Obsidian: Fallout New Vegas Has Bugs Because It's Big

[Ken Sapp]

"I think when you create a game as large as Fallout 3 or New Vegas you are going to run into issues that even a testing team of 300 won't spot, so we're just trying to address those as quickly as possible and so is Bethesda," he said.

Valid point, however when the bugs ones that existed in the previous game and were fixed before this one was started the argument falls on its' face. And that is not even considering the wealth of bug fixes built by the modding community which could have been incorporated along with the mod community inspired content.

I am very much enjoying the game but regressing your video drivers 2 years or tricking the game into thinking they are that old should never be a required fix. I could understand regressing them a few months to what was current at the time the game was finalized but not two years.

 

[IWrestledABearOnce..]

Oblivion. InFamous. Prototype. Saints Row 2. Many others. All big. All playable. Shitheads at Obsidian are inexcusable. We're not talking about some bugs, we're talking about completely broken game.

Oblivion? Lacking in glitches? It may be one of my favorite games, but that game was beyond bugged.


The real problem is that Obsidian probably tests their games on the latest machines, latest software/hardware, and specific versions OS's. There's no excusing the bugs (Which I've yet to encounter after 13 hours of gameplay) but most of these problems seem to be due to either the systems people are running, or something that could be changed by just taking a different route.

 

[Aurora219]

These bugs aren't anything to do with the size of the game though. It's a corrupt save file system, animation errors.. nothing to do with scale, few to do with the myriad of quests...

I don't understand the validity of the argument. A better response would be "Yeah, we're sorry. We'll sort it out ASAP."

 

[Ken Sapp]

Oblivion. InFamous. Prototype. Saints Row 2. Many others. All big. All playable. Shitheads at Obsidian are inexcusable. We're not talking about some bugs, we're talking about completely broken game.

Oblivion? Lacking in glitches? It may be one of my favorite games, but that game was beyond bugged.


The real problem is that Obsidian probably tests their games on the latest machines, latest software/hardware, and specific versions OS's. There's no excusing the bugs (Which I've yet to encounter after 13 hours of gameplay) but most of these problems seem to be due to either the systems people are running, or something that could be changed by just taking a different route.

If you have yet to encounter any bugs then you have been lucky. And considering one of the "official" fixes is to roll your videos drivers back to a two year old version I doubt they are testing on the latest greatest hardware. Can bugs be excused? OF course, any game of this size and complexity is going to have bugs but it is inexcusable when they have bugs that had been fixed previously.

 

[kouriichi]

Huh. There were bugs? Ive racked up over 24 hours of gameplay and havent noticed a single one.

 

[Vrach]

Well, on one hand, they're right. The bigger it is, the more trouble you're gonna have along the way. That's why big things take longer to produce, remember, fixing and optimizing the code are FAR bigger jobs than just typing it up in the first place.

But still... they've had this engine run through 2 different games now, one virtually the same. Old bugs still being there is entirely inexcusable because those should be a lot easier to locate, especially with the time they had.

That all said, I've been playing it for a few days now and I didn't really feel the game was "plagued" with bugs at all. Granted, it crashed once, but it felt like a one time thing and in a game that loads that quickly and where saving a game doesn't actually take any time, that wasn't really an issue at all.

Civ 5 on the other hand takes a good 5 minutes to load up all together and start and even after that it lags like all friggin' hell afterwards, takes 10-15 seconds to save, takes forever to play out the enemy civs (without entertaining you in the meantime by showing you what's happening) and all that crap. Not to mention the occasional random crashes and the fact there's not a chance in hell I can load a game within a map as that's a 100% chance instant crash, no questions asked (and FYI, my specs surpass the recommended specs, it's just that the game was optimized by a drunken monkey during a banana festival)

So ya... lay off Obsidian. Same shit flew about for Alpha Protocol and it just pointlessly tanked the sales of the game for no reason and caused them to drop the idea of a (really, really well deserved) sequel. Maybe there was some issue on the consoles, but I played through the game twice and I don't remember a single bug. Meanwhile other games have far more bugs, far shittier optimization, requiring ridiculous computer specs for what they offer and get knights in fanboi armours waving "get AlienWare" flags.

 

[Luke Cartner]

As much as I feel for those people who are experiencing bugs i have to say I've played it alot and not come across any bug except for the save file bug inherit with steam cloud. Other than that I've seen no real bugs per se.. Maybe my experience is not typical but I suspect those experiencing issues are in the minority..

To be honest if some one is releasing a game as big as FO:NV on PC, xbox 360 and PS3 then issues are bound to slip through. Everyone needs to calm down about it, unless the game simply wont work for them.. I could see how that would be upsetting..

 

[BreakfastMan]

One question: Why all the Obsidian hate? The game is released 2 years after the previous game, which means work was probably not started on it until about a year and a half to a year ago (which is a quarter of the time it took to make Fallout 3). Do you expect it to be bug free? I find it amazing that they actually managed to have it content complete by this time.

So if I turned in a shitty 10 page essay, but then told my teacher I did it all Sunday night she'd give me an A? Hell no.

You would have excuse if the essay was assigned Saturday night though, which is how I see the situation.

 

[ender214]

My friends have been playing the game for a huge amounts of time the last couple of days. I haven't heard one bug complaint from them. I have Fallout 3 (waiting on Fallout New Vegas in hopes of actually being able to finish applying to colleges), and the only problem I have are occasional crash to desktops, which is easily remedied by using the quicksave function.

Maybe your computers just suck?

 

[nYuknYuknYuk]

One question: Why all the Obsidian hate? The game is released 2 years after the previous game, which means work was probably not started on it until about a year and a half to a year ago (which is a quarter of the time it took to make Fallout 3). Do you expect it to be bug free? I find it amazing that they actually managed to have it content complete by this time.

So if I turned in a shitty 10 page essay, but then told my teacher I did it all Sunday night she'd give me an A? Hell no.

You would have excuse if the essay was assigned Saturday night though, which is how I see the situation.

Every game has deadlines to meet, and none of them are as buggy as New Vegas.

 

[Opeth1290]

WOW.....where to start here people...First off I'am a HUGE Bethesda openworld/rpg fan as well as an Obsidian fan and I have to say...this game was released before it was ready. What happened here is just plain laziness, failure to listen to the testers and failure to play through their own game. So far I have discovered MANY bugs/glitches and to be honest (as much as I love the fallout series) Iam ready to take a a steaming dump on the game a send it right back. Problems so far:
1. lots of NPC's fall through the ground and pop back up only to repeat the process over and over (enemies IN mountains and allys falling through what seems to be solid ground)
2. RANDOM freezing (can happen ANYWHERE)
3. Hiccups every 10 mins while adventuring the wastes
4. Factions hating you for no reason (even if your Idolized)
5. THIS IS THE BIG ONE: Broken quests....IE: YOU CANNOT GET POWER ARMOR TRAINING FROM THE BROTHERHOOD ELDER, he will tain you but your character will freeze in one spot immediatly after. I have tried this over 35 times (including leaving the area and waiting/sleeping for over a week in sets of 24 hours) and yes (I'm sorry) but it freezes eveytime...I even looked this up to make sure I wasn't the only one and go figure...I'm not.

As far as I'm concerned these problems (especially #5) should have been taken care of BEFORE the games release date...even if we would have had to wait an extra 2 months at least the game would have worked semi-properly. I guess its expecting to much to want a finished product

 

[(LK)]

Oh yeah, that huuge gameworld. There's so much you have to test, so in all that expanse you can't possibly test everything, especially if you don't even bother to wade into the main menu and make sure you can load saved games.

I agree, it's very difficult to playtest a vast expansive game... when your sampling process is so deeply freaking dysfunctional in the first place.

He is explaining why the game has bugs, but not in the way he intended to. The team makes stupid mistakes and refuses to accept accountability for them or admit to them, therefore making stupid mistakes becomes standard operating procedure. If you're convinced nothing is wrong with what you're doing, why bother doing better?

 

[(LK)]

Oblivion. InFamous. Prototype. Saints Row 2. Many others. All big. All playable. Shitheads at Obsidian are inexcusable. We're not talking about some bugs, we're talking about completely broken game.

Oblivion? Lacking in glitches? It may be one of my favorite games, but that game was beyond bugged.


The real problem is that Obsidian probably tests their games on the latest machines, latest software/hardware, and specific versions OS's. There's no excusing the bugs (Which I've yet to encounter after 13 hours of gameplay) but most of these problems seem to be due to either the systems people are running, or something that could be changed by just taking a different route.

It's not even that, they're just doing something painfully wrong in their methodology. People losing their savegames was a universally present bug. Very, very few people at all avoided this bug, and it even affected people on consoles.

The only way you can miss something that constant, ubiquitous, and repeatable is if your testing is simply being handled with deeply incompetent procedures for how to conduct tests in the first place. Hardware/software is a confounding variable, but not the root cause. When your bugs are core functionality of the game like loading saves, and are overlooked even inside of a walled garden environment like a console, it's not because your game is big, it's because you're unskilled.

 

[OManoghue]

There are a few weird bugs, but I'm level 21 with like 30 hours, (horribly addicted) and my only complaint is the 3000 loading screens.

 

[Imat]

So a team of 300 people couldn't catch a simple bug like lagging and the occasional freezing?

So...You pick perhaps the MOST complicated bug of the game to attack. Very classy. I can see you don't quite understand how videogames work.

Speaking as a programmer, they've got a valid point. Speaking as a gamer, who knows how huge these worlds are, they've still got a valid point. I'm not sure why anyone would think otherwise.

 

[Snotnarok]

I'm soooo glad I passed on the game, I new it was going to be bug city.

 

[Quiet Stranger]

So a team of 300 people couldn't catch a simple bug like lagging and the occasional freezing?

So...You pick perhaps the MOST complicated bug of the game to attack. Very classy. I can see you don't quite understand how videogames work.

Speaking as a programmer, they've got a valid point. Speaking as a gamer, who knows how huge these worlds are, they've still got a valid point. I'm not sure why anyone would think otherwise.

you shush your mouth

UPDATE: I have found a new glitch, it's quite funny really, in the train tunnel close to the Nellis Army Base there's this room with some steps going up to it. When I first went into the room at first I thought I fell through a trap door or something but what I saw was my character (through FPV) falling through the world. I thought I was dead but apparently I was teleported back to the entrance into the train tunnel, I went back to the floor and what i saw was cans that would endlessly into the floor and then teleport back again in a continuous loop, it really puts life into perspective.

 

[SirDerick]

Some bugs are ok.
But the caravan card game bug? come on guys.

 

[mattttherman3]

I say bullshit Obsidian, when you can't even release your own game bug free(Alpha Protocol). Why would I believe you now? Every single game you have made has been full of bugs, and there always seems to be some excuse. Oh they made us release it early! Bullshit, hire more people or grow a back bone.

 

[(LK)]

So a team of 300 people couldn't catch a simple bug like lagging and the occasional freezing?

So...You pick perhaps the MOST complicated bug of the game to attack. Very classy. I can see you don't quite understand how videogames work.

Speaking as a programmer, they've got a valid point. Speaking as a gamer, who knows how huge these worlds are, they've still got a valid point. I'm not sure why anyone would think otherwise.

They'd have a valid point if the point didn't require that people ignore the number of basic functions where easily repeatable bugs were present across platforms and software configurations.

Saves were broken, the Caravan minigame was broken, animations and meshes were broken. These are not things that the size of the game affects the difficulty of noticing. They are things the customer will be encountering immediately and repeatedly throughout their experience and so they are things you make a point of checking thoroughly and repeatedly if you are a professional game developer.

I would agree that things at the fringes of the experience, like side quests etc, things the player may only encounter once in their experience, these are things that having a large game makes difficult to debug all the way.

Unfortunately, most of the most severe bugs were not these things, so this gentleman is just pulling the usual dysfunctional BS of saying "our failures are not our fault and we do not intend to improve ourselves as a business".