» Wed Jun 20, 2012 11:26 pm
The problem may be that their customers (us) can't just refuse to pay them for the product as the Air Force can with the projects I work on (I'm a defense contractor software engineer). There are no standards they have to meet, they probably don't have a very well defined software process, etc. I may be wrong, but that is what I suspect. And the programs (games) they are writing are huge and have a number of not really well understood aspects to them (the AI, abominable as it is). So it's the sort of project that would tend to generate a lot of bugs and they probably don't have the process or discipline (or time or money) to really shake those bugs out. If they did, they might not make money on the game and it would take twice as long to create maybe. Economically, this may be their best shot at making money on the game.
And full of bugs as it is, it's actually more stable than FO3 and FONV and Oblivion on my PS3 (except curiously in the Save dialog which is worse).
I'm not enough of a gamer to know if they are unusual in the industry, but if they were working for the government they would probably never do another project for the government because they would be banned. We have our own bugs, but struggle hard to get rid of them and we're a lot more successful then Bethesda seems to be. And our software probably is about the same size (and we have a small team too). But we've been working at it for 10 years.
So I think no, they're not the worst, this game is better than previous ones, and they do need to do better in my opinion. They really need a better testing process I think, but I realize that is probably hard without the whole game getting out into the wild, but they need to find a way.