Brother None said:
Why are people trying to excuse the game by saying stuff like "I played 20 hours and I got only 3 CTDs"? I've logged about 40 hours and have had, I think, 7 CTDs and 1 freeze. You know how much too much that is? It's exactly 7 CTDs and 1 freeze too much.
Exactly. You guys are understandably trying to excuse Mr. Avellone because he is an original FO mastermind. The fact of the matter is FO:NV is a lot buggier than FO3 and didn't represent a finished product imo.
So I'll make some logical excuses for him since he created maybe the best RPG of all-time; Planescape:Torment.
1. I'm not sure how the timelines work out, but at a glance, it would appear Obsidian had around 15-18 months to take on a completely new project using another dev's base code and put out a finished product. That's a very ambitious timeline, so we can blame Bethesda for rushing it out.
2. The engine this game runs on is a stone age piece of shit. Starting the development on a new engine probably would have pushed the development back a year or two, but damn, one must wonder what Obsidian could have done if they were able to. As I said above, NV is buggier than FO3, but FO3 was still very buggy in it's own right. I blame the engine just being garbage.
3. I know he has stated otherwise, but there is no possible way Chris and his dev team weren't aware of these bugs. I'm guessing they were told to ship the product anyway and use the time between the code going gold and the releases date to try to come up with updates to resolve it. Obviously they were a bit late on this, but again, I think we can logically use the "Blame Bethesda" line here as well.
All in all, I sincerely hope the turbulence created by this release doesn't cause Bethesda to take development on future Fallouts back. The franchise is in infinitely better hands with Obsidian and I shutter to think what they could do with a little more development time and an engine that isn't crap.
My .02.