Obsidian Does it Again

[SandroTheMaster]

After having watched the Spoiler Warning episodes that covered FO3 I was wondering whether you'd have anything to say about New Vegas.
I'm almost considering buying this but honestly these huge amounts of bugs are unacceptable, you have a Q&A people, you have programmers, have them work together, hell DELAY THE GAME WHILE YOU FIX IT. Valve may always release really late but atleast their games don't tend to be horribly broken, unlike anything by Bethesda or Obsidian apparently. Its suprisingly the two companies even continue to have anything of a reputation.

Well, I'm not trying to say Obsidian or Bethesda can get a free pass, but, unsurprisingly, Valve (and Blizzard) makes both incredibly linear and heavily scripted games where you have no decisions to make and your actions don't make a lick in the overall gameworld outside of the enforced one-way rails they put for you.

I'm just saying, they're not using formulas that have any realistic chance of being screwed no matter how hard they tried.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Fallout 3 was the buggiest piece of shit that dared to wear the title GOTY.
If there ever was an event that made me lose faith in the industry, it was that, because Fallout 3 did not deserve that distinction.

And now its cash-cow sibling is out, and guess what the #1 topic I keep hearing about it is?
Oh yes, the bugs. The virtual sniffles. The Crash to Desktops.

I'm wondering myself if this could have been sidestepped, even by Obsidian.
Gamebryo is a terrible, horrible game engine. It looks shiny, but if I wanted a tech-demo/screen shot generator, I'd use the Crytek Engine (oh, and at least this engine wouldn't crash all the bloody time!)

 

[gl1koz3]

I see you have had a bad experience.

I certainly didn't, as I used the handy console commands "save" and "load". And the load times are mostly under 3 seconds, so I'm double happy. It outweighed my problems with the crashing by a huge lot.

But it's funny how they didn't notice the problems.

EDIT: Why the hell I'm getting so much candy badges? It's not bad. Just weird.

 

[Starke]

Never seen anyone so quick to dismiss Neverwinter Nights 2 and Mask of the Betrayer. It had rough edges, yes, but it was hardly "broken."

Shamus has a long standing feud with the Blacklake district. As for Mask of the Betrayer? He refused to play it because he didn't want to "reward bad behavior" or some such. I'm inclined to respond with "meh", except then he insists on continuing to bash NWN2.

 

[IWrestledABearOnce..]

I'm running an unpatched Fallout: New Vegas not through steam, and I've yet to have any problems; if anything it's less buggy than Fallout 3 after a bazillion patches... It's probably just me. :/
(And the quest bug you were talking about is a glitch, but it doesn't really matter seeing as you have to fight about 15 hulking masses of invisible to do it rather than just taking the alternate quest and pwn1ng a weak ghoul.)

 

[Dragunai]

The physical year? 2010
The year according to game quality? 1985

I never saw Amiga and Nes titles doing this!
Granted they were side scrolling coloured pixels but they were functional.

Thanks to things like XBL and PSN game developers have become lazy and complacent. They launch broken titles (EA style) then sit and patch them 'til the fan base stops objecting (unlike EA who never patch their games to full working order) that they paid £40 for something less functional than a Russian Car manufacturer (Ah god bless the old school lada's).

It may just be that gamers have become content to buy garbage and as long as enough of us do, they wont suffer the chronic back handed slap in sales figures they need to make them sit up and note down to stop releasing garbage.

We the minority of intelligent gamers, here on the escapist, cannot change the world because too many 12yr olds cry until their mom buys them the latest hot title that brightly coloured ads convince them is THE game to own. Sad but true story :<

 

[CronoT]

It took only one lesson for me to learn that Obsidian was a crap studio. KOTOR II was a massive failure as a game, and it's one of the very few games I have that I beat only once, and then traded it in.

Based on Shamus' description of the other games, Obsidian strikes me as a studio that doesn't make it own games, but rather takes over projects that other studios are too busy to finish.

 

[potemkin.hr]

"This was like scratching off a winning lottery ticket and then getting hit by a car."
I see a "My name is Earl" reference

 

[Calbeck]

"Not a nice, clean crash, but one of those awful lockups where you have to fight to bring up Task Manager so you can kill the game manually."

Okay, assuming no one else has pointed it out yet (really, I can't spare the time to read 200+ posts just to check for that), this was a common issue in both Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (the engine both FO3 and NV use). Not Obsidian's fault, there; blame Bethesda.

Haven't had the problems with my MANUAL saves reverting, and I've never used quick save, but auto save hasn't advanced since an early point in the game. Same for my roomie (he got his via Steam, but mine was in-the-box). Since this sort of thing, to my knowledge and experience, NEVER happened with FO3, Obsidian's got to take the hit for doing something that broke the friggin' engine.

The slots issue? Yeah. I got three oranges, the max payout, on a max bet...and got NOTHING. No crash; it just didn't pay out. "You have lost 200 chips". I noticed prior to that that some of my other wins also weren't paying out, but others were --- bailing out of the game and going back in fixed the problem (and later, I had the very distinct pleasure of being punted from a casino after exactly two slot pulls broke their bank).

 

[DayDark]

Wow I really can't believe the amount of people here bitching about the game and saying it's a shit game just because of the bugs. This game was better than Fallout 3 in every way.

The writing is superior, the general storylines are more believable and less stupid. There are more weapons and unique weapons are actually unique. Intelligent super mutants like they should be. More companions who have their own quests and backstories. An improved crafting system that expands to all different kinds of items. Much more likeable characters with very different personalities. An expansive area to travel and discover. Way more factions. More perks, that actually do something instead of the stupid "increase (skill) by X points". A more difficult skill progression that requires you to choose what kind of player you are and makes it impossible to be a "jack-of-all-trades". Hardcore mode that makes the game much more immmersive and challenging. The ability to finish the main quest with just speech.

Oh and one of the best parts; a fantastic voice actor roster with more than triple the amount there were in Fallout 3, and all of which have skill that allows them to change their voice instead of use the same voice over and over again. Now not every second character has the exact same voice, even if they're voiced by the same person, and the actual voices themselves are far superier.

And all of you are bitching about bugs. Tsk Tsk Tsk. It's a shame to see such a great and intelligent game go to waste on people who are crying because they saw a rock pop in or the game crashed which happens on heaps of other games.

No one is ever going to read comments so far behind, but i have to say that i agree with you in all points except that the Mainstory in Fallout 3 was not believable. I would even say the mainstory in New Vegas is a bit weaker. I mean, why can't the legion not just swim acros the river and ambush the NCR, cutting them off from the dam entirely and then just starve them out of there instead of relying on a frontal assault...which even failed once before.

I played this game for about 4 days now and so far i didn't encounter serious bugs except for one broken quest and the broken animal vs animal fight in the Thorn.

Radiation in water can be cleaned out through certain substances such as sand. There was no need to build a gigantic water purifier and sacrifice people to get it working and for the Enclave to wage a war over it.

Did you just use real world in a post apoc game with super mutants, and radiated scorpions? hate F3 all you want, but don't ever use real science to justify it.

 

[I_am_acting]

KOTOR 2, not enough dev. time ...... and this ISN'T their fault how?... the only reason time would have run out is if they FAILED to complete the game on the date they agreed with the published.. and even AFTER cutting a shit load out it was still a broken, buggy mess... so miscalulation and poor coding effort is a GOOD advertiement, or something they should be excused for?

that wasn't the original date that was settled on however, lucasarts changed the date to get the game out for christmas of 2004, OB couldn't have just dropped the project cause they had already sunk a fair amount of time and money in to the project

neverwinter nights 2, dev. team didn't have enough resources .... and again, why isn't this their fault... they took on a job that was too big for them to handle and ended up screwing it up... how is this any different to someone else mucking up a task in any other walk of life... still boils down to bad workmanship.

being a smaller company they didn't have a very large supply of cash or manpower, in such a set up these companies REALLY need support from their publisher, often times however they don't get the support they need from said publisher and they need to cut corners, it's a reaction to a situation beyond their control

alpha protocol... I looked for that artical.. even searched for it, but didn't see it (your link doesn't point to anything)... HOWEVER.. as I remember things only started to get bad when an exec announced rather publically (and this very site picked it up) that the game 'didn't feel rpg enough'.. which was pretty piss poor considering that's EXACTLY what Ob were aiming for.. any changes that were made were surely to bring the game back into the vision that the publishers originally bought (pure speculation, however even given a certain amount of meddling (which still isn't a certainty) people were waiting for another disaster and it happened, the fact that people knew before hand speaks volumes for what people know about Ob's ability to make a polished game... and that rep falls squarely at their own feet for only producing crap in the past.

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/14001-alpha-protocol-absolute-failure-of-production-says-anonymous-dev/

granted in alpha protocol's case they did have some really idiotic Executive producers at OB which caused some problems, but SEGA's interference in the project prevented them from polishing any one feature and AP shows for that

AND as for Ob not being big enough in general to handle their projects... this is UNTRUE... they were given THREE of the largest franchises to work with and NO publisher would give that kind of work away to a company they didn't feel had the general resources to handle properly (we're talking amount of staff and general working knowledge here... not competance).. and rememeber publishers do their own studies in these matters before passing work off.... so they WERE big enough to handle the jobs given to them, because everyone involved considered them to be so.

just cause those involved think they're big enough to handle something doesn't make it so, just like with a government project those involved will usually underestimate costs, required labor time, and number of laborers needed to complete said project in a timely manner and have a quality product to sell at the end

It ALL boils down to.. IT'S STILL OB's FAULT.

if i were a soldier in a squad and we lost a position to an opposing force cause of my squad commander's poor leadership would that be my fault? no, so blaming OB for this is a case of did not do the research [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidNotDoTheResearch], but of course, by all means keep blaming a dev. team that is at least willing to take risks

 

[nipsen]

Why are Valve and Bioware on that list?

..because CS and the Source engine has been a work in progress for as long as the engine has existed? Half-Life 2 was, at launch, something that you wouldn't quite brag about in terms of stability, or lack of artefacts, or edges that didn't fit perfectly, or corners in the dark parts without walls and colours, and so on..

But hey, we forgave that, because the games were fun, and Half-Life 2 didn't run well on any computer that existed at the time when the game launched anyway - so whatever.

Bioware - have you played Neverwinter Nights? The first game? Or the expansions? What about Jade Empire - now that was one crazily bugged game. Fighting mechanics.. man.. Loved the story, though, and the graphic style, so hey. Then we have Baldur's Gate. It does, as a matter of fact, have a MONSTROUS AMOUNT OF BUGS IN IT!!!!! But it was such a huge game, so.. Kotor 1 had a couple of broken quests - one of them featured in an article on this site, because the guy who wrote it apparently managed to make it to the first mission before starting to write.

Anyway, the thing is that most of these games came out for PCs that had vastly different architectures and setups. And while obviously it's easy to point out the difference between logical bugs in mission scripts, versus game-engine problems that cannot be pinned down specifically (i.e., broken quest-flags versus the loot while aim-mechanic in Fallout3 and New Vegas).. at least if you actually have played games before.. We all expected those bugs. It wasn't a plus, or something that made the games better. But it was expected that some of those bugs happened.

With Morrowind, on the other hand, and various games that turned up at this particular time. And now all the way to Dragon Age and so on - that actually were made by relatively large studios - we've seen something else. We have sloppy programming routines that end up in two problems: very streamlined writing and quest-composition. Since the mechanics for crafting quests and integrating them into the engine - developing a toolkit - isn't big on the agenda. Along with shoddy execution of scenes that could very likely have been a lot better if they were polished more. That's what we have when the developers are not rewarded for doing their jobs well, and when publishers are rewarded for pushing out games as fast as possible. Even when we know that game-studios are more than large enough now to actually support more than that garage-developer style that we did accept more than 10 years ago.

In addition, developing now does not entail looking at vastly scaling hardware, and solutions to tweak the game to very different architectures. This is something that becomes more and more easy as consoles/multicore computers dominate the market. ...unless, of course, you're Obsidian, and need to cut content in order to get the game onto an xbox mastered dvd.

Anyway. So why does Shamus pull out Obsidian as the horror-example of how games are shoddily developed? I don't know. Maybe it's another great overture to actually calling attention to how modern games developed by fairly large companies shouldn't actually have bugs in them. By.. drawing out the big, big, bad wolf here: Obsidian Entertainment. The big player.

(And by the way, the NWN2 engine and toolkit improved a lot over NWN1.. How does Shamus not know this?)

 

[Beffudled Sheep]

*Words*

Sir, do you read Sutter Cane? Sorry I had to

I haven't experienced any noticible bugs so far, just a few freezes and one almost freeze. *shrugs* I guess they'll hit me eventually.

 

[Dana22]

8 hours. No bugs, no crashes, nothing bad happened with the game. Am I THAT lucky ?

 

[Krantos]

Finally! Jesus H. Christ, I thought I was the only one that realized that Obsidian was terrible at Q&A. Every time I bring up their previous games as evidence, people trot out the "it's the publisher's fault" arguments. Once? Maybe. Twice? Not likely. Thrice? No way.

And as Shamus said, they clearly haven't learned anything when all their titles have problems like this.

I respect the things that Obsidian tries to accomplish with their games (like the decisions in AP), but they're woefully incompetent when it comes to implementing them.

I feel so glad that someone with some notoriety has finally called them out on it, because it feels like I've been shouting in the dark all these years.

 

[Sir Kemper]

My game crashes 95% of the time when you leave a building in the starting town, yes, THE FIRST TOWN IN THE GAME HAS A GAME BREAKING BUG.

I agree with you 100% on wanting your 60$ back.

 

[Sartan0]

Ah the simple joys of console gaming 10 hours and no problems, its simple yet effective.

The funny thing is I have sank 20 hours into this game and have yet to get a single bug issue. On a PC.

 

[ChupathingyX]

Wow I really can't believe the amount of people here bitching about the game and saying it's a shit game just because of the bugs. This game was better than Fallout 3 in every way.

The writing is superior, the general storylines are more believable and less stupid. There are more weapons and unique weapons are actually unique. Intelligent super mutants like they should be. More companions who have their own quests and backstories. An improved crafting system that expands to all different kinds of items. Much more likeable characters with very different personalities. An expansive area to travel and discover. Way more factions. More perks, that actually do something instead of the stupid "increase (skill) by X points". A more difficult skill progression that requires you to choose what kind of player you are and makes it impossible to be a "jack-of-all-trades". Hardcore mode that makes the game much more immmersive and challenging. The ability to finish the main quest with just speech.

Oh and one of the best parts; a fantastic voice actor roster with more than triple the amount there were in Fallout 3, and all of which have skill that allows them to change their voice instead of use the same voice over and over again. Now not every second character has the exact same voice, even if they're voiced by the same person, and the actual voices themselves are far superier.

And all of you are bitching about bugs. Tsk Tsk Tsk. It's a shame to see such a great and intelligent game go to waste on people who are crying because they saw a rock pop in or the game crashed which happens on heaps of other games.

No one is ever going to read comments so far behind, but i have to say that i agree with you in all points except that the Mainstory in Fallout 3 was not believable. I would even say the mainstory in New Vegas is a bit weaker. I mean, why can't the legion not just swim acros the river and ambush the NCR, cutting them off from the dam entirely and then just starve them out of there instead of relying on a frontal assault...which even failed once before.

I played this game for about 4 days now and so far i didn't encounter serious bugs except for one broken quest and the broken animal vs animal fight in the Thorn.

Radiation in water can be cleaned out through certain substances such as sand. There was no need to build a gigantic water purifier and sacrifice people to get it working and for the Enclave to wage a war over it.

Did you just use real world in a post apoc game with super mutants, and radiated scorpions? hate F3 all you want, but don't ever use real science to justify it.

Uhhh, the Fallout series is not stupid, the originals and NV have something F3 lacked, background lore and the fact that they were proper sci fi's. A proper sci fi uses science to create events, people, places and technology without going overboard. In the originals, the use of radiation and FEV was never a "do-anything" power, like the force from Star Wars. Everything is explained, and simple things like cleaning radiation, are taken into account, because if they aren't, it makes the game's story stupid and pointless, like Fallout 3's.

Lets put it like this: If I made a game where a government agency created mutants and I had to fight them and kill them. However, the game was realistic and I could be killed in one shot, I had breath, real time injuries etc. However, I can only use melee weapons. Why? Why can't I just attack them from far away with a rifle?

That's what made Fallout 3's story lacking. Why couldn't people just clean the radiation out? Why do we need to put heaps of tech, years and people's lives into something that people could do themselves?

Also I don't hate Fallout 3. I just think the others are better.