I've purchased every Fallout game when it was first released (including Wasteland and Fountain of Dreams). The digital abortion known as Fallout: New Vegas has demonstrated that Bethesda can no longer be trusted to produce reliable new release code. I can tolerate the graphics glitches - which are EVERYWHERE. I can tolerate the interface glitches - which are EVERYWHERE. I can tolerate the gameplay glitches - which are EVERYWHERE. I can even tolerate a corrupted save - but they're EVERYWHERE! The combined offenses create a very nearly unplayable game that COULD and SHOULD have been a home run. The engine already exists, the framework already exists - just throw in some new assets, maps, and stories and Bethesda laughs all the way to the bank!

Well, no longer. No matter how many games I've been looking forward to from Bethesda, I will no longer fork over $60+ for a new release and I won't fork over another $50+ on DLC. I'll wait until the Game Of The Year edition comes out and then... I'll wait some more!! Then, when the most complete edition is $14.99 used at GameStop, that's when I'll buy. There are enough of your competitors out there competently creating adequate time wasters that I can wait.

As a software engineer, I realize that bugs are inevitable in any "enterprise"-sized application. However, I think I'd have to fire half of my engineers and half of my QA group if they'd let me down as badly as this.

I had thought that Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3 showed me that Bethesda was a force to be reckoned with. Fallout: New Vegas showed me that Oblivion and Fallout 3 must have been lucky flukes.

bethesda didnt develop new vegas

I think that is pretty much the general feeling on the xbox 360 issues forum. I know personally I won't be buying a new Bethesda game (and i probably should have skipped this one the second i saw Obsidian) any time soon if at all. Since i haven't even had much play time before the DLC bug and after constantly browsing forums for information on updates and hopefully work a rounds. I now know so much of the story and the quests involved in the game that its been pretty spoiled for me. I was hoping for an experience with this game like i received with fallout 3. Well I definitely received and experience but not what i was looking for. 22 years of gaming and this is easily the biggest disappointment with the industry.

Yes I owned a 3DO.

SO what your saying is that you will still buy it

Bethesda didn't develop the game, but bethesda did publish the game. I used to work in the industry in QA departments, usually when a game comes out that isn't complete it's because the publisher is pushing the developer to release the game by a certain date or funding for their project is kaput. This being said, it puts obsidian software engineers in a very precarious position for a few reasons. They have to use bethesda's old engine, which as we all saw with fallout 3, was a bit buggy, but bethesda spent all the time they could in refining fallout 3 to release the new gameplay style to the gaming world and it was quite successful. Now, bethesda thought they could probably slack a bit and hire some third party developer to create fallout NV, of which the engine was already created, obsidian just had to put a new template and face on the game. While this sounds easy, it can really be a nightmare for the developers who don't have all the inside knowledge of working with the engine. This is why bethesda would publicly state they were working in alliance with obsidian to create fallout NV.

This tactic to produce more money from a title can be clearly seen with the call of duty franchise, the developers who created the game, infinity ward, only actually developed a handful of the games. Usually treyarch would take over for the crappier versions of the game, and it shows. This is a tactic used by publishers to sell the title and stray from the quality side where they can pay people less money to develop the same title, and people usually buy it, unfortunately, because they don't do research about who is actually making what they play.

My point here is it was probably very tough for the developers to work off someone else's engine, and it probably wasn't the fault of the devs. The OP, i feel, correctly identifies bethesda as the problem, but i don't think it's the engineers' fault. I think it was bethesda's business management team, and higher ups that pushed to get this game out too soon. From what i played that wasn't bugged, i thought obsidian did a commendable job recreating the fallout world and feel, a lot better than i thought they would. I just wish they had more time to refine what they were making and address all the open bugs in their bug database, because i'm sure they're all there, they just didn't have the time to put the fixes in. I probably found more bugs casually playing this game than any game i've played as an end user.

I feel shafted as well, and while the game's bugs has made me an active member in the forum community here, all my time has been spent in the xbox 360 issues forum.

I hope bethesda addresses these issues, and is more aware of future endeavors, meddling with the integrity of one of their top selling game could really hurt the company. I know i will be much more of a conscious buyer next time around and i will go around and read the forums before i'm forced go there because my game saves all corrupted.

This was just a personal insight, i could be wrong about the internal struggle between obsidian and bethesda, but in my experience that's way it goes.

seriously that lame excuse was old a week after the games release..bethesda is just as much to blame for the state of the game as obsidian is..

Bethesda produced New Vegas.

If I produce a product, I'm responsible for its production quality. If I subcontract with a company and they fail me - it's my fault. If I put my name on it, I own it for better or worse.

And you don't think Bethesda gave Obsidian the source code to work from? You think Obs re-wrote the whole game from scratch themselves and released it this soon? That is ridiculous.

Of course it is also Bethesda's fault too, NV is based on the same code, Obs only redid the maps, scripts, and added more serious bugs.

Too many of the problems seem far too common to have been missed / not fixed before release, and the fixes have been too long in coming.

Yep. I agree with what has been said here. We, as the console gaming community, need to learn to be vigilant about hype, and carefully weigh all the feedback and reviews before we purchase game titles. Bethesda has shown us that sequels from big publishers do NOT guarantee a good and quality game title. I really hope New Vegas will be set as a gauge for gamers as to how we can spot and avoid a mess such as this.

While I don't completely agree, I completely understand the sentiment of the OP. The second biggest shortcoming of this game is QC, or lack thereof. All the quests are great and well designed but fall short in actual gameplay. A broken quest makes a broken game. Okay so they rely on the customers to do the testing, well they better have someone standing by to start implementing fixes on a damn near daily basis. I play on a pc so I can take advantage of mods but I pity the poor bastards on consoles who are at the mercy of the nonexistent patches. Does it break some cardinal rule to release a patch that simply fixes ONE quest line? Would it be so bad to release a patch that simply makes all the missing BOS squads appear where they are supposed to? I really like what Obsidian did with the game but what disappoints me is what they did NOT do. Surely they could afford to pay 5 people to do nothjing but play the damned game for 12 hours a day for a week. Assign one of those people to do everything ass backwards.
If they could have just handled QC correctly, it would be a lot easier to overlook the biggest shortcoming of this game and that is the terribly dated engine.

Well, in the last year or two, I have seemingly noticed a decline in quality of games upon release. With the ability to simply patch games and fix them as it breaks, it seems it's popular to release broken software, almost somewhere between beta and final.

While this has been possible for the PC for a long long time, with console gaming it's relatively new still. With that in mind, it appears developers just dump games out without quality control testing (cause that requires paying somebody to do a job) and letting us, the gamers find the problems in the wild, and go from there if they have the time.

But true, it wasn't developed by Bethesda, although Fallout 3 had a handful of problem as well, as did Oblivion (GOTY edition for the PS3 is not worth owning without owning the original version as I found out...), and problems that were never even fixed or resolved, but could have been... So I already have a lack of faith in Bethesda for quality control, but if you're lucky enough to not experience anything game breaking, then you end up with a solid great game.

Ah well.

I need sleep, and having a game breaker happen to me at the very end of New Vegas, and stuck with it unless they fix it, I need sleep before I get even more frustrated

i can't believe the patch isn;t out yet, they rally do seem to want to lose customers..

Yeah I which back to FO3. I'm at 90+ hours and cap lev 30 on FONV. Higher and further in the game more bugs it seems. I'm done until new patch. Plus I'm not spending another dime on DLC for FONV, we should at least get one FREE DLC from them!!!!!!

I'd rather wait a couple of months for a patch that fixes multiple issues in one go than have to update a game every other day. Just saying...

Havok + Obsidian = Legion of Bugs + Bethesda Softworks = released product + unhappy customers = hundreds of millions $. That the truth, baby! the truth is $$$$$$! Hello, Bethesda. Give us more! Give us new buggy as hell DLC! Dirty dead money) PATCH WHO? That's really insane.