I have played games before that had issues. I have even tryed beta releases in the past, and not one crashed as often as FNV. So I have to ask, was this game released in the alpha stage? It sure acts like an alpha. I still get crashes, reboots, and lockup every few mins. Only once in a while the game will let me play for up to half an hour before it crashes, and that's with turning off my startup in the msconfig.

It wouldn't make any sense for this to be an Alpha build.

"Beta" refers to a game (or other application) that has all of its features in place. There is still testing to do and some things may be tweaked but by in large the world and all of its components have been imp lamented. So to suggest this isn't yet in beta would imply there are art resources or game features or what not that are still pending.

When I beta-tested Tribunal we were actually sent Alpha builds - the voice acting hadn't been finalized and (hilarious) placeholders were included for all of the spoken dialogue. There's nothing like that in FONV.

It was a late Beta when it was released for sales. It still is in beta mode after 3 patches. Nothing more than a candy coated turd at the moment, even without CTD's and Freezes.

I did not pay my hard earned money for a beta - let alone the condition it was first released in. Even now, without CTD's and freezes - I have shelved the games as unplayable do to the remaining game bugs.

A direct and decided consumer rippoff - They had the ability to test it before release. And I am sure most of the bugs were known before release. Someone decided because of money/time constraints to release it anyways.

I refuse to believe that anyone could be stupid enough not to have noticed its buggy condition before release.

Even now - the advertising politics continue while they count their caps.

Had the truth been know about what state Fallout New Vegas was released in ( Before Hand ) - the sales for this title would have been very low.

Time for the Rights for Fallout to move onto someone else - Of a Higher Calibre - maybe Blizzard? or some else who is capable of knowing what quality means and what it also represents.

:unsure2:

I have to agree. And the more I think about it, when it comes to PC tittles, Bethesda games are the only ones that have given me any problems that where not related to my own hardware. Also not blizzard, they lost their ability to tell a story without stepping all over their own cannon.

And therefore equals: Fallout New Vegas . . .

I think I fail to see the point of this topic?

I assume it is the developer that decides what stage a game in development is in, and therefore by definition, FONV is in release stage (or whatever the name for that stage is).

You cannot judge a games release stage by individuals subjective experience of the game. In that case I would say the game is in "release stage". :mellow:

It was an RTM build. A buggy RTM build, but still a retail release. Development stage names are meaningless, ex. nvidia calls all their non-WHQL certified drivers 'beta'. I used to work for a company that would release weekly and sometimes daily builds. Anything that wasn't officially sent out was a beta but they were all pretty much the same. They just did some more testing on the build that was sent out.

A true beta calls for feedback on bugs and issues that typically can be reproduced. Judging by most of the posts on this forum there isn't much helpful feedback. Just topics like these, refund requests, people saying OMG when is the patch coming are you working on it, I keep crashing please fix it, this game is full of bugs fix them, etc.

If people really wanted to get a patch faster, rather than complain they could say things like:

Every time I go to X, my companion Y will leave and I am unable to get them back without console commands. Here is my dxdiag and here a save game which can reproduce the issue

Instead they say:

Y keeps leaving wherever I go! This is a disgrace! I demand a refund! Why am I playing a beta!?

Question: Did people have to pay 50 or 60 bucks for those builds ??

The important thing is that they fix all the problems.

Seems like the next patch should address most of the remaining issues as they are taking their time in releasing it.

The functions fairly well for me though. I get random CTD's but they arent a real problem as i've had the game going all day with no issues before.

There are however lots of quest bugs (most with work arounds), sound issues, loads and loads of video problems when it comes to fps and general performance.

Hell i've seen worse though. Even if i had all the problems everyone here is talking about. I've paid and played games that were literally unfinished as in parts of the plot missing. Not to mention bugs. Took over a year to have a functioning game and that was only because the gamer community issued their own patch and rework of pretty much all the DLLs. Not saying that it's ok but it's not unheard-of.

I'd also like to say that I think putting FNV on Steam is a good thing. Especially since i do all my gaming there. It's a great place to meet other gamers with your same interests and once you build up a nice friends list, there is always someone there to play co-op games. I'm a fairly hardcoe gamer and Steam is available at least 99% of time and the rare 1% i just play single player in offline mode.

That's not entirely true

When you are contacted through ED-E to take the robot to the BoS or to the FotA to get it examined, the voice acting from the BoS comes from two people, the latter being clearly someone adding a missing line in the last minute and not "acting" much.

Granted, this it not an empty placeholder but it's still sad for something coming from Bethesda.

You know, there are two basic problems with your reasoning:

1. Final consumers are not betatesters.

2. If you are seriously considering DXDiag a betatesting (debugging) tool then I'm sorry but you have no idea what betatesting is about. Anyway, seeing as DXDiag is the favourite tool in these forums, nobody should be surprised that all our best efforts to help with this sad state of affairs are getting us nowhere but to more frustration.

DXDiag gives a fairly complete picture of your system. It is the perfect tool to anolyze any potential issues with the user's pc, as well as suggesting ways to correct the issue.

Alpha, if you consider the DLC unimplemented features. Its a bit of a paradigm shift towards continuous development with earlier yet slightly more polished releases. By that reasoning the "game of the year" edition (regardless of any awards won) will probably be the final stable release. Also explains why they used Steam, it can be integrated into their development pipeline as a repository for test builds - albeit without the normal repository features like version rollback, not being forced to update, and oh yeah, being free as its not fit for retail...

Much more actually, it was part of a very expensive suite of buggy apps for a niche market



Right, final consumers are not beta testers. End of story. As Zanderat said, DXDiag provides a full report of what a user's system is so you can narrow down specific issues to specific hardware. It isn't just this forum, it's every PC game forum.

And exactly how do you intend that something that simply describes your system to pinpoint *what* crashed, *how* it crashed and *why* it did?

A real debug tool gives developers information about WHAT crashed, what was going on at the time and a number of clues as to *why* it crashed in the first place. Of course tools like that are commonly used by betatesters and the output (something resembling a crashlog) requires a developer to make use of it.

DXDiag does nothing like that so at the risk of being mean I'll say that what we have here is the carrot and donkey scenario where you are given the illusion that you are being helpful with a tool that is pretty much useless for the job. A royal waste of time if you ask me.

Anyway, I rest my case. I shelved NV already and went back to proper games.

:facepalm:

If for some reason Bethesda were put into a position where they would rather sell the rights to Fallout, Blizzard is the last company that should or would wand to take it up. For the last 15 years they have produced only Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo games. They have no reason to desire the rights to any other setting particularly one that would (at that point) have been dropped by two companies. It would be more likely that if Bethesda ceased developing Fallout games then there would be no more AAA Fallout titles made for a very very long time. Right now they have created all their settings and own all rights to them, so why would they want something they did not create from the ground up and would not even own the MMORPG rights to (Interplay does.) Even a single player game with multiplayer components might be considered a violation of those rights. If they wanted a post apocalyptic scifi retro setting they would create their own; more likely they would simply utilize the Starcraft setting if they wanted to do a primarily single player scifi RPG

Blizzard also makes a particular kind of game and particular kind of narrative that is completely incompatible with the branching and open worlds of the Fallout series. I'm not sure why someone who liked any of the Fallout RPGs would play diablo and think "Blizzard should make Fallout games" unless they never liked Fallout. They may make good stable games, but they don't make the same kind of game in any sense.


I agree. It does have a lot of bugs - a lot of which remind me of the release versions of Fallout 1 and 2. Heck, the majority of the bugs in those games were only ever fixed by unofficial community patches- some of which have been released as late as this year.

I've thuroughly enjoyed the game and played through it twice. It does have a lot of bugs, though I did not encounter most of them on all playthroughs. I did have one playthrough that I had to almost restart due to save game corruption but luckily that was not my first playhtrough. If it had been I may have been far more upset by it - but since I had completed the quests related to the bug a couple times before successfully I knew it was not something that was likely to be repeated at a high rate. I think how buggy you end up thinking the game is does depend highly on pure luck.

That is not to say that the next patch (or two) should not be fairly significant nor that Obsidian (though people seem to rage more at Bethesda than the people who actually produced the game) should not be kicking themselves for not budgeting just a tad bit more on QA. It is not flawless by any reasonable definition of the word, nor is it a "turd" as one particular poster likes to say in almost every thread they post in. It is, like the original two games, a flawed but potentially very enjoyable game. How enjoyable it is does have a lot to do with how many and which bugs you manage to run into.

As far as the usefulness of the DXDIAG output goes - it does help with some specific issues. It allows people to diagnose driver problems, codec issues, and the relatively uncommon case of someone attempting to run the game on something like a tablet PC with integrated graphics. Yes, I have seen more than one person trying to run the game on a tablet, ultralight, or budget laptop that did not have a real graphics card. I have also seen several people helped with codec issues and driver issues that were only diagnosed because they posted their DXDIAG output.

This thread makes my brain hurt. Does no body remember Interplay and how much of poster child they made themselves for "screw-ups of the century" before 3d Realms took the title?

One thing for sure it's the last time i pre order a CE of a Bethesda game and also pre order a CE strategy game (i know it s not from Bethesda) before reading forums or reviews with the ammount it costed me to get a game that is one of the most crashing games i ever owned (been playing computer games since the 80s , my first PC was an IBM PC Jr) hell it crashes more than WAR in early beta when you had to disable a processor to make it work i end up having to load previous saves because the game keeps crashing as soon i load a save each time yes looking at you vault 22, when i buy a game that cost me 79$ i expect it to work right away and not having to wait untill they patch a game for months untill i can play with no problems , a few bugs here and there i can live with it but losing hours of gameplay because i forgot that the game likes to do random CTD for no reasons and patching the game making it worse than it was before i patched it , or quest not triggering, factions turning hostile for no reasons having to reload a previous save ? nah i ll pass next time

And I tought I was the only one who noticed that... the rest of the posts are anything but Fallout NV related :gun:

You are clearly missing the point. This is the internet, people lie. People lie about their hardware or exaggerate their specs. Or they try running games on unapproved hardware configurations with integrated graphics. If every nvidia 8800 SLI user is having a certain problem nobody else is having then the dxdiag report narrows it down to that particular configurations. Yes it is helpful

Helpful for beginners or for the purpose of this forum in particular I suppose: to limit the number of things that could have gone wrong, but nothing else.

My experience with betatesting is related to operating systems and in that job a mere list of system components was useless. You're expected to provide crashlogs using tools provided for that purpose. I did that for quite a long time and managed to get bugs fixed on a day by day basis.

I suppose I'd like to betatest the game for Obsidian instead of running in circles here waiting for miracles to happen but oh well, that won't happen

Well was it a 3D modern game or a software application you were testing? I've tested software applications, 2D GUI-driven business apps where yeah the hardware is pretty meaningless except for the odd issue that would affect certain CPU types or certain drivers, and yes certain version of windows. And like you said I kept logs and would attempt to duplicate everything I ran in to.

But 3D modern games have far more variables at play. Video hardware, video driver, RAM, HD speed/type, CPU speed, 32/64-bit OS, etc. And a dxdiag report tells you all that so yeah it's helpful. Because of it, we know that having more than 2 cores or an Intel core i CPU will causes freezes and CTDs. We know that mostly nvidia users were having the initial low FPS around NPCs and also the XP users didn't have it.