Those modders have the entire community behind them reporting all sorts of bugs POST RELEASE, Bethesda doesn't have that luxury.

Surely Bethesda has access to exactly the same resources: there's nothing to stop them incorporating the fixes into a post-release patch. One of the major frustrations is that they won't release official patches even when fixes are handed to them on a plate, the "a-bomb bug" being a particularly notorious example.

Not to mention they don't have deadlines and budget to consider. Bethesda could fix all the bugs of the game easily, but it would simply be too expensive. Patches cost money but don't make money, and i don't think anyone here wants to start paying for pathces. That is why they fix only the most critical bugs.

They've already paid for the patches by giving the money up-front for an incomplete product. Of course after-sales support doesn't "make" money, but it's not unreasonable to say that it should have been factored into the up-front price. Of course businesses prefer to move on to more profitable endeavours rather than finishing the job, but that doesn't mean they should.

Companies have been releasing free patches for years and years now, yet you claim now that one of the most successful RPG developers of the past decade can't afford to fix their own mess, even when the solutions are delivered to them on a silver platter?

Pre release, no they do not. Pre release they have no access to the thousands of fans that can and do report bugs that the modding community has the benefit of.

As Tojka stated, they also don't have a budget or schedule to keep, that frees up the modders in areas that Bethesda doesn't have the luxury of. People will find something to complain about regardless of what happens. it's not just a problem with Bethesda's games either.

I agree, but only to an extent: though I think it's unreasonable to expect them to have that level of resources, I do still think that they do insufficient QA pre-release, and a major gripe is that they don't do enough post-release support.

And "people will find something to complain about" makes it sound as if it's unreasonable to object to unfixed bugs, which I have to say I very strongly disagree with. I don't think it's reasonable to expect every minor wrinkle to be ironed out, sure, but when show-stoppers are left unfixed that's really not acceptable, and time and budgetary constraints should be irrelevant to the buyer since it's a product that's already been paid for.

Usually software developers have a patching budget, amount of money set aside for developing patches, and this is of course included in the price. Once this money is used, patching is done, unless maybe if there is something critical still left.

And it could be worse, Activision for example does not allow money to be used to patch SP only games at all, as Prototype buyers learned the hard way.

Problem is that by using that approach, there's too much incentive to release unfinished products if there's no obligation to do otherwise. Some companies are already pushing their luck in that regard, and irritating their customers doesn't make good long-term business sense. Though I'd also say that "whatever we can get away with" isn't really acceptable whether it makes good business sense or not...

If for Oblivion all the hours people have spent on reporting those bugs, along with the many more hours spent on fixing all those bugs were put together, and Bethesda would pay what they would pay their average employee for each hour, they'd lose a lot of money.

Are you talking about the graphics engine? Probably when the nest round of consoles arrives.

I just hate everything about consoles, that doesn't make me an elitist.

As to why Bethesda used the tech that they did, I'm guessing it had to do with what's in the guts of the Xbox right now. And rumor has it, that sh*t is outdated as hell.

People are lumping lower-level game platform engines in with ready-to-use game engines. Oblivion, for example, was built using Gamebryo, but there is a lot built on top of Gamebryo. Quite a bit of this does seem to be re-used in Skyrim. Now, I'm not arguing that some of these things shouldn't/couldn't be improved, but people also need to understand that the design of a game engine is largely dependent on the features you want to have in the game. You can't compare two completely different games that require completely different feature sets to make and point out that their game engines don't have the same strengths and weaknesses. Of course they don't.

That said, if an aspect of a game doesn't live up to your expectations then don't buy the game. Why would a game company completely replace their entire codebase (insanely expensive) if they don't have to in order to sell their game? That would be terrible business.

Just playing devil's advocate here. How can you possibly know this without doing a full anolysis of the game engine and then a full cost-benefit anolysis of re-creating every part of it from scratch? Even if they did re-create it from scratch, how can you know that there wouldn't be inherently contradictory design goals between things they know they want to do vs. things they might be excluding because their current engine doesn't do it well? They have to determine whether or not it's worth dumping years and millions of dollars into a completely new engine to solve some known issues and to make it look cooler when you jump in 3rd-person. I know I don't have the data to make that determination. Who does?

Care to give some details as to why you hate consoles?

And by the way, games that push the limits of graphical processing lose money. Typically developers want to reach the widest possible target audience, and as it happens, most people don't have great computers, even at this point.

Not much to say since everyone has said everything, when looking at the engines, "Ubisoft Montreal" makes Bethesda’s rather dated. That's if Farcry 3 is really that amazing looking.

　

No. Usually, professional software developers have a bunch of cut-off "end of support" dates; one for feature requests, another (later) one for critical bugs, and a third (even later) one for security problems. All three are usually something like "until the point we stop selling the software" (hint: Bethesda still sells Morrowind. When was the last patch for that?), "about two years later" and "five to ten years after we last sold this software" respectively. Budgets, pricing, schedules and licensing agreements are formulated around the expectation of such.

Example: Microsoft Windows XP.

Sold until: end of June 2008 (retail) / end of January 2009 (OEMs)
Supported until: mid-April 2009 (almost a year after end-of-sale), available with (paid-for) extended support until April 2014.

For business software, no doubt. But as you yourself said: when was the last patch for Morrowind?

Only Blizzard's patching seems anything close to that.

It's the norm for professional software development houses and the level I expect from anyone I buy software at full retail price from. Anyone else is a bloody amateur lucky enough to get something halfway working stitched together ... and who can only hope they don't end up like Troika Games each time they finally release something.

While Bethesda may be a more glaring example of it, you may as well get used to the concept of very limited hardware and software progression going forward. The rise in popularity of consoles for gaming creates natural barriers to innovation as they are static in their ability to perform. This static nature combined with the increased market share means that innovation is an expensive risk with virtually no payoff.

Is there really a rise in popularity of consoles? Although these things wax and wane, the thing with consoles vs. non-consoles doesn't really seem all that different to how things were 30 years ago and more. In fact looking back then, developers often supported multiple different platforms with vastly different (and usually extremely meagre) resources.

Consoles are becoming more popular as they can do more things now (internet, video streaming, music and picture library, etc.) which is allowing them to fill a role independent of the home computer. This means that while in the past people tended to select console or computer we now have a large number of people who select both.

In my experience the gaming industry has almost always been an exception to this. Not saying that's a good thing. Just saying that the precedent that you're implying exists has never really existed in the gaming industry in particular. They're vastly different types of businesses with appropriately different business models.

You're about the same age as I am (unless your profile is inaccurate...mine surely isn't ) surely you remember the days of the 2600 (Memory: 128 bytes RAM, 4 KB ROM). Those things couldn't do any more that play games..and not nearly as sophisticated games as we have now(XBOX 360: 512 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte of GDDR3 RAM clocked at 700 MHz...+ a whole lot more),It's no wonder they are so popular nowadays...and then there's knowing that the stigma of being a gamer beyond 12 years old as being considered immature, is no longer relevant. Yeah, it's people like us, who were playing video games 35 years ago that helped make gaming beyond 12 acceptable...and I still can't count how many quarters I lost in those damned machines.

Yeah, that's my age! I just remember that there was what seemed like an even split between the kids at school with the console owners on the one hand (pretty much invariably 2600s) and the "home computer" owners on the other (pre-IBM PC stuff: Spectrums, VIC-20s, Acorn Atoms and about a dozen other different types!) Well, and there was a few kids with neither, but they were a definite minority by, say, 1982. I don't think there was too much of a stigma since all the cool kids were into games as well, though they tended to favour consoles more...

Or you can buy one machine that does it all. Consoles will eventually be phased out as PC tech gets better and cheaper.