An open letter to Obsidian Entertainment

[Josan]

Encountering bugs just seems to be the luck of the draw. I guess I've been lucky. The only issues I've really had were the freezing (which is quite common) and an issue with Veronica where, if I go to the BoS bunker with her, she appears on the other side of the interior door and doesn't do her dialogue to get us in. The fix was leaving, fast travelling to a nearby location then watching Veronica run past me, all the way back to the bunker, where she then runs up to the door and says her lines.

 

[100LBSofDogmeat]

Honestly, as someone who actually programs for a living and for fun, bugs are more rife than one would expect. Especially when dealing with vastly complicated systems. I'd guess most players who bitch about it have little idea what goes into making these things.

Is it strange that I've played New Vegas for 100+ hours and encountered almost no bugs?

Nope, I'm on playthrough #4 and only ran into a clipping bug twice.

Edit: Just to be clear, I haven't experienced any real problems with New Vegas myself. I did however get a chance to experience Alpha Protocol and that was a fuck fest.

Really? That sucks for you. I've done three playthrough's of AP and ran into no bugs. The controls sucked a bit because I think they were designed with the XBox in mind as opposed to PC.

 

[Lexx]

I've made 9 AP playthroughs and the only bugs I've encountered have been issues with the interface (menu buttons shown over each other) and thats it. :>

/Edit: Beside this, none of my game endings have been the same. It was always something different.

 

[Ausdoerrt]

Why does this come up again? *sigh*

One thing I can say - even if the guy's right, and all Obsidian games are buggy abominations, there's a significant difference between them and Beth/BW; it's that they feel like the bugs shouldn't be there and make a visible effort to fix it. Beth gets the fans to fix their mistakes, instead. Obsidian/CPR are the likes that release day 1 patches. BW releases day 1 DLCs. Shouldn't that distinction deserve some credit for the former??

 

[archont]

The more streamlined a product is, the easier it is to test and remove the bugs, not to mention that there's simply less places a bug could happen.

The more complex the system gets in terms of branching, dependence on external states the more potential for creating a rich and believable world.

If the goal of NV was to create a bug-free game then it would be a post-apocalyptic fetch-quest simulator with the depth of MMO-esque auto-generated quests.

Obsidian took the road less traveled, stretching their resources thin. It was inevitable that a game under those circumstances would be buggy. But seeing as how very few studios make decent RPGs nowadays, there aren't many options to choose from. While I don't like my game crashing, quests freezing or saves getting corrupted just like the next guy, it's a price I can pay for playing a decent RPG.

 

[Elven6]

On a lighter note, I tried the Dungeon Siege III demo on 360 yesterday and I didn't come across any bugs, technical issues, etc. Of course it's simply a demo but the signs are looking good so far. It seems having in house tech could pay off for Obsidian and if it does, hopefully it's something they work towards with future titles.

It's not the best looking game graphically but it doesn't look back and it's still lightyears ahead of Dragon Age.

 

[WorstUsernameEver]

On a lighter note, I tried the Dungeon Siege III demo on 360 yesterday and I didn't come across any bugs, technical issues, etc. Of course it's simply a demo but the signs are looking good so far.

There's this factor too:

The more streamlined a product is, the easier it is to test and remove the bugs, not to mention that there's simply less places a bug could happen.

Dungeon Siege III definitely seems like a much less complex game compared to Obsidian's usual fare. Of course, it's a good start for their new tech nonetheless, as long as it holds for the finished product too (according to a German review it does, but who knows if the reviewer's experience is going to be the average one?).

 

[SharkClub]

I've made 9 AP playthroughs

And I thought my 4 and a half playthroughs of AP was a lot, jeez!

Still, I agree on the point that AP doesn't actually have as many "bugs" as the idiot reviewers make it seem. Some glitches? Sure. Bugs though - they're different, and a lot less common. Shitty little clipping problems are hardly "major gamebreaking bugs".

 

[WorstUsernameEver]

Still, I agree on the point that AP doesn't actually have as many "bugs" as the idiot reviewers make it seem.

You'll make our very own Brother None angry with that!

This game... this game has more bugs than the average David Cronenberg hallucination. To say this was released in an unpolished state would be a kindness, as it is waylaid by a barrage of small glitches to huge bugs on the PC platform. It doesn't quite reach the legendary messiness of old – like Fallout 2 – but for many people the experience won't be that different to some of the classic unplayables.

Without seriously trying to test the game by looking for bugs, in two playthroughs I encountered getting stuck in terrain, falling through terrain, enemies glitching out of the level, boss fights bugging out so the boss doesn't fight back, missions bugging out so you can't lose them, missions bugging out so you can't finish them and – understandably – different storyline threads created by my choices conflicting with no pre-defined resolution.

But, jokes, I haven't encountered many bugs with Alpha Protocol either (although one of them was pretty serious), but there was a general lack of polish that shouldn't have been there. I mean, the game was extremely satisfying to play for me, but I certainly understand the criticism it received.

That said, yeah, singling out Obsidian and not calling out Bethesda is not right, but that doesn't really excuse Obsidian for their buggy releases.

 

[Lexx]

I'll call that bad luck then. In my 9 playhtroughs I didn't got stuck once, no boss fight was bugged and everything else worked as well. The only issues that might come close to bugs are the enemy ai that sometimes was horrible idiotic and of course the enemies that disappear if you've reloaded a part of a map. But none of that has been really serious.

The game feels unpolished and could be better, yadda-yadda, but yeah. It's not nearly as buggy as lots of folks call it to be.

 

[C2B]

Dungeon Siege III definitely seems like a much less complex game compared to Obsidian's usual fare. Of course, it's a good start for their new tech nonetheless, as long as it holds for the finished product too (according to a German review it does, but who knows if the reviewer's experience is going to be the average one?).

Well, AP wasn't that "complex" (aside from the C&C) too so it definitly has some merit.

Otherwise most things were Obsidian has bugs is where it conflicts with the behavior of the tech. Having your own and specified for the type of games you make will certainly reduce the bugs a lot.

 

[Elven6]

On a lighter note, I tried the Dungeon Siege III demo on 360 yesterday and I didn't come across any bugs, technical issues, etc. Of course it's simply a demo but the signs are looking good so far.

There's this factor too:

The more streamlined a product is, the easier it is to test and remove the bugs, not to mention that there's simply less places a bug could happen.

Dungeon Siege III definitely seems like a much less complex game compared to Obsidian's usual fare. Of course, it's a good start for their new tech nonetheless, as long as it holds for the finished product too (according to a German review it does, but who knows if the reviewer's experience is going to be the average one?).

That's a valid point but I agree in that I too want to see what the tech holds for Obsidian going forward. I'm sure most reviews will end up having "Obsidian stigma" where the condition of games like New Vegas will be in the back of reviewers minds, this can work either way though.

 

[Ausdoerrt]

That's a valid point but I agree in that I too want to see what the tech holds for Obsidian going forward. I'm sure most reviews will end up having "Obsidian stigma" where the condition of games like New Vegas will be in the back of reviewers minds, this can work either way though.

All this "stigma" arises mostly from ignorance and/or jealousy of big company fans who hate to see their favourite devs beaten. Seen that with FO:NV vs FO3, and with TW2 vs DA2 (I saw some guy online bashing TW2 for lack of replayability...). Being a small or niche game dev. is an uphill battle.

 

[SharkClub]

I didn't experience the PC version of AP's vanilla (fortunately?), only played with the most recent patch and it all seemed fine to me. I played the Xbox version (which is obviously the platform the game was designed for) in vanilla and didn't experience any gamestopping/breaking bugs.

 

[ramessesjones]

Honestly, as someone who actually programs for a living and for fun, bugs are more rife than one would expect. Especially when dealing with vastly complicated systems. I'd guess most players who bitch about it have little idea what goes into making these things.

I'm a professional software developer and agree. On another site I mentioned that Bethesda did QA and made the call to release the game in its bugged state, so they were as much fault, and I got a response saying that even without QA the game shouldn't have been so buggy, which to me is completely insane, but more likely just very ignorant.