Bethesda: "we need to treat our Skyrim updates with greater care"

OXM UK: Bethesda has expressed regret over its "aggressive" fixing strategy, and promised to be more careful with future patches.

[Jam_sponge]

I hear the PC version has seen a new fix already.

[bozebo]

Bethesda seem to be willing to admit their mistakes. They get a lot of credit for that.

[Bolts]

They get credit for admitting to consistently pushing out the buggiest RPG in the last decade? The funny thing is that on the PC, Skyrim is their most bug free game to date.

[AKS]

I'm not getting constant crashes to desktop or purple textures since the update. It has seemed much more stable lately.

[LightofDarkness]

Honestly, I reckon most of the Bethesda employees took some much needed R&R after the release of Skyrim, for Thanksgiving and what not, and didn't anticipate that the demand for a patch would be so high. So they had to scramble together a patch once most of the people were back to work and it didn't go so well, as it was likely hastily thrown together in a few days. I suspect that the next update will be much larger and far more stable.

[rezzah]

that is a reasonable possibility.

Since they are humans and everybody deserves a break on thanksgiving to be with their families.

[frostypants]

Bethesda has a long, long, loooooooooooong history of releasing buggy games and then farking up the patching process. This isn't about Bethesda employees taking vacation, it's about a seriously and fundamentally broken development culture when it comes to quality assurance.

[reckoner]

Try and make a game as large and encompassing as Elder Scrolls and see if your Q&A team can successfully find every single bug in their playthrough.

You won't be able to. That's why when you release the game to millions of people... you'll be sure to find bugs that weren't found before.

I think they're doing their best in order to keep this game as bug-free as possible. Could they be doing better? Of course. But I don't think they have any sort of "fundamentally broken development culture" when they are one of the best developers out there right now.

[frostypants]

reckoner, this is an issue that goes back to the early 1990s. It has nothing to do with Skyrim specifically. Bethesda is a good developer, but there is no excuse for some of the bugs that land in their games, regardless of how fun their games are.

Obviously no Q&A team will find every bug, but nor should blatantly unmissable ones (dragons flying backwards??????) be overlooked. There is obvious improvement to be made in their QA processes. If their QA team cannot handle it because of the size of the game, then guess what? They need to hire a BIGGER QA team. If the car you drive has repeated recalls, would you just defend it by saying "well, it was too hard for them to test the car"? No. My guess is you'd say they should have figured out a way to QA it properly before selling it in the first place.

I can't think of a single developer that has been around as long as they have that consistently puts out games with this many major issues. When they only made PC games, it was a little more understandable, but when it is on consoles with standardized hardware, it's an absolute joke.

And releasing a patch that breaks other things in such an obvious manner...and having a history of doing so...is inexcusable. As the other poster said, it's called "regression testing", and Bethesda clearly doesn't do it.

There's no point in defending it...call a spade a spade...their QA is sub-par.

[PirateThom]

reckoner - If it was just bugs, that's fair enough, but there's a SEVERE issues with memory not being released within the game. If that was missed in QA, how long was the QA going on for? How in depth was it? Why were so many obvious things missed? These are things people had issues with day 1, how were they missed in QA?

Not to mention, this is now Bethesda's THRID game this gen running on the same engine. If they want to make large and encompassing games, they need to start doing it right.

[bozebo]

"fundamentally broken development culture"

Yes, that's exactly it. Not just for Bethesda, but for most big developers.

[JaredH]

They need to actually learn what regression testing is...

[badkolo]

it seems they are on top of things.

[Animals_as_Leaders]

They STILL haven't fixed Oblivion or Fallout 3 on PC or PS3. ( not sure about 360 it could be the same ).

I wouldn't have high hopes for post game support.

[Kahvipannu]

Well the engine wasn't the most polished one. Now they have more solid ground to build on, so I would like to think it will be better this time.

But yeah, time will tell.

[kaveti6616]

Oblivion and Fallout 3 on PC were fixed years ago.

[Animals_as_Leaders]

@kaveti6616

What a load of sh!t.

I bought fallout 3 on release day.

I had a
q9450
4gb ddr2
8800gt
P35 motherboard
Sata II HDD

Since then I have had the following hardware and OS changes:

gtx280, gtx480
i7-870
X48 motherboard, 1156 motherboard
different sata II HDD, Sata III HDD
2x2gbddr 3, 2x4gb ddr3

I have gone from vista 64 bit to win 7 64 bit ultimate.

On ****ALL**** of those configurations there have been spontaneous CTD. With patch 1.7 ( the last patch ) only a few weeks ago....3 years on, 4 times the computer power, 3 years worth of drivers and 7 game patches and it still crashes to desktop.

It literally has thousands of quest bugs. I was playing it only a few weeks ago and had to do several console commands to make the protectron in the 'big trouble in big town' quest appear where it was supposed to be so I could complete the quest as the science option requires you to repair the robots and if they are not there...well...

Even with a large adressware flag so the game can use more than 2gb of ram and a number of tweaks could not fix the engine instability and they could certainly not fix quest bugs. There is an unnoficial patch that fixes bugs after 1.7...it has thousands of fixes, but it works fine as you claim so why did those silly people waste so much time on it I wonder...

You don't know what you are talking about.

[kaveti6616]

Did you download patches from the modding community or do you deliberately ignore all the fixes people have produced so you can continue to bitch incessantly?

The games are fixed. If you choose not to take advantage of the patches available, that's YOUR problem.

[Jazz4108]

The 360 version was good at launch and didn't need fixing. Yes they updat3ed the engine on the game of the year but unfortunaly most of the bugs are ps3 related. The ram on the ps3 hs caused lots of features to be dropped as well as ope world games that are not linear to run slow and problamatic. I think if ms culd have a bluray and a fast reading one the 360 would be untouchable.

[STONEY4]

The games are fixed, but only because of the community. The community always has to clean up Bethesda's mess. The fact that a FAN PATCH can fix nearly every bug in the game, yet a huge studio like Bethesda can't, says alot.

[PirateThom]

Kahvipannu - The engine for Skyrim is just a modified version of Gamebryo they're calling Creation Engine... it's still Gamebryo though, they've just cleaned it up a bit. It's why the game still has the same issues as Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. Their engine is done, it's useless.

[despair]

@PirateThom

where are you getting that info, because Creation Engine is an all new engine according to Bethesda not another modified version of the old one. Not saying you're wrong just that I never saw anything on that. Even Gamebryo doesn't credit Skyrim in their games list.

[PirateThom]

No, of course, Bethesda were happy to dub it a new engine, but it's still just a rewritten version of Gamebryo

"We then rewrote all the major graphics and gameplay systems including lighting, shadows, level of detail, animation, interface, scripting, dialogue, quest systems, melee, magic, and more. All of those changes made it into our internal editor as well. So much had changed that we decided to call the engine and editor by a new name, the Creation Engine and the Creation Kit."

http://www.diedagain.com/sk...

Bethesda felt there was either enough changed to dub it a new engine or intentionally wanted to make people think it was a brand new engine.

[SuperNerd]

Not really bro they still need to get on the ball and fix some stuff

[MizTv]

i know people arnt going to like this but i can not stand this game. i love 3 and 4 but this is not for me.and i have put 1000's of hours in those games

[kaveti6616]

That's a little presumptuous of you, to think that people care enough about your opinion to be offended by what you say.

[MysticStrummer]

I recognize your name and not his, but he seems to be more familiar with N4G than you are. People get offended over virtually nothing here 24/7.

[SuperNerd]

@killzone just give it some time bro . they'll iron out the bugs eventually i hope

[MysticStrummer]

I could understand if you didn't like the series at all, but to like 3 and 4 but not 5 seems odd. Maybe you just got sick of the basic gameplay, which has been the same since the first Elder Scrolls game.

[despair]

not every game is for everyone, and when was the last time you played III or IV? People's taste change over time. I loved Morrowind but hated Oblivion and love Skyrim(more than morrowind in fact). So its nothing anyone should take offense for but expect disagrees like crazy. Here's one from me as well :)

[badkolo]

every freaking game this gen has had bugs

[Animals_as_Leaders]

Yes they do, and that is a bad thing. I gather from your previous comment and this one that what you are suggesting is that because other games have bugs that it should be an accepted standard?

Get some standards yourself and stop buying games that don't work properly and just like magic... developers will stop releasing broken games. It's because of people like you we have games in need of a day 1 patch.

[LightofDarkness]

Exactly, people NEED to stop supporting crappy workmanship. If you buy an inferior product for the same amount as a superior product, you're telling vendors that you place the same value on both. Knowing that, do you think a developer is going to put the effort into making a superior product when they can sell an inferior one for the same amount and it will sell as well, if not better?

PC gamers have been feeling this sting the most since this generation. Every game these days is released almost as is, with all console optimizations still in place. How much does it take to switch off mouse smoothing/acceleration in an ini file for release? If they'd spent more than 5 minutes on the menus they'd have figured out that the mouse doesn't work correctly and that annoying and unnecessary keyboard and mouse switching is needed.

I love Skyrim, but it's another game that was clearly built for consoles and thrown to PC gamers afterwards like scraps from the dinner plate.

[Kahvipannu]

Games develop, work and content in them rise all the time, so there is more things that might cause bugs/glitches, and they are harder to find. Simple as that.

The game is fine as it is for release, any person who have common sense would have figured out that in game this caliber will have tons of bugs, and wait a bit before purchase, as I am doing.

If you think the game is too broken so that it isn't playable, don't play it, and wait for patches and mods. Now that the game is out for the public, there is a lot more players out there to find even the most rarest gugs out there. Trying to get, again, game this caliber, bug free with just developers testing it would be almost impossible.

Quote from other article:
"A conservative estimate suggests that to have Skyrim bug-free at release would have cost Bethesda literally billions of dollars; perhaps even hundreds of billions."

Again, common sense.

[LightofDarkness]

There's a bit of a lack of context in that quote. Literally, almost any piece of software, no matter how simple, could take hundreds of years to be certifiably bug-free, ie. every possible combination of variables accounted for and passed.

That is why most software is released in a "good enough" state, because it would take far too long to test for every conceivable error. There is most certainly a line, though, and when most developers cross it they get stung. Microsoft released Windows 2000 with over 65000 identified bugs/issues, and boy, did it cost them. W2K was considered a failure because of it's widely documented release state. It even blue-screened while being demoed at a developers conference prior to release.

So while it's technically true that it can't be perfect, it is also true that it wasn't in a "good enough" state for PS3 users and many PC users. I personally have not been affected by any game-breaking bugs @50 hours, but I've had 2 CTDs and a startup failure due to audio settings (rookie mistake by Bethesda). The amount of users with error reports, including quest breakers, many of which are the same errors (ie. frequently occurring to the point of being obvious), suggests that the game simply wasn't ready. Not with THAT many bugs.

[InspectorG]

though I would have to agree with the above. That teams are limited in one way or another, and it can be unfeasible to ship a game with 100% no bugs. However, when I purchase a product I want a package that has had a rigorous testing process... One that when a patch is released fixes the problems rather than create new ones etc.

When developers do this, that is when I really support them. And I think more people should do that as well... Letting developers know that a half-assed effort will not make it anymore.

[ronin4life]

Not every game.
Many/most psp, ds, and wii games are bug free.(realistically speaking, of course. You don't come across them often, or most of the time never, but there probably are a few tiny ones.)
I haven't run into any problems in SS.

[PygmelionHunter]

More like EVERY game has bugs, they've been there since the beginning of gaming but some have more than others, specially this gen, but, look at Nintendo's first party games, they barely have any bugs.

Seriously, game patches and DLC have, at best, wounded gravely this gen for me...

[SP3333D-O]

Wow, so much hate! I was shocked by how buggy Oblivion and Fallout 3 were, to the point I debated getting Skyrim. I have been pleasantly surprised by how few problems I have had with hte PC version. While not absolutely perfect, I feel Skyrim is a superb game.

[Blastoise]

Damn right they do! The last one for PS3 did basically sod all! My character still has no face when i wear certain armour!

[adamant715]

The amount of hate Bethesda is receiving is just appalling.. I understand the game is a bit buggy, but its nowhere near unplayable and all of you are being ridiculously nitpicky.

[kingdavid]

There are some game breaking bugs. I cant even continue with the thieves guild until they release a patch because the guy im sposed to talk to is stuck.

[PCELITE]

Not many bugs on the PC. Don't know about consoles though. And we got our modders which is good.

[xPhearR3dx]

360 version is perfectly fine for me. I've had a few minor bugs like Lydia showing up dead at my wedding. Nothing a quick dragging to the basement won't fix though.

[NoSuchUserName]

Haha, funny shit man

[aliengmr]

Given the size of this game, I can live with a few bugs and crashes. If they went the Blizzard route our grandchildren would probably be waiting for release. I don't want these titles to have less depth and scope because people demand absolute perfection day 1.

[Gameplay999]

someone got fired.

[Donnywho]

Someone got rich and someone got an unfinished game. Guess who I am. Let me check my wallet here...ooooo? empty

[Pillville]

This is a long shot, and only applies to the xbox 360 version, but consider this:

Maybe this is Bethesda's way to combat piracy. There are over 1 million banned xbox 360s that can't connect to Xbox LIVE, and can't get updates. Anyone with an illegal copy is stuck playing the "broken" edition, while everyone else can download the patches and play the "fixed" edition.

[GoldenPheasant]

PS3 ver. Got three characters atm; lvl19 lvl30 lvl12, with probably 80hrs playtime total and I've only experienced a number of issues. When the patches where announced, the first thing I thought was how I was not going to jump the patch train as with games like these, shit usually gets worse let alone better.

I've experienced about 3 freezes, the armor display in a DarkBrahderhood sanctuary doesn't seem to work properly, and there seems to be some weirdness with dragon skeletons...that's it. Hence I will continue pressing the mighty "O" when the update prompt comes up.

[Basjohn]

2 weeks for a patch that doesn't work.....isn't really aggressive lads. Actually one of the slowest responses I've seen considering the main quest is even bugged to uncontinueability.

[MizTv]

my fav things were to make a class at the start of the game,i loved to lvl my jump,custom spells were awesome, i still play 4 all the time.i just dont know why i cant get in to it

[Colonel_Dante]

*reads title*
Lol, Oh Bethesda. We both know thats not going to happen.
Its become tradition that you guys repeat the same pattern time and again. Dev cycle, patch, good patch,bad patch, rinse, repeat.
Ive been burned so many times now.

[Colonel_Dante]

You know, this "crutch" of the ps3 and 360 not being able to run this game,and its struggling and thats why it runs so bad need to stop. Skyrim graphically is not exactly a beauty to look at (without mods) ,the engine is crudely out of date. Its clearly a pc port to consoles, and its as broken as Fallout 3 and New Vegas on ps3. Its a cheap port. In 2011. . . .

[byrnezy]

I've actualy given up playing it on the ps3 as it is far too buggy and laggy. Picked up AC Revelations and raced a bit on ol GT5 and haven't looked back... tis a sad thing really

[SuperStrokey1123]

Does that just mean slower?

[Demobot]

Until I can play console games like Halo and uncharted on a PC I will stay on a console. Also I don`t have the money and time to spend on a gaming rig. Lastly I am an adult, I`m too old to be hunched over a desk using kb and mouse. I love to slouch on my couch in front of my home theater.

[JAMurida]

Have they release the PS3 patch yet that is "suppose" to fix the frame-rate issues?

[Pikajew]

They like making games like this so much, they should at least learn to code them and not get any bugs.

Any game with tons of bugs should always get a point lower when people review it. It can be the best game of all time, it should get a point lower still for the bugs

The game should have gotten more 9/10 than 10/10

[Sunk]

LOL at you guys acting like you've developed a game of this magnitude and what the QA process is like.

[yesmynameissumo]

I've never built a plane before, but I expect it to work when I board one.

[Sunk]

The game works fine. I've played since day 1 without a problem. A lot of the people complaining, I'm sure have already put 40+ hours into the game. If you come across a bug and can't finish a quest, guess what? Move on to another quest, the game has plenty of them to choose from. Anyone who has every played mmo's or huge open-world games like skyrim come to expect this. The game has plenty of content to where you shouldn't get frustrated over a minor glitch. the ps3's problem with with multi-platform games is not something new. The pc and 360 versions work fine. I would not blame Bethesda for a problem the ps3 has since the launch of this gen.

[despair]

problem is I came across a quest in riften to take out a bunch of skooma traders in a cave. It came from the Jarl and was a necessary step in getting my house and recognition in Riften. But since I visited the cave some time before and killed everything, the quest would not advance to the next step no matter how many times I kill the 2 respawning bandits at the cave.

So should I just "move on to the next quest" and not get my Thanehood or my second storage unit..I mean home? I had to use console commands to advance the plot(thank you google and random help forums) but you say 'move on" like its nothing but it affects the game and when something like that happens it can sour a gamers entire remaining playthrough.