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I'm surprised that I haven't run into any major bugs, yet. Or in fact any bugs at all. I wasn't expecting the game to hold together this well, to be honest.

I should really find a way to keep my inventory smaller. My armor and weapons are the only heavy items I have, but I bet the shitload of potions I never use eats a huge junk of my carry capacity.

Also, getting drunk seems to be the best way to travel from one end of the map to another.

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I run into very few. The ones I do find are really silly. Like guards swimming on land to arrest me. Or a courier showing up naked for no real reason.

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Or a courier showing up naked for no real reason.

Heh, i've had that one too.

I'm surprised that I haven't run into any major bugs, yet. Or in fact any bugs at all. I wasn't expecting the game to hold together this well, to be honest.

I think i've iterated my views on this a couple times already, but I still think it's an accurate assessment that Skyrim isn't nearly as buggy as its predecessors. I definitely still believe it's the most polished game Bethesda has ever put out.

All the time i've put into that game, and in terms of bugs that have actually negatively impacted my game, i've seen probably fewer than a dozen. I mean, and yeah, i've had to revert to earlier saves or kind of finesse the game systems to get things moving again at times, but... I dunno, it comes with the territory, i guess.

You know, of course that sucks. Somebody's sixty hours into the game, It doesn't matter how obscure or random a bug is when it stops the game dead. It's completely fair that people get pissed off.

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It's kind of sad when people are surprised there aren't more bugs. Yay Bethesda.

To be fair, while some of the complaints are completely valid, some others seem to originate from not realizing the difference in scope and freedom between Bethesda games and, say, Uncharted. I have only played two Bethesda RPGs, Skyrim and Fallout 3, and haven't encountered any game breaking or even silly bugs so far*. I know they are there somewhere – hell, the PS3 version of Skyrim is supposedly almost unplayable – but they are either very rare or Bethesda has been able to fix them before I have had chance to try either of the games.

According to Youtube, Red Dead Redemption too was glitchy as fuck some point but I didn't encounter man-cougar or any of his pals on my playthrough.

* My expectations of the bugginess of Skyrim were based on the horror stories rather than my own experiences with their previous games.

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Everybody's a beta tester.

There are millions of people investing on average, let's say, dozens of hours into Skyrim. That game is being twisted into every conceivable permutation of events, and when people encounter problems, they're rightly pissed and will make it known on the internet.

And yeah, it kind of creates a slightly skewed perception online.

There are many games released in last year that were magnitudes more fucked up that Skyrim is, even in pursuit of smaller ambitions, but problems with those did not get nearly as much attention because those player bases were not as big and as vocal.

Even relative to the previous TES games, you'd get the impression that Skyrim is significantly more busted, but it's simply not the case. (Basically all of the TES games have been incredibly crash prone, but Skyrim is a markedly more stable game, for starters.)

And yeah, there's also kind of the looming spectre of the PS3 version. Apparently all of Bethesda's games have had the exact same issue on the PS3 and just nobody really paid attention until now. People are finally calling them out on it.

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I don't think it's really fair to cut them any slack for releasing bug-ridden games, no matter what the scope. In my limited experience working as a bug-tester for Sony in 2000, I don't recall any bugs being found that we didn't spot* -- known bugs were "signed off" all the time. The money men just did a quick calculation: Will this affect sales? Yes/No.

For example: I seriously the doubt the testers who work at Bethesda never saw a naked courier in the thousands of hours in testing they've done.

* - Actually I did hear about one major bug slipping through from the other part of Sony that worked with their development team (we tested finished products from other publishers -- everything needed to be tested before Sony would allow its release on their console). The inhouse team, having to play the same game all day, every day, would get bored and listen to music as they played... and they missed a serious sound error because of it. Oops!

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I don't think it's really fair to cut them any slack for releasing bug-ridden games, no matter what the scope. In my limited experience working as a bug-tester for Sony in 2000, I don't recall any bugs being found that we didn't spot* -- known bugs were "signed off" all the time. The money men just did a quick calculation: Will this affect sales? Yes/No.

For example: I seriously the doubt the testers who work at Bethesda never saw a naked courier in the thousands of hours in testing they've done.

* - Actually I did hear about one major bug slipping through from the other part of Sony that worked with their development team (we tested finished products from other publishers -- everything needed to be tested before Sony would allow its release on their console). The inhouse team, having to play the same game all day, every day, would get bored and listen to music as they played... and they missed a serious sound error because of it. Oops!

Well if your game is emergent enough, you can easily create a system that is literally impossible to properly test in our lifetime. Even if it isn't procedural, or wildly broad scope, you can easily end up in a scenario where it's really hard to get full coverage. And while fixing all bugs may seem like a noble goal, I think what's happened with Bethesda is that they've just decided to focus more on content creation.

Developing software is all about time management. Everyone wants to create something great, and everybody has great ideas, but you can't do everything. What people are hinting at when they excuse Bethesda for leaving bugs in the game, is that they appreciate that someone is more focused on putting man hours where they find the value. Because so many studios out there are polishing miniscule linear projects into perfect glossy merchandise, it's refreshing when someone says "We'll just see what we can make if we don't obsess about being perfect".

And to be fair to the Bethesda dev team, the bugs in Skyrim (PS3 excluded) are absolutely minor.

On another note. I've been thinking about everyone's revulsion to the "Arrow in the knee" meme. I never thought that it was that played out, but more than anything else since RickRolling people seem to call attention to it as over used. I'm starting to think that people are including their experience in-game with people propagating the meme. Due to their repetitive nature, and alternate voicing it's like the NPCs themselves are quoting the internet.

Vinny was talking about the alternate voice acting thing on bombcast a couple weeks ago, and I have to agree with him. It is absolutely bizarre that they had multiple actors speak the same lines, and then ended up using all of that material. Maybe they wanted multiple takes of the lines from different people to find the best, but it feels like somebody felt the content was light and just left them all in the build.

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udM4VvSL2VA



Hi Nick!

This is goddamn badass. I also cannot wait to see what people will do with this!

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Finally 'finished' the two main story questlines (Alduin & the civil war) after 140 hours of play. In typical Bethesda fashion, the climaxes weren't very exhilirating, but since I was expecting that it didn't bother me. I liked the political storyline very much, even though I'm more anxious than ever to see

how we're going to take the fight to the Thalmor. I've been aching to destroy those bastards since day one! I also wonder how they'll progress the continuity; which victory in the civil war will become canon?

As for the bugs, I've encountered a few silly ones, but the most grieving was that extremely frequently (say, every other fight!) my thu'um wouldn't work! I'd be fighting and no matter how hard I pressed the right shoulder button, fireballs would not eject from my mouth! It was highly annoying since I could never depend on one of my main offensive strategies.

Still, Skyrim is a joy to play and in 140 hours it only crashed 3 times. For Elder Scrolls, that's a shining victory because Morrowind must have crashed well over 200 times on me. And still I kept playing.

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I played Skyrim for a while on my PS3 without running into any bugs, however I just couldn't get into the game: The way my character controlled felt too clumsy and unresponsive, and the world was too bland for me.

I'm sorry if I'm stepping on any toes but I enjoyed Oblivion and I'm quite disappointed. It seems like I've come to expect more from my games.

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I played Skyrim for a while on my PS3 without running into any bugs, however I just couldn't get into the game: The way my character controlled felt too clumsy and unresponsive, and the world was too bland for me.

I'm sorry if I'm stepping on any toes but I enjoyed Oblivion and I'm quite disappointed. It seems like I've come to expect more from my games.

Was Oblivion also played on the PS3?

I don't expect anyone on here to shout and swear over opinions on a video game, but I find that Skyrim creates a much stronger world for me to experience. It's little things like the unscripted conversation between a mother and daughter concerning where they're eating the same night, or some other such mundane point of interest.

However, and I've been contemplating this a lot lately, perhaps the story and setting of this game resonates with me as someone from Northen England. I find that often we as a culture are rather hostile to foreigners, much like the Nords, and often we face similar troubles (North East England is known to have the highest rates of unemployment, for example.)

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I played Skyrim for a while on my PS3 without running into any bugs, however I just couldn't get into the game: The way my character controlled felt too clumsy and unresponsive, and the world was too bland for me.

I'm sorry if I'm stepping on any toes but I enjoyed Oblivion and I'm quite disappointed. It seems like I've come to expect more from my games.

I've had quite the opposite experience. I found Oblivion to be overwhelmingly dull, but I've loved what I've seen of Skyrim so far. (I have a feeling that I played Oblivion "wrong", though.) On another note: I'm playing it with a joypad, much to my surprise.

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I find it curious that somebody would argue that Oblivion presented a more interesting place to explore than Skyrim. I mean, obviously that's a very subjective thing, but the common opinion is that Oblivion was kind of the dullest of the three modern TES games.

The unresponsive control i find an odd comment too, i've generally felt that Skyrim feels about as bad as Oblivion did.

I'd like to hear Daisy Daisy elaborate on his opinions more, i want to know where he's coming from on this.

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I think this line might shed some light on things:

It seems like I've come to expect more from my games.

I definitely question whether you'd enjoy Oblivion as much now. In fact, I would be outright surprised if you played Oblivion and Skyrim as side-by-side as you could and found you didn't consider Skyrim the better game. Perhaps you've just outgrown the Elder Scrolls in its current incarnation.

After all, it is clumsy and unresponsive, particularly if you've been playing Dark Souls as I know you have. If TES worldbuilding doesn't do it for you anymore (and I suspect that's the issue as, much as Sno said, almost everyone seems to see Skyrim as being a more interesting and better realised world than Oblivion), and Dark Souls and the like have trained you to expect better action gameplay, you're not going to get much out of Skyrim.

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I'd like to hear Daisy Daisy elaborate on his opinions more, i want to know where he's coming from on this.

:erm: I don't believe our latest member has revealed their sex yet? (We do have women posting here.)

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He's just under the assumption that everyone on the internet is male unless otherwise identified. I think until the moment of revelation comes to us, we should refer to he and/or she as 'it'.

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He's just under the assumption that everyone on the internet is male unless otherwise identified. I think until the moment of revelation comes to us, we should refer to he and/or she as 'it'.

"Moment of revelation" combined with your current avatar makes my day.

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