like that doesn't really bother me as much because yes, in a big game weird things are going to happen; as long as those things don't force me to hard shut down the console, it's not that big a deal.

I will agree that the overall amount of glitches have gone down, however the ones that persist are the really annoying freezing ones that have plagued every release of this generation.
If they fixed the really annoying old problems and all new ones popped up, nobody would probably care.

The thing is, they decided to tackle the biggest issues first (such as entire features in Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind being broken), then tackle the smaller issues. They pretty much did what EVERYONE would do in their footsteps, so dunno how they could go about this any other way that wouldn't result in a lesser and more broken experience.

Well, that's easy. They just need to make it so their games don't freeze up in the middle of play. That's what stops the fun for me: the hard shut down.

 

[TheDarkestDerp]

Sales have already suffered. I've not bought Skyrim, nor do I intend to, much less the next game they put out. Sure, I'm just one sale, and all that defeatist tripe, but that's still one sales they didn't get and won't be getting.

Sorry, Charley, but after using the same engine for multiple games in a row and watching it get buggier with every game, I just can't care. People seem to praise Skyrim so very highly, but I can't agree. Too many game-breaking glitches, not to mention the more laughable minor ones which still interrupt gameplay, litter the landscape like bad jokes about arrows to this or that. Add to this the rather cavalier attitude they seem to have taken about their product's quality. All in all it seems a rather sloppy rushed effort on their part.