How many QA's worked on this?

My theory is, no matter what the problem is in any game the maker CAN and SHOULD fix any problem that a paying customer has with a game. Bethesda appears to just stop caring at some point.

Why does there need to be a standard? Bethesda should be striving to release games with absolutely 0 bugs, not games with a max of 250 or so.

Wth would tax records have to do with it? You have no idea how their QA department is structured, whether QA are even listed as employees, temps, whatever, do you?

The idea that you would somehow discover Bethesda's dirty little secret of no or badQA by looking at their tax records is ridiculous, furthermore, it would do you no good at all as you legally have no case whatsoever for action. Consumer protection laws are a great thing, but don't exist to be abused by entitled gamers...who have gotten a huge amount of valid use out of a product, but still feel they are 'owed' something.

Your right, I'm wrong. As a disabled, former Federal "employee", I over-stepped my bounds. I was hoping someone in this forum is a fan that could advise if I should, or should not invest with this company. It seems with the amount of dissatisfaction I am reading here, the choice is quite clear. Thank you for your input.

Good job. You really opened America and invented a wheel with that idea.

It's one thing to QA test a 4-5 hour COD game thousands of times.

Quite another matter to do the same with a massive open world RPG that provides several hundred hours of content. Bethesda could have hired a QA team of hundreds and had them testing nonstop for years and still never found every single bug. Within the context of huge open world sandbox RPGs, this is hands down one of the least buggy launches IMO.

Keep in mind, I'm not a Bethesda employee and this is my personal opinion.

Using company Q&A practices as a metric to determine the profitability of a company is ... kinda bizarre if you don't mind me saying.

It's okay.

Companies like EA salivate at this kind of Market. Bethesda is completely dependent on this particular niche market for profit. EA acquired Pandemic Studios (which had an open world engine that worked decently) and Bioware (Mass Effect) not too long ago. It was about the same time they were working on The White Council, which was also supposed to be an open world RPG.

They may still be doing so, despite reports that they cancelled that project.

EA is a predatory company. They already have an open world engine. Several of them, actually.

EA's corporate model is built on exactly this kind of circumstance: A company has a niche market or idea, so EA competes with that market or bullies the competition out, takes over, and they then have a death grip on that market.

This is exactly the kind of situation EA looks for, and no I'm not simply speculating.



My point is that if Bethesda doesn't learn to put some more of that massive revenue percentage into taking care of its users better, I wouldn't be shocked if they were gone from the world entirely within a couple of years.

There are companies out there right now that are looking at Bethesda, Skyrim, and this niche market that's being served up to them on a silver platter; a gift on par with a voluntary sacrificial meal...

And they're salivating.

Everything like Skyrim needs a deadline for it to be completed at all, and it certainly wasn't "rushed'. Years of work isnt "rushed"

http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/o6ivz/bethesda_qa_and_respect_for_gamers/

I am the author of small, but almost necessary mod for Skyrim -- Weapons and Armor Fixes (or WAF, which you can find http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4719). I'm not writing this reddit because I want to pimp out my mod, in fact I suspect most of you won't care for it and would rather wait for the https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs, from the same guys that made the Unofficial Oblivion Patch and the Unofficial Morrowind Patch (both of which literally fix thousands of bugs beyond the last official patch for these games), or are console gamers, in which case you don't have access to mods. No, what concerns me is why it's even necessary to have such a mod.

As of version 0.94 of WAF, 177 Weapons out of 2,848, and 545 armors out of 2,762 are affected. This is roughly 6.2% of all weapons, and 19.8% of all armors. While not every of those are problematic (see first bullet of section 4 on that first link above), most are. Having such a large number of weapons and armor affected speaks volume about the quality of the bug testing/QA going on at Bethesda, or how much they really care about putting out a polished product.

At the very least, 85%+ of these problems can be spotted simply by sorting the items according to various properties (weight, name, weapon type, material, ...) and play a little game of "spot the intruder". These are not the big "OMG, this game is huge and complex, so it's normal to have a few things slip through the cracks" stuff. This is basic Q&A stuff, requiring no more than a few hours' time from some minimum wage intern. I takes me more or less 5 hours to do the whole thing from scratch, with hacks, 3rd party tools (which are very early in development), and zero documentation. And I never had any modding experience prior to Skyrim.

We on the PC are very lucky that Bethesda gives us the privilege of doing their job and uncrapping their game. I can't imagine how users playing on the Xbox 360 or the PS3 must feel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUoDfO1pWto). Don't get me wrong, Skyrim is a good game, but shame on Bethesda for releasing it in such a poor state. And shame on the gaming press for awarding early beta releases >90% scores (the PS3 version has 92% FFS!), and several GOTY awards.

We as loyal gamers and fans deserve better. Bethesda should look at studios like Eidos Montreal for listening to their fans (who gave us features like the ability to turn of augmented vision in Deus Ex Human Revolution, even if they themselves felt it added to the game, because they RESPECTED their fans enough to not pretend to know what we wanted better than we did), and care for them equally regardless of platform, giving us both a true controller interface, and a true KB+M interface (not to mention proper graphics and basic options such as the ability to key binding controls out of the box for PC users). Or studios like CD Projekt Red for their beyond-phenomenal post-release support of their games like The Witcher.

It is our responsibility as gamers to let Bethesda know we deserve better. Because it's not our gaming press that will do it, for fear of being cut off the money train of early access and exclusive interviews. Nor will it be Spike TV, who's opinion Bethesda seems to consider more important than ours. Nor will it be their focus groups, because they clearly are disconnected from our needs and wants.

So tweet, write letters, blog, reddit, ... anything! But don't sit on your chair pretending it's OK for Bethesda to ask 60$ for a beta-release, or for the gaming press to give them GOTY/SOTY awards. Otherwise, it's just going to be one painful BOHICA for TES VI.

-- Headbomb

In the case of Skyrim, I experienced about 10 CTD in total prior to the Steam LAA update and absolutely no crashes following this, over the course of playing the game 350 hours in total.

350 hours on one character or spread out over several I wonder?
On PC anyways, 350 hours and still managing to maintain a playable game without permanent-CTD-areas is impressive! Save file size?

That is ridiculous, seriously one of the most ridiculous things i've read, much less about a project the size of Skyrim. There is literally probably NOTHING in existence on PC minus minesweeper that has 0 bugs...man, you just made me shake my head even more.

Lvl. 80+, 557.+ Hrs., First Play through, 360.

After reading how many QA's " worked" on Skyrim, or any other Bethesda RPG; I haved developed a theory on their business ethic... Sell Now, Fix Later. Either the QA's are blowing off, what is instructed, or not instructed as "minor" issuses, to be fixed after the games release, OR, the QA's are reporting all the defects they find to their managers, and it is they who allow the game to be released to the public.

Obviously I've put some hours into this, and let me tell ya, I'm tripping over all sorts of bugs, glitches, and defects, and not even going out of my way to do it!!!!! I haven't even started on the PC yet.

I really like Bethesdas game lines, but come on now!!! Maybe some of their staff don't appretiate the seriousness of their jobs, or the economy as it is; and it's those workers that are bringing down the honor of the harder working staff! I'm surprised they're putting up with it.

I wonder when their last Federal Audit was? Hmmmm.