I wrote an impassioned defense of Obsidian yesterday, however I will say I am not satisfied with this answer.
It's like this, I can see how there are problems like this if they were forced to go with an earlier build right before release (which is what I suspected). However if this was the intended product and there is no such factor involved, then they did a horrible job. Simply put the bugs in this game are not minor glitches in isolated parts of the game. This is a situation where pretty much any player revving this up and head out and play normally and find tons of bugs and issues without doing anything even remotely odd. The slow downs, stuttering, and screen freezes in the PS-3 version I'm playing for example are bloody
obvious and affect everyone has a copy apparently. They can't tell me that hundreds of hours of testing this never uncovered problems like that.
Of course, I suspect a big part of the problem is that I think game developers increasingly lie about testing games. Games have always had bugs, errors, and problems, but there can be a case made (especially with console games) for there having been more solid products in previous generations.
Despite listing large testing teams, I don't see much in the way of open invites for beta testers on single player games, akin to what you saw on services like "PC Link". What's more when you DO see Beta Testing among the general gaming population, it's typically for things like MMORPGs and the game companies tend to treat it more like a free preview, or use it for stress testing. I've been in many Betas and I can hardly think of any cases where a design team has "snapped to it" and gotten on a bug immediatly after discovery. I've seen bugs, including some impressive ones, discovered months beforehand make it into the final release of a product, because the developers simply do not listen to their testers, or only listen to very specific ones that they hand pick.
I can see some of the concerns with this of course. Circulating a lot of beta software increases the risks of piracy and the theft of "trade secrets". Large numbers of beta testers also risk burning out portions of the audience before the game is released, so they wind up not buying the final product... among other concerns.
On a related note, the gaming industry has also gotten arrogant and stopped listening to their customers. The general attitude is that when it comes to feedback they need to seperate the signal from the noise, however they make this desician themselves, and typically wind up deciding whatever they want to hear is the "signal". In articles and such I've read developers talking about how they can't take thing seriously because of the overwhelming negative reactions they typically get.
While unrelated to "New Vegas", I think a good example of a company getting arrogant and ignoring it's fans is Bioware. With "Dragon Age II" they released information about the upcoming game, and being handed the character "Hawke". In the initial statements they said they were doing this to gauge reaction to see if they were on the right path. The response was overwhelmingly negative to be honest, this includes their own forums (where I checked). The most positive comments you saw in any great numbers seemed to be people taking an "I trust Bioware" position more than thinking it was a good idea. Oh sure, there WERE some people who liked the changes (reduction of character generation options, etc...) but they were actually the minority.
Right now you don't see as much negativity (but it's still there) largely because Bioware just pretty much decided "oh well, we're doing what we want to do anyway" and people resigned themselves to it, despite their preferances.
The point being that in gauging fan reaction, they pretty much ignore the results when they didn't like what they were. The same basic attitude can be said about companies in general and testing, when they even bother to do it properly. They really just don't give a frakk about it. Game companies seem to think that tester is the same as "freeloader" yet they create that themselves through their own attitude, and doing things like giving away "Beta Access" as a promotional gimmick, rather than looking for people who you know... actually want to test the game.
I might not be articulating this very well, and understand this isn't so much me picking on Obsidian as industry trends in general. Obsidian however probably took this to an extreme because without some kind of excuse akin to the ones I suspected, the only way a product like this could be released after testing is if they pretty much ignored the testers. I mean crud, all you have to do is walk forward enough and the PS-3 version is going to get slow down issues, that's not something a tester could miss.
