I love Skyrim and appreciate the effort it took building such an engaging world. However, I'm surprised at the number of glitches that should have been caught in testing. Now, I'm not in the software business but I would have thought that going out and buying a couple of "off the shelf" gaming rigs and putting a hundred hours into the game on them to watch for bugs would be a must. The save file problem should never have made it in the "out the door" product as an example. Using your paying customer as your beta tester is not a sound business model IMHO (maybe not the intent but seems to be the result).

Computer gaming isn't new. There are legions of sophisticated gamers in the market today. Many of which have programming prowess that could match the developers and have the insight to spot shoddy corner cutting work. Putting a product out to this market with some of the prominent problems plaguing Skyrim exhibits poor business judgement . I'm just shaking my head over this.

I'm still enjoying the game and look forward to what the mod community will produce. I salute this community for all the effort they put into improving games for the rest of us to enjoy. Thank you!

Open-world structure + everything dependent upon player choice and scripting = lots of potential for things happening that a million players will likely find out about faster than a QA team of several hundred people.

It is virtually impossible to predict how many different ways the game could be played by an audience of over a million, especially with the complex structure that Skyrim has, just like in many of the previous Bethesda games. Playing Halo always ends up the same way, because it's ultimately only one path and one way for things to happen. In Skyrim, that path is entirely up to the player after the introduction.

And given how complex a lot of games can be, there will always be a chance for a bug or a glitch to be found, even years after release. Some people even play the game in a way that they're intentionally trying to cause bugs and glitches, just to see what happens.