Virmire said:
I'm surprised it was playable at launch.
See, to me you seem to be giving the developers WAY too much slack.
When you hand someone sixty bucks for a service, do you really think it's okay for it to not work properly for over a month? Would you really be satisfied if it didn't even load before they got out their third patch? That's what that line says to me, and it wouldn't hold up in any other industry.
And to clarify, I'm with you so far as "weird things happening" not being a big deal. If mammoths only fly into the air if you happen to see them on a Tuesday, when it spawns partially inside a rock and the random number generator that's supposed to fix that rolls a 13, then that's fine. If a bandit NPC doesn't always talk to you before attacking for some reason like she's supposed to, that's fine. I don't expect them to test it rigorously enough to find all the instances where that happens, and that sort of thing is what patches are for.
However, on the PS3 at least there have been SYSTEMIC issues reported, which is another matter entirely. From what I understand, the game world tries to keep track of too many useless variables, and it attempts to do that in a way that slows the PS3 down over time. What this means is that, around the time you hit level 30, it's still keeping track of the stuff you moved on your way to town the first time and as such starts freezing up. The solution to this (though there are a few partial workarounds) is to create a new save, and do less on your way to the end of the game.
Now, THIS sort of bug, which has been reported well over a third of the time (so far, many people have yet to finish so we'll see how bad it gets), indicates to me that nobody sat down on a PS3 and played the whole game once to see if the system could handle the larger save files. This is the sort of thing you NEED to do, because if people can't finish the game and interact with your immersive world then why have one?
Personally, I am playing on the PS3 and am still at level 8. I am quite content with my purchase, enjoy every minute of it... but if my game freezes up consistently in a dozen more hours, forcing me to restart, I'm not going to be a happy camper. And I don't think I should be.
TL

R
Many people are not nitpicking, but pointing out glaring problems that break the game, not in ways that are easily fixed by reloading, but by DESIGN.