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Rule of thumb with ANY Bethesda game is just wait 6-12 months after release, and MAYBE it won't delete your saved game. No one ever learns with these guys. Cool

Rule of thumb with ANY Bethesda game is just wait 6-12 months after release, and MAYBE it won't delete your saved game. No one ever learns with these guys. Cool games, horribly buggy for most of its early life.

wuliwong 8y ago
I had some rough experiences with Fallout 3 but New Vegas and Fallout 4 didn't really give me any trouble. Maybe they are improving?
- learc83 8y ago
  New Vegas wasn't made by Bethesda. It was made by Obsidian. Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2, and I thought New Vegas was about 10x better than Fallout 3.
  - theandrewbailey 8y ago
    While Obsidian "made" it, it used the same engine/code/technology as Fallout 3.
    - learc83 8y ago
      It did, and Bethesda had time to iron out the kinks in the code that Obsidian used. But Fallout 3 used the 3rd party Gamebryo engine anyway, so the engine wasn't really developed by Bethesda either.
  - the_af 8y ago
    > Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2 To be fair, Fallout 2 (my entry to the series, and a game I still love) is famous for being utterly bug-ridden and full of incomplete/broken quests. Disappearing car, anyone? :P
- smitty1110 8y ago
  New Vegas used the same engine as Fallout 3, and it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They fixed all the bugs in the engine, and a better development studio handled creating the game. I believe that Fallout 4 used the engine developed for Skyrim, so they had more than 5 years to work out all the bugs.
  - fhood 8y ago
    To this day I get a kick out of the fact that the best Fallout game was made by Obsidian.
    - AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
      Why? Remember, Bethesda was the outlier. They purchased the Fallout IP from Interplay after Black Isle Studios went under. And many of the former Black Isle Employees went to go work at Obsidian, so New Vegas was much closer to being under the stewardship of the original team than Fallout 3 was.
nilkn 8y ago
Almost all of Bethesda's software problems originate from their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine. The engine has been falling to pieces since Skyrim. I gave up trying to get Fallout 4 to run acceptably on high-end modern hardware and refunded it. It looks like Fallout 76 literally just gives you a stretched picture if you try to run it on a 21:9 monitor (which a very substantial proportion of high-end PC gamers have in late 2018). For me, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and any subsequent Bethesda games based on this engine are automatic no-buys for me at this point. I sincerely hope Fallout 76 sells poorly (relative to other Bethesda titles) so that they can get the message where it hurts.
- fraqed 8y ago
  There is a recent post in the Elder Scrolls subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrolls/comments/9wmm98/bethesdas_going_to_reuse_its_old_engine/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrolls/comments/9wmm98/bethes... discussing the Bethesda game engine and the following quote from Todd Howard was posted: ”I think most people that aren't making games use the word 'engine', you know, they think of 'engine' as one thing, and it's, we view it as technology, right? so there are lots of pieces, and every game, parts of that change. Whether it's the renderer, the animation system, the scripting language, the AI, the controls... so, some people talk about Gamebryo but that's, like, we haven't used that in a decade.” ”And a lot of it is, some of it is middleware, whether that's Havok animation here, and, so 76, we changed a lot of it. You know, it's an all new renderer, new lighting model, new landscape system, and then, when you go to Starfield, even more of it changes. And then Elder Scrolls 6 which is really out in the horizon, even more of that will change there.” The quote is translated from a video interview in German here: https://www.gamestar.de/videos/fallout-76-interview-mit-todd-howard-nicht-so-ein-krasser-umbruch-wie-bei-fallout-3-gamestar-tv-fuer-alle,96653.html https://www.gamestar.de/videos/fallout-76-interview-mit-todd... Here is an English translation of the video interview: https://www.reddit.com/r/BethesdaSoftworks/comments/8v1u2z/translated_interview_from_todd_howard_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BethesdaSoftworks/comments/8v1u2z/t...
  - Quarrelsome 8y ago
    I hope they're working on a new director component for their content creators because Cyberpunk 2077 level of story scripting + animation + staging + etc seems to be generating results that Bethesda games are _well_ off. People point at the right speech moments, look disappointed appropriately, a timer then fires for a story option that's only open for five seconds. It looks so much more _alive_ than a Bethesda game. There's hints of it back in Witcher III if you know where to look but I'm super excite for 2077.
scrooched_moose 8y ago
I finally got to PC Skyrim about 2 years ago and still ran into a game breaking bug in the main quest. It took me at least 5 hours of research, 2 mods, and a pile of console commands to bypass an event which wouldn't trigger. From what I found it was a reasonably well known bug too.
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  I got hit by something pretty much just like that, was it the one with the council on high hrothgar and the jagged crown mission overlapping and blocking each other?
  - scrooched_moose 8y ago
    It was Esbern not coming out of his room in the Ratway Sewers when he was supposed to. I'm really fuzzy on the details now, but from what I remember there are multiple bugs related to him. Some have been patched, either officially or community, but the one I hit hadn't been.
    - graphitezepp 8y ago
      OH! I hit that one too, quit the game over it. Very obnoxious finding endless forum posts of people having the same bug as you, and not a solution to be had, and your not even being paid for it.
thrower123 8y ago
That's basically a good rule of thumb with any software. It's just impossible to do full QA of everything that crazy users will do, on a wildly diverse spectrum of hardware, in projects that immense. Even if you had unlimited budget and manpower, you're never going to see all the things that are possible; there's just too many unknown unknowns.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- softawre 8y ago
  While I think what you're saying is not wrong, it is definitely different these days. Back in the day games used to release on carts and we could not patch them. Now that we have Day1 patches and people expect bugs, production companies shoot for earlier release dates because they can.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
They patch some bugs[0], but they don't patch the shallow characters and mediocre writing. I played Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 side by side. By the end of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been mostly playing the same game for 10 years (all of Todd Howard's games since TES4[1]). I almost stopped playing near the end. Witcher 3 is one of the best games I've ever played. Todd Howard has lots of work to do if I'm going to get another one of his games. I'm watching Cyberpunk 2077 intently. [0] They leave the "entertaining" ones in. It's usually up to modders to fix what they can. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-Sometimes-Doesnt-Fix-Entertaining-Bugs https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-S... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard#Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard#Works
- overcast 8y ago
  I cried a little when that Cyberpunk demo video was released. Beyond hyped for that game. CD Projekt is a top echelon developer.
- dmos62 8y ago
  What did you think of Fallout 3 and New Vegas in terms of writting? It's been a long time, but I found them very entertaining. Different league than Fallout 4. I'm surprised it's the same creator. Then again, there was a large gap between trying Fallout 3/NV and Fallout 4, so maybe my perception changed.
  - vithren 8y ago
    F3 was made by Bethesda. New Vegas - by Obsidian. Not the same studio.
  - shoo 8y ago
    > but they don't patch the shallow characters and mediocre writing. one of my reactions to fallout 3 was that unlike the original fallouts, it wasn't funny.
  - theandrewbailey 8y ago
    > Different league than Fallout 4. I'm surprised it's the same creator. Not quite. Fallout 3 was all Bethsoft, and Obsidian mostly did Vegas. Fallout 3 has no big story twists, and clear good guys and bad guys. The main quest is entirely linear, with a large spectacle near the end, ending with a pathetic boss fight. Most everyone (except Dad and maybe 3 Dog) comes off as one dimensional with only one purpose in life. There are some cool side stories and places (a cave filled with orphans, and a mad scientist's escapist simulation), but I recall them being static for the most part. New Vegas is complicated and more gray in comparison. Who's good or bad is murky. I don't recall any big story twists, but the characters had depth. Take for example, Caesar: I doubt Bethesda would have thought to give him a tumor. There's lots of powerful factions, which not only have stories, you significantly participate in them. The main story branches off into about 4 very different endings, something that Bethesda didn't do until F4. Back in the day, I watched the Zero Punctuation review of New Vegas[0]. I remember literally everything he talks about! I drank out of that toilet! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsACXSVhWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsACXSVhWY
SilasX 8y ago
Now we're having to do this with OS updates too: https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/06/windows-10-october-update-delete-pulled/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/06/windows-10-october-updat...

wuliwong 8y ago

I had some rough experiences with Fallout 3 but New Vegas and Fallout 4 didn't really give me any trouble. Maybe they are improving?

learc83 8y ago
New Vegas wasn't made by Bethesda. It was made by Obsidian. Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2, and I thought New Vegas was about 10x better than Fallout 3.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  While Obsidian "made" it, it used the same engine/code/technology as Fallout 3.
  - learc83 8y ago
    It did, and Bethesda had time to iron out the kinks in the code that Obsidian used. But Fallout 3 used the 3rd party Gamebryo engine anyway, so the engine wasn't really developed by Bethesda either.
- the_af 8y ago
  > Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2 To be fair, Fallout 2 (my entry to the series, and a game I still love) is famous for being utterly bug-ridden and full of incomplete/broken quests. Disappearing car, anyone? :P
smitty1110 8y ago
New Vegas used the same engine as Fallout 3, and it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They fixed all the bugs in the engine, and a better development studio handled creating the game. I believe that Fallout 4 used the engine developed for Skyrim, so they had more than 5 years to work out all the bugs.
- fhood 8y ago
  To this day I get a kick out of the fact that the best Fallout game was made by Obsidian.
  - AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
    Why? Remember, Bethesda was the outlier. They purchased the Fallout IP from Interplay after Black Isle Studios went under. And many of the former Black Isle Employees went to go work at Obsidian, so New Vegas was much closer to being under the stewardship of the original team than Fallout 3 was.

nilkn 8y ago

Almost all of Bethesda's software problems originate from their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine. The engine has been falling to pieces since Skyrim. I gave up trying to get Fallout 4 to run acceptably on high-end modern hardware and refunded it. It looks like Fallout 76 literally just gives you a stretched picture if you try to run it on a 21:9 monitor (which a very substantial proportion of high-end PC gamers have in late 2018). For me, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and any subsequent Bethesda games based on this engine are automatic no-buys for me at this point. I sincerely hope Fallout 76 sells poorly (relative to other Bethesda titles) so that they can get the message where it hurts.

fraqed 8y ago
There is a recent post in the Elder Scrolls subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrolls/comments/9wmm98/bethesdas_going_to_reuse_its_old_engine/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrolls/comments/9wmm98/bethes... discussing the Bethesda game engine and the following quote from Todd Howard was posted: ”I think most people that aren't making games use the word 'engine', you know, they think of 'engine' as one thing, and it's, we view it as technology, right? so there are lots of pieces, and every game, parts of that change. Whether it's the renderer, the animation system, the scripting language, the AI, the controls... so, some people talk about Gamebryo but that's, like, we haven't used that in a decade.” ”And a lot of it is, some of it is middleware, whether that's Havok animation here, and, so 76, we changed a lot of it. You know, it's an all new renderer, new lighting model, new landscape system, and then, when you go to Starfield, even more of it changes. And then Elder Scrolls 6 which is really out in the horizon, even more of that will change there.” The quote is translated from a video interview in German here: https://www.gamestar.de/videos/fallout-76-interview-mit-todd-howard-nicht-so-ein-krasser-umbruch-wie-bei-fallout-3-gamestar-tv-fuer-alle,96653.html https://www.gamestar.de/videos/fallout-76-interview-mit-todd... Here is an English translation of the video interview: https://www.reddit.com/r/BethesdaSoftworks/comments/8v1u2z/translated_interview_from_todd_howard_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BethesdaSoftworks/comments/8v1u2z/t...
- Quarrelsome 8y ago
  I hope they're working on a new director component for their content creators because Cyberpunk 2077 level of story scripting + animation + staging + etc seems to be generating results that Bethesda games are _well_ off. People point at the right speech moments, look disappointed appropriately, a timer then fires for a story option that's only open for five seconds. It looks so much more _alive_ than a Bethesda game. There's hints of it back in Witcher III if you know where to look but I'm super excite for 2077.

scrooched_moose 8y ago

I finally got to PC Skyrim about 2 years ago and still ran into a game breaking bug in the main quest. It took me at least 5 hours of research, 2 mods, and a pile of console commands to bypass an event which wouldn't trigger. From what I found it was a reasonably well known bug too.

simongr3dal 8y ago
I got hit by something pretty much just like that, was it the one with the council on high hrothgar and the jagged crown mission overlapping and blocking each other?
- scrooched_moose 8y ago
  It was Esbern not coming out of his room in the Ratway Sewers when he was supposed to. I'm really fuzzy on the details now, but from what I remember there are multiple bugs related to him. Some have been patched, either officially or community, but the one I hit hadn't been.
  - graphitezepp 8y ago
    OH! I hit that one too, quit the game over it. Very obnoxious finding endless forum posts of people having the same bug as you, and not a solution to be had, and your not even being paid for it.

thrower123 8y ago

That's basically a good rule of thumb with any software. It's just impossible to do full QA of everything that crazy users will do, on a wildly diverse spectrum of hardware, in projects that immense. Even if you had unlimited budget and manpower, you're never going to see all the things that are possible; there's just too many unknown unknowns.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
softawre 8y ago
While I think what you're saying is not wrong, it is definitely different these days. Back in the day games used to release on carts and we could not patch them. Now that we have Day1 patches and people expect bugs, production companies shoot for earlier release dates because they can.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

They patch some bugs[0], but they don't patch the shallow characters and mediocre writing. I played Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 side by side. By the end of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been mostly playing the same game for 10 years (all of Todd Howard's games since TES4[1]). I almost stopped playing near the end. Witcher 3 is one of the best games I've ever played. Todd Howard has lots of work to do if I'm going to get another one of his games. I'm watching Cyberpunk 2077 intently. [0] They leave the "entertaining" ones in. It's usually up to modders to fix what they can. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-Sometimes-Doesnt-Fix-Entertaining-Bugs https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-S... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard#Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard#Works

overcast 8y ago
I cried a little when that Cyberpunk demo video was released. Beyond hyped for that game. CD Projekt is a top echelon developer.
dmos62 8y ago
What did you think of Fallout 3 and New Vegas in terms of writting? It's been a long time, but I found them very entertaining. Different league than Fallout 4. I'm surprised it's the same creator. Then again, there was a large gap between trying Fallout 3/NV and Fallout 4, so maybe my perception changed.
- vithren 8y ago
  F3 was made by Bethesda. New Vegas - by Obsidian. Not the same studio.
- shoo 8y ago
  > but they don't patch the shallow characters and mediocre writing. one of my reactions to fallout 3 was that unlike the original fallouts, it wasn't funny.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  > Different league than Fallout 4. I'm surprised it's the same creator. Not quite. Fallout 3 was all Bethsoft, and Obsidian mostly did Vegas. Fallout 3 has no big story twists, and clear good guys and bad guys. The main quest is entirely linear, with a large spectacle near the end, ending with a pathetic boss fight. Most everyone (except Dad and maybe 3 Dog) comes off as one dimensional with only one purpose in life. There are some cool side stories and places (a cave filled with orphans, and a mad scientist's escapist simulation), but I recall them being static for the most part. New Vegas is complicated and more gray in comparison. Who's good or bad is murky. I don't recall any big story twists, but the characters had depth. Take for example, Caesar: I doubt Bethesda would have thought to give him a tumor. There's lots of powerful factions, which not only have stories, you significantly participate in them. The main story branches off into about 4 very different endings, something that Bethesda didn't do until F4. Back in the day, I watched the Zero Punctuation review of New Vegas[0]. I remember literally everything he talks about! I drank out of that toilet! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsACXSVhWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsACXSVhWY

SilasX 8y ago

Now we're having to do this with OS updates too: https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/06/windows-10-october-update-delete-pulled/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/06/windows-10-october-updat...