Obsidian Promises No More Bugs with Dungeon Siege III

[Twilight_guy]

And then all the programmers let out a long high pitch wail that pieced the heavens and sent many into hiding for fear of the Apocalypse.

1. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, no bugs good ones guys.
2. If you can program these kinds of tools why didn't you do this before? Yeah I know time constraints but this has been an issue with you guys for awhile why haven't you at least done this partially before?
3. Some poor schmuck has to go through all those reports... god rest his doomed soul.

 

[GoGo_Boy]

In some months there will be this news "Obsidian realized - programming an engine, not that easy".

 

[Paragon Fury]

Obsidian, your games being buggy and crashing has absolutely nothing to do with game engines. At all.

Instead, it has everything to do with you having a shitty, lazy, incompetent QA department, all of whom should have been fired and executed years ago.

Actually, scratch that. It seems like everyone who isn't an artist or involved in the story/character department has no idea what the hell they are doing.

As a matter of fact, the only reason most of your recent games even half work is because they've been based off things where 60% or so of the work was already done for you by someone not incompetent, IE: Bethesda or EPIC.

Stick to stories and characters and plots Obsidian. Let other people do all the actual gameplay work for you; trust me, it'll turn out better.

And I suppose you know all the internal workings to Obsidian then? Calling for the execution of someone because of a buggy game is ridiculous.

If had I done as shitty a job as Obsidian did with Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas, I would have fired myself for letting such a slipshod product out the door.

Alpha Protocol and New Vegas invented new, unheard of levels of fail and brokenness.

 

[John the Gamer]

I'll eat my shoes if they ever release a bug-free game. They're starting to act like Peter Molyneux in promising stuff they can't do. Software's too complicated to be bug free smartasses.

Would still be nice though. But how about you go and make Fallout 3 en NV bug-free first, eh?

 

[Exort]

but damn it now I wanna use Onyx. and as talented as the guys at obsidian are I trust them on this because working with your own tech is a fuck load easier. (people that've never programmed have no idea what a difference it makes)

Amen brother.

The other thing I find really annoying is when using 3rd party tech, quite alot of them forget to add "var skynet=false;" to the start of their code.
The machines are coming... if the zombies don't get us first.

Seeing they are a triple A developer they should have the money/time to work it out. They just chose not to. If it is a indie then it is a different story.

 

[Zaik]

Well, I can't really decide whether they'll just give up and let the idea fade into nothing, or end up releasing another buggy nightmare of a game.


I guess we'll see.

 

[Super Toast]

I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[corrupt]

"Obsidian is building its own engine for its next game" - bad idea

 

[JaredXE]

Great, when can they start fixing Alpha Protocol? Or releasing a bug-free sequel?

 

[Live4Lotus]

What a load of crap...over at nexus forums they have over 200 bug fixes for fallout NV, written by users and working good. Most of these were written before bugfix 1.2, and were not included in bugfix 1.2. They can't claim that they don't know about the problems; they can't even claim that they don't know how to fix them...they released an untested game and they refuse to support it...that is the bottom line. We will see if Dungeon Siege III follows this recipe; but I am not expecting much from an engine written by a company that can't even figure out how to use an engine written by someone else.

 

[ksn0va]

If it came with 90% less bugs, I would be satisfied!

 

[Dectilon]

It's good that they have a process now I suppose... Bugs have never prevented me from enjoying Obsidian's games, but that's mostly because I lucked out and didn't get crashes.

 

[Kellerb]

In other news:

Bethesda promises no more terrible dialogue with Elder Scrolls 5.
EA promises less shitty DRM with Mass Effect 3.
Ubisoft promises less WHAT THE FUCK endings and meaningless side bullshit for Assassin's Creed 3.
Lionhead promises less Reaver with Fable 4.

if you promise to whinge less.

 

[Acidwell]

Spoiler: snip

So, what was their excuse for Alpha Protocol?

Hey I liked that! FA:NV was worse for bugs. Much worse.

They're going to make they're own engine? Well all aboard the fail train.

Alot of developers make their own engines in-house. Won't be worse than Bethesda's engine. With any luck it won't produce games that have "Unreal Engine 3" written all over the visuals too.

As to why I think it will be better:

As a software dev I've lost count of the amount of times I've thrown my arms in the air out of frustration because some tool that I didn't code but have to use has some really irritating little shortcoming or bug that breaks something I did code. I can't fix it because I can't reverse engineer it and fix that little bug myself. Sometimes it's even something as apparently trivial as functions being named things that seem a little ass-backwards. Like using a right handed mouse when you're left handed. Arguably that would be *my* fault or problem, but if enough of it is like that the result is the same - it's unworkable.

A few times I've said screw it, thrown out whatever tool I was struggling to use and built my own.
It cost more in time, but the results were so much better because rather than using an old, buggy tool for a job that it wasn't explicitly designed for in the first place*, you are using a clean, fit for purpose tool specifically made to do exactly what *you* want it to do.

* Obviously a game engine is engineered to be a game engine - I'm talking about very specific tasks here. Obsidian know exactly what they want for their new game - they can make a lean, mean game engine machine to do that, do it well and do nothing else. Bethesda's engine would have had a decade worth of bloat and deprecation in it, and as we devs know the phrase "legacy support" does not a happy coder make.

This way they create a scalpel to replace the meat cleaver they were previously using to make the delecate incision required to implant an experience in someone's mind.

I see where you are coming from but Obsidian probably can't code anyway considering the witcher and neverwinter nights 2 were released around the same time but aside from loading issues CD Projekt RED made a game with far fewer bugs on the same engine. bugs are something Obsidian do which is a pity since they make pretty good games

 

[Avisell]

dont suppose you could've learnt that after fallout 3?

 

[Jandau]

I liked New Vegas. I liked KotOR2. I even thought NWN2 wasn't bad. But I honestly have no faith in the buglessness of Obsidian games. Unless they used the tons of money they made with New Vegas to hire an actual QA department, I don't see this changing.

On a brighter note, I hope Obsidian can continue the Dungeon Siege trend of sucking less and less with each game. DS1 was mediocre, DS2 was fairly decent, perhaps DS3 will actually be good?

Bug free? Show me a game with no bugs whatsoever. Anyone. I dare you.

I don't think it's about it being 100% bug free, but rather about Obsidian's tendency to release REALLY buggy games. There will always be bugs in games, but Obsidian takes it to new levels most of the time...

 

[lumenadducere]

I'm going to have to agree with the skeptics. KotOR 2, NWN 2, Alpha Protocol, F:NV...all of them had a very large number of bugs ranging from minor to major, so their track record isn't in their favor. I really enjoy their writing and some of their design mechanics, but I really have a love/hate thing with Obsidian's work. Here's hoping they actually get one right this time.

 

[DTWolfwood]

best of luck Obsidian, anything with less bugs will be seen as a great success. XD

i mean they have set the bar so low, any improvement will seem like a monumental leap forward at this point hehe.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Massive disbelieve

Obsidian since its inception hasn't produced a finished product. The closest thing would be if you just played Peragas and Nar Shadda in Kotor 2 and quit there.

Also PC releases of console ports suck. What would really get me interested is if he said "The PC version will have a totally different interface than the console versions."

Well, there sure isn't any way in hell I'm getting the ps3 version. That's more than likely going to be a complete mess. Whenever I get a multiplatform game for the ps3 I feel like it gets hardly any support compared to the other platforms.

If this is a new engine, it's going to be a little while before the mods fix it up for the PC but given that it's even a possibility makes that my preference.