I think we can all agree, even some of the most trusted names in games design are betraying gamer trust by releasing broken games. So what can we do to fight back and make them focus on quality and content? Is there anything? Why does this problem keep getting worse? Is it because video games are getting too complicated to develop?

They had a deadline to meet like Sonic 06 and did not do an open Beta but fortunately Bathesda fixes their bugs unlike saga.

Well complicated developing / coding is one thing, that can be overcome fully or to satisfaction given enough time. Which leads to;

That the developers, programmers, designers etc. etc. are all answering to suits upstairs when the company is big enough. There are bills to be paid, and figures to be met. However, the suits upstairs usually only know enough to make some calls regarding the production, but not enough to make it worthwhile. A lot of producers will see their creativity stiffled and as a result, a lot will burn out under those circumstances, if they haven't already left for smaller companies / indies.

If the suits upstairs thinks that X or Y sells today, X and Y is what you are going to get. So blame the game trends, and the fact, they are bound to deliver what the majority wants, else you don't make enough money. The risk in releasing experimental designs are to great, when a production cost anywhere from 20 to 50 million dollars. If you flop, there is hell to come.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I have very few bugs (couple of graphical glitches now and again) nothing game breaking. Had a couple of lock ups, again maybe just lucky. 250+ hours of game time.

?I for one think Bethesda have done an outstanding job for stability etc for this release. Especially when you consider the huge open world game play with near enough full interaction and the multitude of differing PC specs out there.

?I say well done, keep up the good work Bethesda!

I agree with this, however, I do also think its become part of the culture now that Patching is a possibility.

Not sure if you played video games in the 90s, but what you got is what you got. If it came broken then tough, you just wasted your money... But those companies went down in flames for releasing bugged garbage. Now even the biggest studios are releasing heavily broken games (AC: Unity; Batman Arkham Knight) because it is the norm, you can always patch later.

What exactly is "broken" in your game?

There are numerous broken games in the world, but for F4 it's like death by 1000 stings. A short list: the building aspect of the game alone has dozens of bugs, the over all balance is way off, the game difficulties are off, a number of physics bugs, fairly frequent crashing (especially when tabbing to pip boy), quest bugs aplenty, floating monsters.... There are more if I made a complete list.

The answer?

When people stop buying them.

One of the big reasons I switched to buying all of my games digitally is the fact that, for over a year, every single game I bought was utterly unplayable, requiring me to go through at least two, sometimes as many as five or six, physical copies of the game. I was spending my entire weekend just trying to BUY the game, with no time left to actually play it.

And I know that I am far from alone in this experience.

Now, the rule of thumb is, if you want bug-free, and you want to know that you are getting the game that you payed for, wait six months.

If it's not in good condition by then, it will never be.

With a Bethesda game, however, it is a little different.

It's 'wait for the MOD kit and first expansion to release, then wait six months, then find the best mods, THEN you will know if the game is bug free enough to play and if you are getting the game you payed for'.

Really, the only way this stops is a total boycott of at least one AAA franchise from a major developer that has the effect of destroying the entire company and ruining the careers of everyone involved.

Sad, in that these are not the people responsible, in general, but still, it is the only way to terrify the senior management of other companies enough to change their behavior. They have a good thing going right now and they will not give it up without a fight.

Well, I did play games in the 90's (my fist videogame was chuckie egg for ZX Spectrum in 1983) And I see patching as way better method to correct your mistakes, instead of crash and burn, or as became the norm. You would go and buy a hefty prize magazine with a CD attached to it, with the patch you needed for your game. I don't believe in things have to be fault free, if they intend to at least address the worst cases, altho I am sometimes too lenient when they fail to correct them (but, I usually won't be playing the game for long, and will withhold my money second time around)

As for broken games, it is usually due to the fact they can't keep producing on things. It cost money, so yes, in that sense, they will rely on patches to some degree. But don't think it is the developers. It is, as I said, the suits upstairs you should hold responsible. Game developers will have pride in their work, and not for one bit, do I think they always are satisfied with what they are forced to release, because of time is money. I sometimes feel for them. They are the ones taking the heat when the general crowd wanna see heads roll, while, it is the top mamagement who should be lynched. Suits only care about bottom line, so if people wanna turn the general trend in gaming, they got to vote with their wallet.

I'd like to hear specifics on what you've encountered as broken because a lot of things I've seen people saying were broken just happened to be people not knowing what they were doing in the game - like balance. The only "bugs" I've encountered are companions getting stuck - easily resolved, I had an invisible attack on a settlement which didn't break the game it was just weird, settlers on top of houses, again doesn't break the game.

There's no way to make a game this large completely bug free - well maybe there is but I don't want to wait 10 years for a game. You want completely bug free try Tetris.

Actually it keeps getting better. Given the always growing size of nowadays games I'd say that most bugs aren't even worth mentioning and are to be expected. You should have seen how gaming used to be in the 80's with games [expecially RPG] the size of a today's mp3, and yet with more bugs than content.

Uh ... you're being sarcastic, right?

I'm missing some kind of hidden joke here right?

Please answer before I go any further so I know whether to tell you how dead wrong you are or have a hearty laugh with you.

They had years to work on Fallout 4. There was absolutely no excuse for the day 1 patch, there's no excuse for all the settlement bugs, items falling through walls/tables/shelves, tv's and jukeboxes causing settlement happiness to plummet, recruitment beacons doing the same thing, and so on ...

The only thing they seem to have gotten right this time is stability, but everything else is pretty much on par with how it's always been with Bethesda games. Weird glitches, bugs, and yes there is still some crashing issues.

What to do about it? Stop buying their products. Unfortunately they go out of business then. So they have us by the McNuggets and there's pretty much nothing we can do about it.

This is why I'm against allowing games to be modded. If it weren't for people fixing their mistakes for free it would get done right the first time, or with a patch, or they would be gone. Modding is just enabling them to feed us these ever increasingly broken products. Yo, guys, you said yourself that 50% of your sales were console's ... time to stop sticking it to the other half of your revenue source.

I mean, it's pretty pathetic that if I actually want to complete Fallout 3 and NV that I have to go buy a PC and download a bunch of mod's from total strangers ...

Simple, we all agree not to buy the DLCs until the big bugs which should have been taken care of threw a beta testing, have been taken care of. Which we are graciously doing for Beth after we bought the bloody game.

Thing is, corps have been getting away with more and more over the years because people are basically herd animals and as long as they're not too annoyed, not starving, not getting killed left and right, can get under a roof when it rains, they happily go bheeeee. Simplistic, yes, true, I think so.

For the troll asking where, oh where are you, oh bugs?...read the thread BUGS, it's one of the few things that actually pinned on this forum

Best Example is Maccreadys Perk. A very simple Bug but no one in those long 7 Years noticed it? Hard to imagine. Is there one Thing that runs perfect in that Game? Even the shooting got some Bugs. Sometimes Bullets just dont hit because of invisible Walls everywhere. It happens by some Objects like Windows, Banisters, Cupboards, Car Windows and many Thigns more. Many Times i had Sight on target but the Bullet never has reach the Target while the Enemy hit me xD. This Games needs a bit Destruction from Battlefield 3. This Games feels to static.

I'm sick of settlement defenses not working. I mean I fast travel when enemies attack one of my settlement and I see all my turettes, water pumps and crops destroyed. But there's only 3 or 4 level 1 Raiders or 2 supermutants. That doesn't make sense. As of right now, I'm putting FO4 in my library. Maybe I'll take out my PS3 and replay FO3. That has more replay value than FO4. Honestly, perks kind of ruined the FO world. It was better when it was just SPECIAL. Every 2 levels of carefully picking one. One point to help make the game a bit better. Not a point in a perk to make the game a lot easier. Survival difficulty is a joke past level 40. Not enough enemy spawns. Map is huge but not much to do. I also dislike how bullets have no weight. And how easy it is to earn caps.

But I played about 60 hours. Paid $60. So $1/hour is good enough. I got my money's worth. Just disappointed it wasn't as good as FO3.

Those are bugs. What you described are bug. It doesn't have to be "game breaking" to be a bug.

1 - settler rescue mission, but the settler was assigned as a courier, so she had a brahmin with her. Both settler and brahmin are in a small room. Brahmin doesn't fit. Brahmin is clipping everywhere and preventing me to get to settler to complete rescue. Bug.

2 - bunker mission, end quest, talking to guy: all ending dialog options after passing yellow > orange > red do nothing and go back to conversation start. Bug.

3 - settlers clipping onto rooves and not being able to get down. Bug.

4 - settler giving a mission from their starting settlement, being reassigned to another settlement, but quest marker turn-in is now pointing to where they gave the mission out and not where the settler (and thus end quest) is currently located. Bug.

5 - Pipboy or guns disappearing and turning invisible unless you change view modes. Bug.

6 - mouse suddenly not able to get to bottom 1/8th of the screen to click on menu options located there. Bug.

7 - settlement lights turning off after leaving/coming back to settlement, despite all electricity still in place and working. Bug.

8 - Getting stuck in terrain (and fortunately having TCL available to me). Bug.

etc, etc, etc. And these are just the ones I remember right now.

Again, bugs can be show stoppers, they can cause crashes, they can require reloading of a previous save, or they can just be quirky. The priority level or severity of a bug doesn't classify it as a bug or not, whether it deviates from intended design and function does.

Personally, I have not encounter many game breaking bugs in Fallout 4.

However, the settlement system is a half baked idea. Building settlements can be buggy when trying to put walls in certain corners and there is no way to quickly determine what your un-named settlers' roles are. Game breaking? No. Immersion breaking? Yes.

The only crashed I have experienced so far is when I attempt to load a saved game, the game just hangs. This probably happens to me once every 10 hours on average. Game breaking? No. A little bit annoying? Yes.

Graphics glitches... yeah.. sometimes I will see bands of Red, Green, Blue over some textures. However, I do not know if this is due to a game bug or if it is a AMD driver issue. This definitely is immersion breaking and quite possibly game breaking for some people. Existing and restarting Fallout 4 generally fixes the issue.

Nonsense. Daggerfall is by far the buggiest game Bethesda has ever produced. It was released before the games could easily be modded. They didn't give us the Construction Set to mod their games until Morrowind, four years later.

When the software industry figured out that the internet enabled them to patch problems later, the avalanche of releasing unfinished titles became the norm. Before the internet there were buggy games, of course there were, but companies had to try harder to get them as close to 'perfect' as possible, because there was nothign that could be done about it afterwards.

Since the internet has allowed all games to be patched a slong as the developer is willing to do so, so most - if not all - developers are quite happy to push titles out of the door to meet deadlines vs. quality. Some are better or worse than others.

I like bethesda games and they're the only company I will pre-order from, and while I tend to have good luck with their titles, I know what I'm going to get: a bag full of bugs that may not get fixed. Mods and unofficial patches - on a PC - typically make up for most of the rest.

So, you think that it would fix your half of the market if the other half of the market got deprived of mods? No, the result would then be that everybody had a buggy unfinished game.

That was the case with Daggerfall, which was a PC game that wasn't designed to be modded. Bethesda simply does not fix the minor bugs in their games. They don't care if modders go ahead and fix things or not, because they got your money, and they're on to the next project.

Besides, if you think that bug fixing is the reason PC users mod their games, you are missing the whole point. The most popular Skyrim mod is a mod that gets rid of the console-style user interface.

Edit: I see that P.W. got in with the ninja-move a couple of posts above.

There are a couple things you can do to fight back.


1. Stop Pre-ordering from companies with a history of releasing buggy software. Then buy it later when it's patched up. (potentially on sale).

2. Do not buy DLC that mostly just fixes the game. If the new content itself isn't worth the asking price for the DLC don't buy it. The fixes should be given for free.

Personally I will not preorder games coming from:

UBIsoft (due to Assassins Creed Unity)

Firefly Studios (due to Stronghold 3)

EA (Countless examples)

Any game that uses SecuROM (Less of an issue now since I buy most of my games on steam now. Every game I've ever bought that used SecuROM, I had to get a crack in order to play)

I've had a couple crashes in FO4, but I leave it running for long periods of time, alt-tab out of it (it's running as I'm posting this)... From my experiance, FO4 is a pretty stable game. While yes there are some issues, I still consider it a great game, well worth it's price. ($80 CAD)

Regarding modding... that is actually a weak argument because there are plenty of games out there that do not allow you to mod, but they also have game breaking bugs. However, I do agree that moddable games can be a catch-22 where developers could simply let the community fix all the game bugs. But the past have proven that Bethesda do take the time to fix game bugs. Do they fix all of them? Of course not (and some time bug fixes creates new bugs), but at least they do address them. As far as I know of there are no games out there that are 100% bug free.

Regarding Fallout 3 and NV... it is mostly not all Bethesda's fault. It is actually Microsoft's fault because each new release of Windows changes some of the coding which could mean that older games no longer works because the way how certain instructions have been executed in the past is different in the current version of Windows. MS could have made the execution process more streamlined and efficient, but the result could be that older instructions do not execute properly which can cause the program to crash.

I remember a lot of people complaining that Fallout 3 had issues running in Windows 7 without a minor fix. Fallout 3 only officially ran on Windows XP and Vista. Why? Because Fallout 3 was released on October 28th, 2008. Windows 7 was not released until July 22nd, 2009 or roughly 9 months later. When Fallout 3 was released, Windows 7 was still being developed.

Generally speaking, game developers do not go back to previously released game and re-work the code so that the games will run with a modern OS. Their focus is to make new games that can generate future revenue for their publishers, not re-coding older games to allow them to run on modern hardware and operating system. Sure maybe that will generate a little bit of money, but nothing compared to releasing a new game.

GOG.com (formerly Good Old Games) licenses older games, tweaks them to run on modern hardware and OS as well as makes the game DRM free. You can always pray that GOG.com somehow gets into a licensing deal with Bethesda so that Fallout 3 and NV could be tweaked be compatible newer Windows OS... but I recommend you do not hold your breath..

How many actually "broken" games have been released in the last year or two? Simcity, Arkham Knight PC, Colonial Marines? Maybe some of the half-ass Early Access/Kickstarter things. What else?

When people stop buying games based on hype alone. Stop trusting companies and stop being loyal to franchises.