Howard: Skyrim bug issue "not nearly as bad as it seems"
Game director admits to problems but says "vast majority" unaffected
Bethesda game director Todd Howard has spoken about the bugs affecting Skyrim, particularly on PS3, admitting that many gamers saw problems but that the trouble was "not nearly as bad as it seems".
Speaking to Industry Gamers, Howard said that the 1.4 patch, released at the weekend, should solve many problems experienced by gamers, but that many issues were impossible to predict.
"Statistically, it is not nearly as bad as it seems," says Howard. "Meaning, by all the internal and external data, this is our most solid release."
"It's also our most popular by a large factor, so we do have a lot of people on the PS3 who play the games a lot and their games are at a state that the game is just taxing the PS3 enough. That's a fact; so, it really wasn't until we were able to get save games from the users - because, literally, how they play the game over 100 hours - some of it, very little of it, we were able to reproduce and take care of on our own and a lot of it that you're seeing now, we weren't.
"So over the course of, like, December, the community helped us. We got their save games. We'd literally have to look in and say, 'What quests do they have running, what order? Oh, he's doing this. He's got these dragons here. This script is running. Why is it kicking out this many things?' And the 1.4 update is coming out today on the PS3 and it should - in our internal tests on those games - it fixes it, it takes care of it. But, going through this, we now know, there will still be - a smaller set, but there are probably still people we don't have their saved games and they have [other problems]."
Whilst the size and intricacy of Skyrim lead to obvious potential for conflicts and difficult to test issues, it's unlikely that Howard's comments will go down well with gamers who experienced the game breaking issues which afflicted the PS3 SKU.
Users reported stuttering, broken questlines, texture issues and other bugs, with many considering the game unplayable after a certain point. Howard, however, insists that they were in the minority.
"People will say, 'When your save game hits this size [you're affected]' but that's totally not true, because you have a much larger set of people who are fine. So it's not that. It has to do with how many things have you done in the game in what order. What's running right now? And because the game is so dynamic, it does tax the PS3 in a different way. Obviously, we wish we had all that information beforehand. Some of that is just very difficult to get."
Still loved it though.
I played on PC and it would crash about once every hour or so for no apparent reason, but you could save ALL THE TIME so who cares? I never got to a point where the bugs actually prevented me from playing the game.
I'm honestly surprised that people play for 100+ hours and then complain. That's already about 50 hours more than other games give you for the same price, and you can always make a new save file if one of them gets unplayably buggy.
If you look at it as one crash per every ten hours or so it's about on par with most pc games.Batman arkham city is the only pc game I've finished lately that hasnt crashed on me but that had a terrible glicthy DX11 mode that I ignored despite having two new graphics cards.
It was absolutely riddled with bugs.
From Quests breaking to Mammoths falling from 1,000 feet in the air for no reason to parts of the gameworld disappearing before my eyes at times it was, at best, a bit of a mess.
Still, I at least wrapped the game up after learning not to explore for fear of my upteenth questline snapping and only going to places I'd been directed to by the AI, I adapted to the forced linearity.
The PS3 version?
That was naughty and there are god knows how many thousand PS3 owners who were rightly upset at the state of the final product. To say otherwise when Review code for the format (strangely) went missing and forums the world over have highlighted the incompetence on display since launch is pretty mischievous in my opinion and a poor attempt at 'spin'.
The only other bug I've encountered is a major quest that won't trigger, even though I've fulfilled the requirements for it.
To be honest, I expected Skyrim to be buggy at launch, but I'd have thought more of it would have been fixed by this point.
At first I thought I was missing something but I've confirmed these are bugs on the Skyrim Wiki. Granted this is 5 quests out of several dozen that I have completed successfully but to be honest I think Bethesda should think about the amount of content they offer versus the amount of bugs that come along with a game of this size. A lot of the these quests, especially the side quests and the smaller quests can become really monotonous after a while. A lot of the time it amounts to "go kill this guy over there!" I just think it would serve the game better to ever so slightly trim some of the side content down and design more diverse and interesting quests. That said, the bugs haven't stopped me from ultimately enjoying the hell out of Skyrim. I don't think this is my favorite Bethesda product (Fallout 3, also buggy) nor is it my GOTY for 2011 (Portal 2) but it is right there. I do think Skyrim is the most gorgeous open world I've ever played in.
Blaming bugs on the fact that the PS3 system is being taxed is a very poor excuse, *surely* they are testing on this very system. Saying the information on 100 hours of game play is difficult to get is also an extremely poor excuse. *Surely* they tested the game with real players for at least that number of hours before release.
All in all, I'm disappointed the response is not "We apologise for the quantity of bugs facing our players, you are valuable to us (as you pay our salaries) and we are working hard to fix as many as possible as fast as we can".
Its still my goty for '11 though since Bethesda seem to be taking the issues on a case by case basis and fixing them as they arise. For me its a better approach than some other companies who just leave games broken... No names mentioned ubisoft...
A lot of good will towards the scrolls series has been lost for me and especially Bethesda's willingness to sell incomplete games without any remorse.
I bought the PS3 version and an hour into the game was unable to continue, because the gaurds outside white run did not appear, so I could not be given the key, so I could never enter and continue the story. Thankfully, I was able to kill an npc outside who had a key.
I entered Whiterun to find all the assets missing! No roads, no buildings, fences etc. Just the doors to the buildings and the civilians (most of which were floating out of reach) were present. Even if I was willing to bear with it, the bridge to Dragons reach was missing, so I could not continue the story.
Bethesda released a broken, unfinished game.
And then I went and bought it for PC!!! . . . . and it was fine . . . *phew*
"Oh no! a quest is broken and it wont let me finish" press ~ key... ten seconds later *POOF* continue unhindered.
I just wish Bethesda would release some sort of manual for their console instead of me having to google the command every time I need to do something. If there already is one and I'm just behind the times on finding it, then a link would be great :)
I downloaded the creation kit last night after finally getting a bit of free time to play the game itself. Gonna try fiddling with it tonight after work. I just wish I didn't have to go through Steam for all of it. ;)
I think that would have been the best response, but it seems Bethsoft feel differently, instead trying to undersell the severity of the bugs.
Apart from my impending divorce from my wife, as I would rather slay dragons and kill bandits than spend 'quality' time with my real world wife!
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Richard Pygott on 21st February 2012 4:51pm
The good thing about it being on the PC though is that the clever people living in the world put code on the t'internet that fixes every problem I've run into so yay! I agree with Joshua Rose, they should release fixes themselves and put it on a website rather than us having to search loads ourselves. Its because of the possibility of bugs that I got it on PC. I get that because of the size of the game and it seems to be the running order of certain quests and obv everyone does things in different orders so its difficult, but as consumers, that shouldn't be our problem.
I love, love LOVE this game though. I prefer it so much more to Morrowind and Oblivion.