Game Breaking Glitches in Skyrim: Who's responsible?

[VanityGirl]

Perhaps you've heard that Skyrim has a game breaking glitch or two in it. No? Well allow me to quickly fill you in. Just by typing "game breaking glitch in Skyrim" you'll find pages and page and even more pages of people saying "Uh... I can't play anymore".

One of the bigger glitches is when a person walks into a building and their character gets stuck. Even reloading will not help. When this happens, you're just stuck and the only way to actually play the game is the start start a brand new game.

Another is the infamous framerate glitch. According to a few people, the glitch normally happens after 60+ hours of play. When this glitch happens, the frame rate slows to a turtle speed, if not to 0. Why's this a problem? Well obviously traveling, fighting, during quests, ect. would become a real burden. These problems also seem to happen the most on the PS3. (Though it does happen on 360 and PC).

There are also some minor glitches, but these two are the most serious in my opinion.

Who's to blame? The ones effected by this glitch will quickly through their controllers at Bethesda and say that they are the ones responsible. I would also like to say that they are responsible as well. Sony has also been under fire since they supposedly knew about the PS3 having problems with Skyrim. So they are also to blame.


Look, Skyrim is a good game with horrible problems. Does Bethesda honestly expect me to believe that their game testers didn't notice this at all? Did they really not try to put in more than 60 hours to see if there would be performance issues? Why release it for the PS3 if they knew it was buggy? Was the 11-11-11 date so important that they had to release what is essentially a broken game to the masses? A game that, only the ones who truly care about it and put time into it will, will find has major game breaking issues?


Let me know what you think.

A link for comparison of 60+ hour Skyrim to a fresh skyrim
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-07-bethesda-refutes-skyrim-ps3-lag-claims-by-fallout-nv-dev

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

All sorts of people are involved.

The play testers who didn't catch it, the designers who didn't account for it, the executives who forced the game out before it was ready, the artist who didn't speak to the animator at the right time so the gnoll's armpits don't actually connect with their arms.

No individual person of persons are responsible for game breaking glitches because no individual person or persons are responeible for the game. When you say 'Bethesda' what you really mean 'the several dozen sub divisions and groups of Bethesda who were all involved in the making of this game, possibly more than a hundred people in all but it makes me feel better to be able to just point at their entire HQ building and say 'you did it.'

If I make a videogame in my bedroom and it has a glitch, I am responsible because I am the only one who was involved in it. The minute I include even one other person the blame spreads because neither of us noticed it and neither of us dealt with it. This is an interesting effect though because I the individual programmer am more likely to be able to spot problems, since the whole thing is my lovechild. When you get up to professional designer levels not only are there more people to miss things, but there are more people to take the blame for missing things.

So to answer the actual question, nobody is just as responsible as everybody.

 

[mada7]

You're probably not going to like this answer but it is likely the closest I can think of to a correct answer and that is: it depends. Ive worked in video game QA for a while and in general when gamebreaking bugs ship it is because the QA teams on the high end are around 20 people and are more often considerably smaller than that and the bug itself is either a very low reproduction rate to the point where neither the QA team nor the programmers can figure out what is causing it or that the steps to reproduce this bug are so specific or complex that no one is able to reproduce the bug in a consistent manner so it gets shipped. The larger the world and the more open ended a game is the more likely you are to see these types of things happen because testing everything becomes increasingly difficult and less likely. You will then see these bugs reproduced quite a bit by players once the game is released because the number of players playing the game vastly outnumbers the number of testers working on the game

 

[Jordi]

Did they really not try to put in more than 60 hours to see if there would be performance issues?

I think this is highly likely. I mean, I don't doubt that they put in way more than 60 hours of play-testing, but I do doubt that they did it all on one save on the PS3. They probably just test a lot of much smaller things. It might even be the case that they expressly start over every time they go to test something specific, because "play the game for 43 hours, go to place X, do Y, and there's your glitch" isn't a very nice bug report.

Perhaps they should have tested what would happen if you played for 60+ hours on the PS3 (that's easy to say now), but where should they have stopped? Maybe they tested up to 50 hours and figured it was okay. What if they didn't encounter any problems after 60 either, should they continue to 300, 3000, etc.?

I'm not saying Bethesda's not responsible. After all it is their product. I'm just saying that I think this might have been hard to catch with normal QA testing. They should have realized this could happen when they built the engine, but it probably just got overlooked.

I don't quite understand the other bug you mention. Why can't you reload to before you entered the building where you got stuck?

Anyway, even though it's all pretty hard to catch, I think Bethesda is responsible. They released a faulty product (for some) and they should provide a refund option.

 

[Wolfram23]

Well call me lucky but I'm just over 60 hours and still have normal framerates and no glitches or bugs. Might help I have it loaded on an SSD, I definitely still have slower loading screens compared to a new game, but in game it is pretty smooth. I guess it also helps that should something go wrong, I can use the console commands.

 

[VanityGirl]

snip

But you see, the difference here is that Bethesda has notorious for releasing terribly buggy games. Their test team will be very large since this is their biggest release and their money maker. Of course players will find some bugs testers miss, that's a fact of life, but in this case, the bug (framerate bug) happens when the game is played for 60+ hours. A lot of PS3s have been having this issue, clearly this is something that couldn't have been missed. Deadline, dates are all issues game testers must deal with, I understand, but when we look at a bug that makes people quit playing, then we should reasses what to do.
I don't totally blame them, because for all we know, they could have found the bug and reported it.

snip

And yes, I mean Bethesda as a whole. It's not just the testers fault. If they knew and reported the bug, then this is several people's fault. That much is clear.

 

[NLS]

Lets not forget that the sound of "things are broken" will always outshadow "everything works fine". Because nobody finds it interesting to read how anything is just okay.

 

[mada7]

As for why something that is commonly occuring at 60+ hours of play is not getting picked up by QA teams there is a simple explanation for that. A bug that occurs after 60 hours of playing a game is very difficult and very expensive to find. It means a tester has to spend 60 hours on the same build of a game which works out to around a week and a half of testing during which time a developer will have produced 3-6 new builds of the game (the hard drives on the consoles are wiped at each new build so there are no bugs reported that are a result of inconsistencies between builds) so the tester will be working on an outdated build and the bug they find might have been fixed through previous optimizations that the dev team was already working on so the tester might be asked to reproduce the bug on the latest build before fixing it. This process becomes even more arduous when the bug in question does not reproduce 100% of the time. The cost to benefit ratio for such a test is very low to the point where you wouldn't do it unless you expect to find something there. Leaving the console on overnight is another possibility but it is also possible that the bug will only happen when the game needs to keep loading more assets so that doesnt always work and typically a dev will ignore a bug that has as its reproduction steps "leave the console on for 60 hours" because it is unlikely that anyone would do that outside of testing purposes.

Bethesda has this problem because they release very large and ambitious games so testing all corners and possibilities becomes difficult and no matter how big that test team is the number of people that bought the game is at least ten thousand times bigger and those people will find a bug that the much smaller test team could not.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

All sorts of people are involved.

The play testers who didn't catch it, the designers who didn't account for it, the executives who forced the game out before it was ready, the artist who didn't speak to the animator at the right time so the gnoll's armpits don't actually connect with their arms.

No individual person of persons are responsible for game breaking glitches because no individual person or persons are responeible for the game. When you say 'Bethesda' what you really mean 'the several dozen sub divisions and groups of Bethesda who were all involved in the making of this game, possibly more than a hundred people in all but it makes me feel better to be able to just point at their entire HQ building and say 'you did it.'

If I make a videogame in my bedroom and it has a glitch, I am responsible because I am the only one who was involved in it. The minute I include even one other person the blame spreads because neither of us noticed it and neither of us dealt with it. This is an interesting effect though because I the individual programmer am more likely to be able to spot problems, since the whole thing is my lovechild. When you get up to professional designer levels not only are there more people to miss things, but there are more people to take the blame for missing things.

So to answer the actual question, nobody is just as responsible as everybody.

This. With extra blame put on Todd Howard. He was the one ultimately in charge. They all did a poor job.

 

[JesterRaiin]

Roses are red, violets are blue
In the land of gaming industry
responsible "is" you.

 

[InevitableFate]

The more complicated something is, the more likely something will go wrong.

But that's just the reason for the glitches. What is the reason for apparent lack of testing?

Say there are 10 play-testers who test the game. Each one puts in 100 hours of the final version before the game is released. That's 1000 hours of play total. During that time they find no game-breaking glitch.

The game is released.

There is now 200,000 players on Steam at one time (it was actually more, but I've rounded down to make the maths easier). They spend 1 hour playing the game. That's 200,000 hours of play time. 200 times the amount the testers managed, with only 1% of the time spent.

This is why game-breaking bugs aren't fixed.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

The more complicated something is, the more likely something will go wrong.

But that's just the reason for the glitches. What is the reason for apparent lack of testing?

Say there are 10 play-testers who test the game. Each one puts in 100 hours of the final version before the game is released. That's 1000 hours of play total. During that time they find no game-breaking glitch.

The game is released.

There is now 200,000 players on Steam at one time (it was actually more, but I've rounded down to make the maths easier). They spend 1 hour playing the game. That's 200,000 hours of play time. 200 times the amount the testers managed, with only 1% of the time spent.

This is why game-breaking bugs aren't fixed.

The PS3 game breaking bug has been present in two other games of theirs. That excuse doesn't fly. Isn't it odd that they never sent out PS3 review copies? Almost like they knew about the problem.

 

[mada7]

The more complicated something is, the more likely something will go wrong.

But that's just the reason for the glitches. What is the reason for apparent lack of testing?

Say there are 10 play-testers who test the game. Each one puts in 100 hours of the final version before the game is released. That's 1000 hours of play total. During that time they find no game-breaking glitch.

The game is released.

There is now 200,000 players on Steam at one time (it was actually more, but I've rounded down to make the maths easier). They spend 1 hour playing the game. That's 200,000 hours of play time. 200 times the amount the testers managed, with only 1% of the time spent.

This is why game-breaking bugs aren't fixed.

The PS3 game breaking bug has been present in two other games of theirs. That excuse doesn't fly. Isn't it odd that they never sent out PS3 review copies? Almost like they knew about the problem.

In that case it is something that could have easily fallen into the category of legacy bug. That is a bug they know about from previous games but had no problem shipping those games with that bug in there and so feel safe shipping the current game with it in there and is something might only only get fixed if there is spare time in the schedule. Given the nature of this type of bug it would take a considerable amount of time to fix and so gets marked as a legacy bug and shipped

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

The more complicated something is, the more likely something will go wrong.

But that's just the reason for the glitches. What is the reason for apparent lack of testing?

Say there are 10 play-testers who test the game. Each one puts in 100 hours of the final version before the game is released. That's 1000 hours of play total. During that time they find no game-breaking glitch.

The game is released.

There is now 200,000 players on Steam at one time (it was actually more, but I've rounded down to make the maths easier). They spend 1 hour playing the game. That's 200,000 hours of play time. 200 times the amount the testers managed, with only 1% of the time spent.

This is why game-breaking bugs aren't fixed.

The PS3 game breaking bug has been present in two other games of theirs. That excuse doesn't fly. Isn't it odd that they never sent out PS3 review copies? Almost like they knew about the problem.

In that case it is something that could have easily fallen into the category of legacy bug. That is a bug they know about from previous games but had no problem shipping those games with that bug in there and so feel safe shipping the current game with it in there and is something might only only get fixed if there is spare time in the schedule. Given the nature of this type of bug it would take a considerable amount of time to fix and so gets marked as a legacy bug and shipped

Except that they assured players on the PS3 that it was getting a "ton of attention" and was comparable to games on the other platforms. They also lied about fixing it in the past:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-07-bethesda-refutes-skyrim-ps3-lag-claims-by-fallout-nv-dev
And knowingly releasing a game with a game breaking bug is still a douche move no matter how you word it.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Everyone is to blame.
Mostly Bethesda: these are all the same problems that have been plaguing their games for years and even after building a whole new engine (that was supposed to fix all the problems) they?re still having the same issues. They know how the ps3 ram works. It?s gotten to the point where they have to either be completely pants on head retarded and/or they just really hate the ps3.
Sony should have some oversight at this point. There have been way too many shitty ports flushed onto the PS3 and Sony really needs to start regulating this crap or nobody is going to want a Playstation 4 except for the die hard sony fanboys...who have been dwindling anyway.
The gaming press is to blame. All I?ve seen are rave reviews for this game and we only started hearing about problems from users on forums. Reviewers (like Sony) should know by now that a Bethesda game needs to be broken in before you can see what the performance really is.
But also, most of you are to blame too. You didn?t need to be the Amazing Rando to figure out that Skyrim was going to freeze a lot...especially on the PS3. Bethesda is notorious for this kind of thing and people ran out and bought it at launch anyway. As much as I wanted to play Skyrim, I knew it would be broken so I didn?t buy it. If nobody pre-orders their next game, they might get the picture but as long as their games sell like crazy at launch, this crap will keep happening. Really what incentive to they have to make improvements if they?re making record profits?
Especially if you only go to the Escapist or gamefaq to complain. You also need to send your issues to Bethesda customer care and post them on their forums.
Sorry, but that?s the way I see it.

 

[TheLaughingMarcus]

As a Software Engineer I will say that C++ is to blame, its a very powerful language and requires a lot of memory management. On a project of as large a scale as Bethesda's norm it is nigh on impossible to catch every bug that will occur because memory is filling up after n-hours of playtime. This is also hard to find in testing because n hours of testing will require a lot of time invested in a single build. As stated above, the build may change every week.

In regards to testing in general; to test every single possibility is just unfeasible. Bethesda would need to hire many more testers to have any chance of ever releasing a game. This would result in both a delay in release times and in a massive price increase to pay for all the extra staff. Are you willing to pay ?80 to cover these expenses, when the bugs will be fixed shortly after release anyway? There is also the case that given enough staff and enough time, someone may not even think of one incredibly specific scenario they need to operate in order to produce a bug.

Personally I have to say I think it is a major dick move when a company releases a buggy game so that the paying public ends up playing what is for all intents and purposes a beta rather than a fully functioning game. If you happen to know me personally then you'll know how much it despise a company whose ethics allow this to happen. I can however say that this is not the case with Bethesda, they took on a massive project, they tested it as much as possible within their constraints and released an amazing game that a very small minority are having any trouble with. I know a large number of people who own the game, only two of them have noticed any bugs, both PC users. I am a PC user who has seen zero bugs. My PS3 playing mates with 100+ hours logged have no problems with the game. At the end of the day, no matter how loud the people complaining of bugs are, they are still the minority.

TL;DR People who complain will always strike louder than people who don't. In their tongue he is OP, whingerborn.