Bvenged said:
Are you even a programmer / ever written a program in your life? The sheer amount of incompatibilities that come up when you add even just 1 more user option is incredible. It's frustrating and heavy on the workload. Bethesda IS Bathesda, a developer who makes THE MOST interactive open worlds going. Sure sure you've got WoW & Borderlands, but really they're just scripted sequences packed together under one overarching variable script - so variations pretty much equal 1; and other than "go kill X beasts that respawn" and "go to X location and kill/collect X" there's no variation whatsoever. They don't allow for it so the devs don't have to worry about what Bathesda do:
"What if the player did this, then this, then this, then this? - then linked them up to this, or did it in a multitude of amounts of possible approaches?. What if they go somewhere before we want them to? What if this NPC dies before during after this quest, and they're tied to these quests? It's a massive domino effect for every single changing variable."
As a matter of fact, i have, and my conclusion in my previous post (which you even arrogantly PM'de me to tell me was "wrong") is based on actual analysis of Bethesdas games and their design decisions, many of them which they have revealed themself when they are forced to respond to why one of their bazillion bugs once again cannot be fixed.
And the simple fact is that most of Skyrims problems are caused already in the planning phase of the game, and therefore make it into the core mechanics (which in turn means that it makes it almost impossible for fix, for Bethesda or any developers in the community).
Lets take the PS3 FPS-problem which was mentioned on this site a few weeks ago. Bethesda came out and proclaimed that the bug was pretty much unfixable because the cause lies in one of the core systems of the game. What Bethesda did was that they made it so the game records an event EVERY SINGLE TIME the player touches an object in the game, which eventually adds up to huge chunks of memory being wasted, which causes the FPS issues to the point where the game becomes totally unplayable (this, btw, is also part of the reason for the memory leaks on the PC version, which is why there are fixes out there so the game can use more than 2 gigs of RAM).
Any other game developer with even half a brain could have told Bethesda already in the DESIGN phase of the game that this system was a recipe for disaster. Hell, even i could have told them, and I'm not even a game developer. Now, since the system is an important piece on how the world works, i wouldn't suggest scrapping it unless it is going to make the game unplayable no matter what, but almost any other game studio in the world would have started looking for alternatives to the system. So lets analyze it for a bit.
Now the system was put in place to make it possible for to create the "every action has consequence" system. The idea is to give the game a way to retroactively look up every action the player has done in the past (including picking up objects, talking to NPC's etc.), and potentially modify the game based on it. I use the word "potentially", because most of the time the system either isn't used or could be implemented in a different way.
So lets consider what Bethesda could have done instead.
Now part of the system also records which NPC's you have talked to. This means that every single time you talk to an NPC, the system records that event on a global level, and memory is used. This is a system that would have been much smarter to instead tie to each individual NPC's (in case of NPC's there is procedurally generated, these can be tied to a "group", similarly to when you kill an important quest NPC, another equivalent NPC takes its place with the same options), and only loaded when you are close to an NPC or have to interact with them.
Another part of the system is that it records every single time you pick up or move an item, and adds that to the global event of the current game. And i, for the love of god, simply can't figure out why they felt why that was necessary to do it that way. Individual items that have a significance in certain places (like house decoration) can - or rather, SHOULD - be tied to the instance of the house rather than a global list, so the game doesn't need to have that items properties loaded when you're elsewhere. Items of quest-significance are much more rare than items that aren't, so these can also be tied to an individual list to prevent cluttering. Items that aren't yours (and therefore relates to stealing) can be handled by an individual stealing system that is much less bug-prone and much less intensive on the system.
There were several more elegant (read: not completely retarded) ways to handle this particular system. Even amateur programmers could have told Bethesda that global lists with either variables or objects that are meant to be kept loaded at all times should be limited in size, but someone forgot to give them that memo, so they created a single unified list that records EVERYTHING a player does in a game that takes well over 100 hours to complete, and didn't manage to figure out even BEFORE they implemented it that this would become a problem? It's laughable.
And that's just one example out of many. Other things that makes me laugh is the reusing of old systems from their previous games, when those systems have already proven buggy more than once.
There simply is no excuse for this. Once a system has proven faulty, you don't just reuse it. You either fix the problems in the new iteration, or you scrap it and find an alternative and more elegant solution. Bethesda did neither of these, and i can't for the love of god remember any game in human history from other developers that abandoned common sense in it's development to even remotely the same degree.
So to return to your last paragraph:
To fully patch the game would take a decade. Even The Unofficial Oblivion patch is still being updated by the community TO THIS DAY, and even that had some troubles with breaking things when trying to fix others.
...the problem (as i just showcased) is that the CORE systems of the game is broken, and any decent developing company would (and should) have picked up on even in the very early development phase. It's still being fixed (or attempted fixed) because the problems are rooted so deep in the gamse, and should have been eliminated from the very start. But once you decide to go with broken systems like the one i just described above, you end up in a situation where fixing it simply isn't feasable and you have to start over (which is why Bethesda should have realized this very early in development).
Skyrim can best summarized as an outstanding and unique recipe with a mediocre cook. The recipe is still amazing, and is still going to be popular for the people who like that kind of food, but it would still be 10 times better if Gordon Ramsay was cooking, and it's a simple fact that once you've burned the food, you have no choice but to start over if you want to get it right.