I gotta say you guys win at hype as was really looking forward to this game. However, there are serious bugs and glitches that imo are keeping this game from its true potential. Here is a brief list of what I have experienced in just 2 days of xbox 360 gaming:

Poor textures, look closely at any rock face. Shadows are very jagged and not even close to smooth when projected on almost every texture, the jagged shadow edges almost twinkle. Sometimes the transition from night to day is gradual and sometimes its instant. Sometimes the weather effects are gradual and at other times they are instant. For example, a gradual snowstorm turned into a heavy blizzard, I walked about 10 feet and it stopped instantly. No matter where I go, there are no foot prints nor hoof prints. Almost every time I am sneaking and engage in battle I have to hit the left stick at least a dozen times to stand up. One of the first mountains I was climbing I got stuck in a rock and the games decides to autosave me there. So I restart from a previous save, and get killed 5 times while trying to get to Riverwood. Every time the autosave sticks me back in the rock...very frustrating. The horse has to be just plain [censored]! It's graphic is broken as she frequently disappears. She runs off all the time. I spend more time looking for the darn horse than riding it. Couldn't you at least have put a horse icon on the map so I could find her easier? Why can't Lydia ride a horse? Why does Lydia choose what items I trade to her to use? Why can't I make that decision, after all she is sworn to serve me. I have only faced the first quest line dragon, and what a sissy he was. I took 2 full fire blasts to the face which did hardly any damage, yet a tree spirit or a giant spider can 2 shot me to death, this is rotten balancing! I stood atop the tower and killed the "mighty" dragon with just a hand full of arrows. Guards still seem to have cell phones or telepathy. On the quest to kill Sinding for Hircine, I first went to the Bloated Man's Grotto, talked to a hunter, could not find Sinding, left the grotto, found Sinding near Whiterun, talked to him, and decided to spare his life. He said we shall hunt together, then just stood there...for like 15 minutes. So I attacked him, he ran off, 4 Kajhit came out of nowhere to pursue him, so I killed all but one of them who happened to be a trader. Every time I got the trader to zero health he would drop to the ground for a moment then come back with full life. I tried to kill him at least 7 times before I gave up. By this time Sinding had made it back to the grotto, so I fast travel there, find him, talk to him and say the hunters are all dead, and get the quest completed. Then stupid Lydia comes running in and starts attackng the werewolf. Of course he kills us both. I gave up at this point, as this quest is obviously very bugged.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the game. Especially the wide open world, random wildlife, and beautiful soundtrack. It just seems as though a hyped up marketing strategy for an 11/11/11 release date took major priority over delivering a polished game. The game is great, and if polished would surely be game of the year, if not game of the decade. It is even more frustrating that we have heard nothing out of Todd Howard or Bethesda in recognition of these bugs or any of plethora of bugs/glitches/problems being reported on these forums.

everyone who pre-ordered IS a beta tester

This is the xbox 360 board though....

The game is surprisingly clean from game breaking bugs, everything you just typed about are either graphical problems or random game problems, first of all Horses are a major improvement from Oblivion, stop losing your horse then ffs, if you spend your time trying to find it then riding it then you must be stupid or something, fast travel somewhere and it will show up, and how the hell did you manage to get stuck in a rock, avoid mountain climbing, follow the roads,

And about the dragons they are [censored] hard, I died frequently, if you think they are too easy, set the difficulty to master or something.

And from what I've seen and played Guards don't have telepathy as they did in Oblivion, I completed the Dark Brotherhood quest-line so I'm pretty sure they aren't TELEPATHIC, most of the problems you've experienced and easily be fixed if you think of what you're doing ....

And last but not least, you're bothered by the textures of random rocks ? Why would you even go right up to a rock and look into it to spot the wrongs, you need to know that Skyrim has a huge [censored] world, and the graphics are amazing for a game like that.

Skyrim is a master piece, even after playing it for hours and hours i still have LOADS to do. GOTY and GOTC.

Wanna add that its also a brand new engine (kind of) Its impressive there are so few bugs on something new. Also. Its a huge world There are bound to be issues. @OP Go play Stalker Clear sky un patched if you wanna see some real game breaking bugs.

I think the argument is being made that these bugs, while not game breaking, could EASILY have been sorted out if Bethesda went to the store, bought a couple of the new xbox 360Ss, and played the game on them for a few hours... I just do not understand that, and I do not understand (unless it was intentional) why Bethesda would release the game with the texture issue.

Oh, and even if it is really difficult to sort the bugs out (I understand that troubleshooting bugs is not an easy task, and is indeed extremely time consuming), Bethesda should at least issue an apology, and say something like "We forced the game out onto the shelves unprepared. That would be our fault, and give us some time to fix the problems... oh and have some free dlc too." Now THAT would keep me interested in Bethesda as a company.

Too soon. Game-breaking bug in the "The Cure for Madness" Quest line for the Brotherhood. Door to leave the place doesn't trigger even though it says "To Skyrim". Also wrong texture is loaded. Instead of the Brotherhood door, it's a stone wall. Cha-Ching.

[like]

My answer to the title of the topic is obviously not enough!

lmfao unless its just a patch don't expect any free dlc

Balderdash.
Have you even looked at this subsection?
How can you print nonsense like this?

One game-breaker I encountered:
A bridge would not lower in a cave I had to jump into.
If I didnt have a hard save outside the hole Id have had to restart at lvl 25.

You must be playing on the easier modes, turn the difficulty up to the highest level and you'll see that your problem isn't there anymore.

But I must agree with you about the textures though. I really hope we can get an answer from Bethesda very soon. I am positive that many of our complaints & questions will be resolved if Bethesda simply told us when they planned to release the next patch (as 'sometime soon' is not specific enough).

You are lucky, a lot of peoples have issue with ps3 version, framerate drop, Poor texture rendering and sound not as good that Pc/360 .

I play with my friend on 360 at skyrim , Indeed textures have issues. Why they have all theses major bug when the game just release ? Everyone notice right at the start theses problems prove that their beta tester are very incompetent.

Zero problems for me. Removed cache, play on disk. Looks great. And for the TC. to properly test a game this size it could take 1 to 2 full years. That is never going to happen, get over it. Yes the shadows are not very good, but this isn't a bug, Shadows cause huge drain on framerate, if you play pc games you know this. It would be nice to turn them off, but you get use to it.

So, I don't know which forums you've been reading but there isn't a huge outcry here about shadows. It's either; a ) the games textures don't load properly at all, or b ) people aren't able to progress due to game breaking bugs. Really none of us are asking for every single bug to be squashed. I just want my game to be playable and in it's current state it is not. I paid for something I can't even use, surely you understand the frustration people are having. Also, a vast number of people experiencing massive texture issues is probably one of those things they should have squashed early on, just saying. It's very prevalent and doesn't need a keen eye or even a QA tester to notice it. Quests are understandable because there are so many different variables that go into this game it's really hard to account for all of them. A game not loading the right textures though...That's sort of starring them right in the face.

I'm only about 12 hours in and I've already encountered a game breaking bug on the quest The Fallen. Everytime I use the Call Dragon shout on top of the great porch nothing ever happens and the Jarl just sits there and complains about me taking too long to summon the dragon. Quite frankly it pisses me off, and it isn't the first bug I've found either. You can't just release a game full of problems and potentially game breaking bugs and expect the public to eat it up for very long. I'm agreeing with whoever said that Bethesda was more excited about meeting their promotional 11-11-11 date than actually making sure the game worked right. It's kind of hard to enjoy a game when it [censored]s you over to the point where you can't progress further.

There are no ''Game breaking'' bugs in Skyrim. If graphics glitches and a few broken quests are ''game breaking'', you must find a lot of games broken.

For me, a game breaking bug is a bug that doesn't let you play the game. I haven't heard about a single ''corrupted save file'' yet and most bugs I've encountered were back to normal when I save et load back (books I couldn't target for example). Some quests are problematics and yes, a patch will come but you can use all the features in the game and explore until then. Also, the game is fairly large compared to any other game on the market so it's not unusual to find bugs and glitches.

I'm about 40 hours in and I believe I haven't seen 10% of the open-world. By the time I'll finish exploring, I'm sure the patch will be out.

Anyone who bought Skyrim on release, did you buy Oblivion on release or Fallout? If so a) they were far far more buggy than Syrim is and b)did you not learn to wait for the first major patch before buying it/starting a game?

I really want this game, i cant wait infact but i know from experience that these games need 1 major patch before i will play them, because bugs will appear in them and break games. I thijk Oblivion had 10,000 bugs remaining after all the patches were out. Im not trying to defend Bethesda, but people shouting have to realise its impossible to have no bugs in any game, let alone a game this size. Testing it for months will not remove all the bugs. I know people who have played this for 20-30 hours without any issues

It's not... The main quest is a part of the game. That's what makes The Elders Scrolls what it is. A main quest broken would ruin the game entirely for most linear RPGs because you can't go to the new area because you need to finish that part of the main quest. In Skyrim, you can explore almost every dungeons, keep leveling, find treasures, do side-quests for all towns, do side-quests for Guilds and more even if the main quest is broken. Call it whatever you want but I'm sure that, by the time you are done exploring 80% of everything Skyrim has to offer, the patch will be out. If your primary goal in Skyrim is to do the main quest and you can't focus on anything else, the Elders Scrolls series isn't made for you.

I can't exactly say this for 100% because I've barely dabbled in the world of Skyrim in my twelve hours, but my main priority has always been to finish the main quest first, it gets it out of the way and it also helps level you up. Why is that important? Well because in Oblivion they decided it would be a wonderful idea to balance all the quest rewards to your level. Like chillrend, for example. One of the best weapons in vanilla Oblivion, yes? Well if you go do that quest at like level 25+ it'll have max stats, if you go do it at level 5 it'll svck complete ass. It doesn't level with you, either. So I always complete the main quest first and try to avoid reward quests until I'm a higher level. I guess I'm not made to play the Elder Scrolls.

Of course its not expected and shouldnt be in there, but is this bug something everyone is getting, everytime they play the game? It could be that this bug is triggered by doing certain actions in a certain way, and the testers didnt get the bug.

I found a game breaking bug in another game (not Bethesda). Going on the forums of that game i asked about it, and some people had the same bug, but alot didnt. I reloaded my save and never got the bug again. What im trying to say is they can only fix what they find, and they simple may not have come across this. Now they know about it, it will be fixed in a patch.

We can all rant and rave about it, but at the end of the game we all want the same, a great game with as few bugs as possible. And to get that its best to post bugs so they can be fixed, not going off on one at Bethesda.

Just because im trying to explain it from there point of view does mean im in bed with them. I dont want bugs in the game, but neither do Bethesda too

Some really angry people here.

Zebina, that shadows comment and who I was commenting to was the top creator, and to the topic. Yes bug svcks, yes game breaking bugs svck. But people need to realize that unfortuatly when a game is this huge and this complex you cannot properly test a game like a linear single player game. You really see a lot of the bugs when games go live.

The texture issue, maybe they use developer kits that are different from our xboxs and they never install the data? or the developer kits are different enough that the texture problem doesn't happen. That is possible. I have yet to see one texture issue, the only thing I saw even close one one texture taking 2 secs to load.

I wouldn't doubt that half the things people report as bugs aren't bugs at all. People make the assumption they are. Some bugs are obvious of course, and again svck, but it is expected with games like these.
You see a trend of people doing open betas to help with bugs, which helps a lot, but story driven games like this they may not want spoilers out there, people like to ruin it for other people.

then there are the trolls who just stir things up and lie, so you have to contend with them.

I have seen a few bugs here and there but they have been insignificant like a npc gliding across a walkway instead of walking.

Your answer makes no sense. The game hasn't even been out for a week and people are finding all kinds of bugs. And they even bettered themselves this time by announcing that a patch/update is in the works a day before the game's release, instead of a day after, like they did in FNV. LOL. I saw this coming a mile away and the trend will continue until something changes with our laws, such as a 'lemon law' for video games, or at the very least, the current laws we have now get enforced.

Do you realize the amount of money they keep making off of these games? They've clearly got the means and money do to a good testing phase on their games, but instead choose to pocket that money and let the customer do it for free.

Can you imagine going to a fancy restaurant and the server brings you a plate of food with much of it uncooked/unprepared just to put it in front of you within a reasonable time frame, and then the chef comes out from time to time and takes a portion back to the kitchen and 'fixes' it. Meanwhile you've sat there for 5 hours waiting to get the meal you really ordered. The only difference is that the restaurant doesn't take your money first before you have a chance to realize just how crappy the food/service really is and you'd have a chance to leave without paying them anything because of it. Which is why I suspect Bethesda doesn't have demos as opposed to the BS excuses they give.

BTW, if the game REQUIRES you to play from disc to function properly, then it shouldn't have passed MS's QC. Does the packaging state this requirement? Do the advertisemants/hype? I'm guessing no.

There is a reason a patch comes out on day 1 with many games. That is because the finished code is sent to be massed produced etc a month before release. So they continue testing during that time, but obviously cant change the game as its been sent to be mass produced. So a patch is the only way they do it. Happens with alot of games