Why Fallout: New Vegas crashes

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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Obisidian Project Director was talking to Eurogamer about their Onyx Engine, Dungeon Siege III and working with foreign tech, and working with foreign tech is quite a chunk of the reason.<blockquote>"Stability and being bug free are extremely high priorities on this project, and we actually talk about it internally constantly," he explained to Eurogamer in a new interview. "The advantage here we have over, for example Fallout, is when we have a question about how something works, I walk 10 feet outside my office door and go talk to the programmer who wrote it. That's a lot different than trying to get someone on a mailing list, or get someone on the phone who's in a different time zone or across the country. Those sort of things have made it possible for us to stabilise things and keep things working as well as we like.

"Here we have the advantage of, no matter who runs into a crash issue, we're able to get it up on the screen with a stack dump and look at it and peel back the information on it, and identify exactly what happened and get it fixed. That's been a change.

"When we've worked with other engines sometimes you get a crash and you're like, well, I don't know. We didn't write this. Why is this happening? You get a bunch of engineers in there trying to reproduce something that takes hours to reproduce. Those kind of things can be difficult when you're not able to develop your own tech. But our crash and stability tools on this project have been phenomenal.</blockquote>Thanks sampson70.
 
No matter what they say, even if it's reasonable and all, the name "Obsidian" will stand for "buggy games" with each title they make, unfortunately. Atleast it's like that in the yellow pr... most of the game journalism.
 
He's talking as if they were the only company on earth that is working with foreign tech. Some 70% of all developers do the same, and some 95% of them are not so infamous due to buggynes of their products. Not an excuse, guys, not an excuse
 
and some 95% of them are not so infamous due to buggynes of their products.
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Yeah, well, 95% of them don't do complex roleplaying games.
 
Their games have a ton of good playable content (story,gameplay,customization) , and publishers can make a new deadline all the time if they want for such a small studio .
I'm surprised that they still have the nerves to keep it up with the complexity considering that they will predict most bugs happening in finishing stages . They don't reduce the game because of it because it can and will be patched always . But then they really always patch it , unlike EA for instance who doesn't give a rats ass about its customers (mostly PC customers for some reason,like only we "pirate" always) .

But yeah , Obsidian have a rep for buggy games . Like an urban legend , it's so freaking annoying and funny at the same time hearing people about it , it makes them look like they're the only one making bugs in games and nobody else!

But their bugs don't kill the game at least . Every time their Fallout was fixed someone started to play it again , same with Kotor , same with New Vegas , same with NwN2 , same . Same thing will happen with their other games .

So yeah , they have an excuse and a good one . They always make one hell of a good game , that you have to wait a little (1 month is nothing) to patch it and to be pissed about it is totally pointless . They always made a patch .
I'd rather wait 1 month for New Vegas patch and start game anew than go through Fallout 3 metro stations again .

And besides what about patching Dragon Age Awakening on xbox and ps3 , nobody cares about that and that's Bioware were talking . Calling Fallout New Vegas a huge bug problem when DAO:Awakening still must be played as it is written to avoid all bugs that will crash the main quest is simply and ill quote Mister Handy : ridiculous!
 
They could change their name and rebrand themselves to get rid of that "buggy" stigma. But that would also lose a name known for making good RPGs.
 
Lexx said:
and some 95% of them are not so infamous due to buggynes of their products.
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Yeah, well, 95% of them don't do complex roleplaying games.
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And those 95% also don't find themselves making games from buggy foriegn engines.
 
It's pretty much a given, an engine created internally or used for many products would be more familiar to a team than a new external engine. On top of that, RPG's, especially Obsidian's are usually pretty complex on a technical level.

Looking forward to seeing what Onyx is capable of though (the gameplay video didn't look bad), this would be Obsidian's very first internal engine if memory serves right?
 
why game companies make buggy games:

1) they dont control/own the engine

this means they cannot customize the developer client with all the bug tracking/catching methods/calls that they want. if a bug pops up, they cannot be sure where the bug is coming from. there is no guarentee they can track it down and fix it. plus the chance that its a bug in the engine itself and you have to wait for a patch from the people who created the engine.

2) the engine is not exactly designed for what you are using it for

trying to use your custom libraries of functions and such to support your game may involve you re-writing libraries that the creator of the engine made, but without the full functionality/features you want so you have to re-create it from scratch. or else "fake" it by using the standard libraries accepting that there are times it could create a game.

3) the developer just doesnt give a shit

see: bethesda

4) the publisher makes the developer publish the game before its ready

games take time. if you have very very good programmers, they can create a game with few bugs, but there will still be bugs. the lower the skill of your programmers, the more bugs there will be. and there is no telling how difficult to pin down and fix that bug will be.

5) the developer is running so close to the margin they dont have time to do proper bug testing both pre and post release and have to start working on the next.

this is just lack of time.

6) there is an issue on the users computer

drivers, drivers, drivers. oddball hardware. ancient hardware. brand-spanking-new hardware.
 
The problem with Obsidian isn't only that they've so far released a buggy game, but most of the times it was a sequel. And when this sequel came out the first game was patched quite well and often run on the same engine, leading people to the question why that wasn't the case for Obsidians game. On top of that you nearly allways felt how they had to cut content because it was too much for the set release date.

So is it because they don't know how to handle the engine? Sure that's a part, but why are other developers are able to manage working with another engine?
-> Because their managment is simply superior to that of Obsidian.
Sure Obsidian tries more to put into their game, that's why their games aren't as polished. And here's the big difference, other developers are more pragmatic and say "Yeah well, we won't be able to to that in time, so let's aim for less".

Obsidian is Troika on a lesser scale. Good creative people with no one who's really good in managing their projects and is hard enough to say at the right moment that something has to be cut. So they cut at the last possible moment and aren't able to cover it. And we as players later find points where we think: "Isn't something missing here?" and even later say "Well it was good, but it could have been great, if..."
 
Lexx said:
and some 95% of them are not so infamous due to buggynes of their products.
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Yeah, well, 95% of them don't do complex roleplaying games.
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Not to mention many other companies do release just as buggy games. Take Bethesda as example. But they are for sure not the only one. With Anno1404 I had a really nasty bug which caused your game to create corrupted savegames and to create a savegame can sometimes take 5 min. and the game would as well crash a few times during playing ... pretty funn experience.

I guess today you can be already happy if they at least decide to make some patches to fix a "few" of their bugs. Hence why I NEVER buy games with the first day of release.
 
drawnacrol said:
Crni Vuk said:
Lexx said:
Hence why I NEVER buy games with the first day of release.
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+1

Never making that same mistake again
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I never, and will never buy games at least in first couple of months after release.
After hype passes, prices drop, bugs are patched, and I save money = very happy.
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Bad_Karma said:
The problem with Obsidian isn't only that they've so far released a buggy game, but most of the times it was a sequel. And when this sequel came out the first game was patched quite well and often run on the same engine, leading people to the question why that wasn't the case for Obsidians game.
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what game are you talking about?

if you are talking about fallout 3, it was barely patched, and something like over 1,500 bugs still remain that fans are working on.
 
what game are you talking about?

if you are talking about fallout 3, it was barely patched, and something like over 1,500 bugs still remain that fans are working on.[/quote]1,500... I say that is quite extreme. I played it maybe 7 months ago,& the only "real" was the dreadful crashing. BTW does anyone know when NV is getting a new needed patch?
 
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