tl;dr warning.

I do not usually sign up to videogame forums to post my disgust with certain videogames, but oh, what an exception this is.

Let me get straight to it: apparently this videogame has 3 testers. I'm probably wrong, but I really hope I'm not for the sake of Obsidian and Bethesda, as then it might be understandable why this atrocious excuse of a game called 'Fallout New Vegas' is so horribly, horribly bad.
But anyway... Behold the 3, and only 3, testers credited to the "game".


^{(Ripped straight out of the credits of the game)}

It kind of makes you wonder what they spent their time doing. Well two things are immediately obvious; thinking up nicknames to put in the credits, and writing http://bethblog.com/index.php/2010/06/30/inside-the-vault-obsidians-casey-kwock/ ^{(I will probably reference this diary in a minute)}.
But I'm not here to pick on anyone, I'm sure all 3 of these testers worked hard on making an absolutely despicable game slightly less... despicable. I'm not a religious person, but if I were to even think about how this game would've turned out without any testers at all, I'd probably reconsider. But my point again is I'm not here to pick on anyone, I'm here as a consumer voicing my opinions in a public forum, and my opinion is that we don't have to stand for this kind of poor quality product.

How long was this game in development for? I keep hearing 2 years so I'll go with that. Keeping in mind the game's engine is recycled from Fallout 3 WHICH HAD THE EXACT SAME GOD-AWFUL ISSUES, you'd expect they'd spend 25% of that time (that's 6 months) of those two years fleshing out the engine before, leaving them with 18 months to create content.
Let me put this into perspective... Suppose they have merely 5 programmers who were working on these issues for 6 months. That's 24 weeks of 5 working days (120 days). Suppose they worked only 4 hours per day on the engine EACH. Who's good at math? 120 days multiplied by 5 programmers multiplied by 4 hours... That's 2400 hours. TWO THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED hours. Five programmers, 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, 6 months. I can only assume they had more than 5 programmers working on a game of this magnitude, and they DEFINATELY had hell of a lot more time.

IN FACT: Since the game engine is recycled from Fallout 3, which was recycled from Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the game engine would've been worked on over a span of 3 videogames and two different companies. The theoretical 2400 hours to ensure Fallout New Vegas runs as a consumer, spending their hard earned currency, would expect, is beyond a joke when this engine has been in the works for years. Instead, we have a game that is absolutely broken beyond comprehension.

Please tell me how this is acceptable.
Please.
I find it hard to believe this game actually got good reviews.

Does anyone know how much this game retails for in Australia on release? $109.99 AUD. In US currency that'd be about $105 USD. I'll just give you a minute to soak that in.
I saw it in a catalogue on special for $79. I still wouldn't even pay that much. In fact I wouldn't play the game even if I was the one being paid to play it. I would rather work in the most mundane occupation on earth non stop for 3 weeks straight without food nor sleep than play this rancid joke.

And once again I return to the testers... Here's a snippet of one of their blogs:

Testing functionality, gameplay and system performance. You know what, yeah, they did a good job of gameplay. The game is solid, it's engaging and fun. I wish I could say the same thing about functionality and system performance.

Bethesda, Obsidian: I do not know who is to fault, whether it be Bethesda for being to demanding with the release date, or Obsidian for being too lazy. But you have made one thing obvious: both of these companies care about nothing more than money. You either were too demanding with the release date because you wanted your brand new shiny money tree to churn out your next vacation, or you just didn't want to spend the money to fix your product.
After all this, I guess I wonder why you would even care. You didn't care about the customer satisfaction of millions of people around the world, why would you give a flipping damn about what I have to say. But, you know, if you at least print this off and magnet this up on your fridge like a child's finger-painting their parents never really looked at, that'd make me feel special.
Apart from that, Bethesda, Obsidian, I will never buy another product with your logo on it ever again, and I have a feeling many people feel the same way. That is all.

Now, let's see how long it takes for me to get banned for blasphemy.

Excellent post. It's confounding to think how issues that are so blindingly evident and up-front to such a huge proportion of consumers were not picked up on. Multiply that by the age of the engine and the time that's been available to iron them out, and you approach the unbelievable. And to think *now* only after release is the time when they are rushing patches to the market? At my place of business if I was responsible for a product, no matter how inspired or terrific "in theory," that was fundamentally so broken and unusable at release, I would be fired. Simple as that.

QUALITY ASSURANCE
Testers
Ashley "Childlike Cat Empress of Chocolate Mushrooms" Betters

She was obviously on mushrooms the entire time! She just thought the spinning head glitch was all in her mind.

I did the same Ridort. I never sign up for game forums, but I had to because this game is so freakin broken.

Great post. The only sad thing about it is that the people at bethesda will never read it. They are too busy looking at the forums that talk about how great the product is. I dont understand how some people have games funtioning perfectly while us that are unfortunante have lost all of our hair from TEARING it out.

Actually I was surprised to see a few Bethesda employees (with blue names) in the list of "User(s) are reading this topic" a little while after I posted it.

3 testers!!!!! We had 100 at least testing Sega Sonic Racers?! A hotly anticipated game like this with just 3 testers is actually a bad joke, surely this cannot be right?!?

The list came straight from the credits of Fallout New Vegas, so unless there's a lot of uncredited testers...

The three stoges are alive and well, working hard in QA.

This is what happens when you make a game and test it all hopped up on jet.

I never knew it makes a game bad if it's filled with bugs.This game is great IMO and is much better than FO3.That said,the game is filled with tons of irritating and frustrating bugs.I have no idea on how the game could have all the bugs even if it only had 3 testers.The bugs occur in the very beginning and continue on.Some are part of the outdated engine and some are just there.
I don't regret buying the game,I love the game but the freezing and the unavailability to pick my perks is what annoys me.

The reviews are meant to recommend games, not discern bad games between good ones (although it's fairly easy to do that yourself based on what reviewers say). The point is that this game should never have gotten as good reviews as it has when so many frustrating, gamebreaking bugs, glitches, crashes and issues are present in all 3 versions of the game. I honestly believe most of the reviewers got paid to score it high.
Games are meant to be fun and enjoyable, not frustrating and tedious to a point where you need to save every minute in case of a crash. We paid good money for this game too; we paid good money to have fun and enjoy. And like you said, many of the bugs are present right from the start of the game, I don't see how they could have overlooked them.

This is all just so disappointing.

You'd think that after all the problems people had with FO3 on the PS3 they'd have taken a bit of time to work out some of the bugs before releasing the game. If they did really only have three QA people it's obvious that the entire development process was spent adding content with the existing engine. Essentially NV *is* just a glorified DLC pack.

I had been cautiously optimistic about NV and was seriously considering getting it this week ( I actually have an entirely free weekend for the first time in forever ) but after being burned by the late-game bugs in FO3 and seeing no indication that anything has changed ( in fact my impression is things are *worse* ) I'll be skipping NV.

The only way I'll be getting this game is if the patches address the major concerns of the community, and even then it'll be doubtful.

Congratulations Bethesda, you're inability to release a reasonably bug-free game over the last several years has turned this long-time fan against you. You've proven to be simply unreliable.

I think it's interesting how many of are on Fallouts Forum to vent us frustrations with these companies. You would think that a game like this would have 1,000 of testers working different shifts. I have a friend who used to work for a certain major giant game company (trying to take over the world) who worked on The Simpsons game. She told me her job was just to walk around one level over and over and try and fall through cracks or get stuck. That's it, she hated it because it was so boring. But you know I don't remember glitches in that game. Maybe they had three testers because the game was so secrete. Like they were afraid that people would find out it was just fallout 3 New Vegas and really just a expansion on Fallout 3. They may have been afraid to hurt sales. Whatever the reason. I know when they try and bring out Fallout 4 any game review who just throws them the 9.00 will regret it. I think we should not only vent to these fools but also contact IGN and gamepro and any of these other reviewers out there and let them know whats up. Review the game, pull your lips off their butt and tell us if it's worth buying. Most of these game reviewers either get a patched copy of the game or ignore the game quality all together. I remember a game that scored a 5.00 from IGN. The game was horrible, graphics svcked, sound svcked, story svcked and game play svcked. What about New Vegas. 8.5 for game play. 8.5 can you believe how low their standards are. Common we have GT5 coming out and they won't release it till it's perfect. Were talking shadows you may never notice have to be flawless. You think you'll play gt5 and your car is going to float. Never going to happen. Why because they test and test and test and test and test and then if it's not perfect they test again. 2 years is about the time it would of taken to make this game great. 10.00 game play great. Instead they waited to the last minute to test and then had no more time. I would of loved to hear a delay was needed for the game. I would of welcomed them to say the game is not good enough for us. We expect more from are product and we will give the consumer no less than the best we can do.


Just sell the rights already

POST OF THE MONTH!!

caustically sarcastic BUT on point. If there was any justice in the world, both Obsidian and Bethesda would not only read this post but take it's message to heart and act accordingly.

Bravo Good Sir, I humbly bow down to you :bowdown:

Three testers. *lights a cigarette*

Yeah, that fits. It's a poor choice, but it fits. Jesus...it explains everything.

Your average playtesting group is comprised of around 8 groups of 6-12 people working around the clock. At the end of any one day they should've recieved feedback from 50-100 people.

It seems like alot, but as mentioned these people are doing mundane things like walking over a floor again and again to find problems. It's testing like this that creates solid games.

Oh, my Lord. My head's hurting. We could be looking at a serious problem here. There's no way they can spend the hours to patch-clean the entire game when the entire game was never properly tested.

This is...heartbreaking. Man. I looked forward to this since they first let us know. What am I saying, we all did. Man. I'm in a room of broken hearted people.

I wish I could buy you all a drink. I know I could use one.

Okay, they're currently discussing the three testers over in the "General Fallout: New Vegas" board, and the moderator "Gstaff" had this to say...

"If you go through the credits, you'll see that there's well over 70 testers that worked on the game. I'm sure the number is probably higher than that."

Well, having 3 testers made me believe the reason why there are soooo many bugs in the game. Having 70 plus testers...and the game still has this many bugs??!?!!

It's obvious that their play testers are not gamers in their off time. It's obvious from the first 10 minutes of the game that there are issues that should have been resolved. It's like these testers didn't understand the implications of these issues and thought "oh, they'll overlook that". I'm also convinced that they test these games on special systems that react to the things you do differently than consumer systems. So these game breaking bugs may never have showed up as a result.

I've had no real issues other than long load times after marathon sessions and one side quest (only mentioned in a note actually) to kill someone in vault 3 and rescue another. When I returned to the quest giver he acknowledged the rescued ranger but there was no dialog to get paid for the enemy kill. Also, the train explodes on me regardless of the fact that I've successfully disarmed and removed the bomb using the generic action and the skill that allows you to do this.

No big game breaking/ending bugs for me (yet?), but at the same time it's ridiculous to see so many people across all three platforms having these problems and the amount of people that are going to give up or never even giving the game a shot to begin with.

For shame Obsidian/Beth, for shame.

I find that strange considering there's only 3 listed in the credits.

While at first that may sound better, it is in fact quite horribly the flip-side. Seriously how can say around 100 people playing this game, not play the 'Come Fly With Me' quest which is almost inevitable if you follow the storyline to Novac - what 4 hours in - and not see the half-sinking body relevant to the quest item.

Reno

Wow, those are some really obnoxious and unprofessional nicknames.

Props to Casey.

I have to agree somewhat, although if I remember correctly all the FO series games have had little easter eggs/nicknames/humour in the credits.

First game, PC version anyone?

Reno

There's a difference between QA people and testers. Other games that boast of dozens of testers probably mean beta testers.

Also, its not cool to post the names of the QA people to badmouth them when they can't defend themselves. They may have been told to QA only certain portions of the game or the publisher may have simply decided to go ahead and release the game with a long list of known bugs. Lets not assume that the QA folks didn't do their jobs. They could have done it to perfection and we could still end up with the same level of bugginess.

good post, its good that somebody actually pointed this out!