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Fallout 3: Broken Steel Expansion
There is no doubt that when it comes to an entertaining, engrossing, even all consuming gaming experience, Bethesda Softworks is the king of hill. They previously made their mark with the Elder Scrolls series on the PC, and then took that massive success and translated it to the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and more recently, Fallout 3. But these immersive, sprawling worlds seem to come with a price; Bethesda among all the developers producing games for consoles also holds the reputation for consistently releasing the buggiest, glitchiest games. No one will argue that Bethesda games aren't top class entertainment experiences... when they work. But the question then becomes, should gamers forgive the increasing malfunction of Bethesda games because of the fun they offer, or will there come a day when Bethesda has leaned on the good will of forgiving gamers for too long and have crossed a line?
Before the era of high definition gaming, when consoles lacked hard drives and Internet connections, bugs and glitches were a much rarer, smaller occurrence. Console game developers worked on smaller, less complex games and rigorously subjected them to Quality Assurance testing because they only had one shot at releasing the game, and if it was defective, there were no second chances. This was a mindset that became less important to PC game development as Internet connections became commonplace; developers not only realized they could improve the game after release with additional expansions, they could fix a game's defects after the fact with a post-release patch. This meant that games working under a tight deadline could still meet that deadline despite bugs or glitches because developers now had the luxury of knowing they could fix it "in the next patch." Now, with the advent of the same on-line infrastructure to console games, this same mentality has spilled over to the PS3 and Xbox 360. Bethesda, unfortunately, is at the head of this brigade.
The Bug Plague
Fallout 3 is Bethesda's most recent--and best selling--title. Released on the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, the game has received universal acclaim from critics and rightfully so. This may be the third in the Fallout franchise, but it is the first time Bethesda has taken over the reigns of this fan favorite PC series and brought it to console gamers to boot. The post-apocalyptic role playing game has been widely enjoyed in Europe, North America and recently, has stunned aficionados of the RPG genre by actually cracking a recent Japanese poll of best RPGs of all time, an unheard of feat for a western RPG. It is also, sadly, a game that is riddled with glitches, bugs and other defects across all platforms. The fan/knowledge-base site wikia has a Fallout 3 section with numerous documented bugs and glitches for every version of the game. Everything from the game slowing down, freezing, crashing and missions not correctly playing out despite required objectives being completed have been noted by gamers since the game went on sale. In some cases, these errors and bugs have been fixed by the numerous patches that have gone on-line subsequent to the game's release. In other cases, these errors remain within the game to this very day.
Recently a new bug has put Canadian PS3 owners in particular in a very difficult place. On October 13th, Bethesda released Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition to all major retailers. This is a reissue of the original Fallout 3 with the addition of the expansions that are now available for purchase on-line to add more playable content to the game. With five expansions selling at $10 each on-line, it's actually cheaper for most Canadians with the original Fallout 3 title to simply sell their existing copy and purchase the newer GOTY edition, rather than pay $50 to buy each expansion on-line. The manual for the new version also states that old Fallout 3 saves will work with the GOTY edition, in anticipation of such a purchase, since this precedent was well established for earlier games such as the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GOTY edition released previously.
However, for Canadian PS3 fans, the "GOTY" edition of the Fallout 3 is not compatible with older Fallout 3 game saves.
The reason for this is apparently a difference in regional game versions. The original Fallout 3 version that was sold in Canada in 2008 was actually the American version, with bi-lingual packaging and documentation. The new GOTY edition that went on sale in Canada however, is a unique regional version with full bilingual functionality built into the game itself. As a result, the GOTY edition recognizes older Fallout 3 saves as a "foreign region" and refuses to load it. This is an issue that Bethesda itself has recognized on their forums, but they have yet to release any further information about a possible solution. Meanwhile, the issue has already been widely circulated amongst local Canadian retailers such as EB Games and Best Buy, with a new policy to NOT refund gamers and alleged EB Games employees making anonymous posts on the Bethesda forums stating that EB Games will not even accept these "defective" versions for trade, as the problem is so widespread. In essence, Canadian gamers who bought the GOTY edition believing Bethesda's claims that their old saves would work on the new version found out very quickly that Bethesda failed to mention the disclaimer "provided you have taken the precaution of securing an American copy of the GOTY edition and not the one we are shipping to your stores."
At this point it has been over two weeks since Canadian PS3 gamers have found themselves locked out of their old Fallout 3 game saves and no solution is in sight. Some have simply written off the loss, tried to sell their game off, or, in the case of a few far sighted individuals, simply returned their games immediately before the problem became widely known to retailers and exchanged it for another title. For the rest, some continue ask for updates on the official Bethesda forums, others have given up, and still others patiently wait, hoping that a patch or some other solution will be forthcoming that will allow them to finally access the added content the way other gamers around the world can.
A Wake Up Call For Gamers
While it is unfortunate that this has happened to Canadian PS3 owning fans, realistically, this is not a large demographic, and Bethesda itself may simply decide the issue is too costly to warrant a fix and ultimately ignore it. The GOTY PS3 edition still works fine for other countries and regions, and within Canada itself, Xbox 360 owners who purchased their version of the GOTY edition have had no problems. Financially, it actually makes sense for Bethesda to simply do nothing and hope the problem goes away by outwaiting the few PS3 owners wanting a fix out of sheer principle. While it may not earn any goodwill from Canadian fans, the undesirable expense of working out a fix may justify ruffling the feathers of a small number of customers.
But in all fairness, a lot of what has occurred with Bethesda games are understandable to a degree. Expansive games such as Fallout 3 are some of the most technically complex games available on the market with numerous variables to consider. Between free roaming NPCs, conflicts between multiple objectives and numerous conditions and factors built into environments, missions and even equipment, it's a daunting task to go over such a massive work with a fine toothed comb and take every consideration into account. Other games such as Bioware's Mass Effect have had the occasional hiccup that was eventually addressed. Recently the multi-platform Gearbox title Borderlands had a bug that affected the multi-player component on the PS3, though the error was rapidly corrected in less than 24 hours. It is unrealistic to expect that with games as large and complex as those we enjoy today, they will be perfect, bug free experiences. What gamers should be concerned about is whether this is a trend that will worsen in the future, particularly in terms of response from the creators of these games. Right now Bethesda is in a comfortable position; they make brilliant games that are enormously fun to play and gamers have few, if any alternatives for similar experiences. However if they continue to release games riddled with bugs that either take weeks to address or remain ignored entirely when developers such as Gearbox issue fixes within a day, it does not reflect well on the company and may possibly affect how willing gamers are to forgive their gaffs in the games to come.
If the future of gaming is one where gamers must accept the reality of fixes to games after release, then it will be the developers and publishers that get their fixes out in a timely manner who will win the favor of consumers. The good will Bethesda has among fans who love the games they provide may not last if a competitor arrives that offers a similar experience with fewer issues, or more timely fixes.
UPDATE:
On the official Bethesda forums, this statement from the Community Manager has now been released:
We have come up with a fix for the issue relating to saves with the Canadian PS3 version of Fallout 3 Game of the Year. We're currently completing and testing the fix.
I don't have an exact date of when it will be available, but I'll let you know as soon as I do. Thanks for your patience.
Comments
EA's games such as Assasins Creed are amongst the most buggy. Oh and don't forget those clowns over at Valve LOL, they are just as guilty as Bethesda.
@Above, i have to disagree with you. bethesda are the worst culprit, i have had hardly any trouble with EA games as far as bugs and glitches are concerned. and valve i have had no problem with either (unless you count the orange box PS3 port, which was done with an inhouse EA developer and not vavle themselves)
as for developers and bug free games insomniac has delivered outstanding games with very little glitches, and they have only had patches if they were balancing out multiplayer. naughty dog is another example ( the firmware 3.00 incident was unexpected, so it doesnt count)
it seems multiplatform games has the most bugs and glitches in them.
bethesda are always quick to fix any bus or glitches in their games and they almost always release patches to improve certain aspects of their games their are good with their fans and community and should be praised, unlikr some developers who will not even bother to patch or fix bugs in some games
so all in all thumbs up bethesda for creating great games and for good community support and response
*cough*RISEN*Cough*
Loved playing fallout 3, waited years for the DLC on PS3 but can barely play it as it keeps freezing every few seconds and when ever i use the targeting system, ruins the experience completely.
steve says:.......*cough*RISEN*Cough*
That's a nasty cough you have there XD
awww 3:18 you lucky yanks, it's 19:18 here and if it was only 3 i would have not long finished work and would be lying on my ass on my bed, but no i have to sleep in like 2 hrs to get up at 4am O_O *cries*
Above, Hey clown Ubisoft made Assassin's Creed, not EA.
I meant the BELOW* the first post
A better question to ask is do bethesda games get worse after each new release? oblivion was half as good as morrowind and fallout 3 was just plain simply an abomination.
bethesda quick to patch? yeah right if stopping you from exploiting gold glitches and item duping is fixing bugs.... why not stop the game ending freezes instead?
They need to stop with the atrocious character development systems. stop blowing the world up so big they can't fill it with anything but randomly generated and useless junk.
Are bethesda games buggy? psst, bethesda is a bug. Game over.
Who's the idiot who said EA make Assassin's Creed??? LOL. BTW - i have the PS3 version of Assassin's Creed and there are NO bugs in the PS3 version of the game - you may want to re - check your facts (Both of them).
Actually, I bought Assassins Creed for the PS3 a couple of weeks ago just to make sure I didnt miss anything good, and the first thing that happens in the tutorial is that Altair glitched through the geometry (when trying to jump up on a wood-structure) and fell to his doom in the black void. - I died in the tutorial, the PS3-version is certainly not bug-free.
Bethesda games have too ugly animations! FO3 destroyed my favorite franchise... And I even started to hate people who make Todd and his ilk feel like they have achieved something.
People actually buy Bethesda games on consoles? The only thing making them playable on PCs is the mod community.
I will tell you this. Is Fallout 3 had been handled by Interplay, the rightful owners of the fallout franchise. The game would have been at least fully playable. Bethesda make buggy glitchy games and push them out the door... Fallout 3 was sadly :( not fully playable, and at best a tedious experience..
You forgot to mention that two of Bethesda's PC patches have caused just as many (or more) problems than they fixed, and most of them do nothing but add "support" for the DLC's useless achievements.
I was so excited reading this article. Bethesda deserves all the bad publicity it ever gets. They should be punished for constantly putting out unpolished, glitch-laden games and expecting people to buy them. Stop giving them a free pass on their absolutely worst-in-the-business animations and shockingly terrible AI. I refused to buy any of the Fallout 3 DLC or the GOTY edition because of how they treated the PS3 version of the game. There are developers making much, much better looking, sounding, playing, animated, and working games and they will always deserve my money over Bethesda. To hell with them.
no not at all, there games just dont work for the first few weeks after release, theres nothing wrong with that :D
though borderlands is no better, 6 times i had to reinstall the game because for some reason it was corrupt.
than i spent 20+ hours playing it, than one day i turned it on loaded my save file and it was corrupt.
what a waste of 20+ hours that was.
so i started all over again, 10 hours spent playing the game, and today i turned it on, loaded my save file and AGAIN MY SAVE FILE WAS CORRUPT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
stuff you gearbox studios!
thanks to you i wasted 110 bucks on a game that wont work.
this will be the last time i ever buy one of your games, hope you enjoy that 110 because it will be the last you ever see from me!
Interplay released just as buggy games. Remember Fallout 2? I had the trunk of a car following me around (if I was lucky, sometimes my stuff would just disappear), and some of the quests were bugged. Of course, Bethesda is getting better. Try playing Daggerfall, and compare the bugs in there to Fallout 3.
I sometimes feel like I'm the only gamer that thinks Bethesda is a sub-par developer. Yes, their worlds are huge and take forever to complete (if you explore and do side quests). However, to me, part of atmosphere is an emotional connection, and Bethesda is only partially on that in terms of graphical presentation. Sure, Fallout 3 looks like an empty wasteland and Oblivion is beautiful, but every "dungeon" looks the same. People thought Halo was repetitive, but Fallout 3 takes the cake.
This is nothing to say of terrible A.I. All of the creatures roaming the world act like monsters from the original Doom.
Buggy gameplay, subpar voice acting, bland animations and repetitive environments = major fail. Yet somehow Fallout, Oblivion and even Grand Theft Auto are given 9's or 10's because you can play them for hours on end.
I'm sure you can think of a lot to do with a piece of crap in hand, but that doesn't make it an excellent toy...or excellent anything.
"bethesda are always quick to fix any bus or glitches in their games and they almost always release patches to improve certain aspects of their games their are good with their fans and community and should be praised, unlikr some developers who will not even bother to patch or fix bugs in some games"
You must be joking. Oblivion still has a game-ruining animation bug that was discovered by the users years ago. Bethesda posted a few times in the thread, never fixed the bug, never offered any solutions besides what users discovered, never apologized for the problem, and has ignored it since then. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 still have quests that can be broken, game mechanics that are broken, spells/items/abilities/perks that do not work as intended, and HUNDREDS of other minor (but still annoying) errors.
I found plenty of bug's in Fallout 3 And Oblivion. With Oblivion being the worse of the 2, but that doesn't mean the games aren't great. Best games that I have ever played, let's just wait and see what happens with future game's.
Most of the problems are with the PS3 Versions of the games. Due to inferior programming on the behest of Sony, what can you really expect?
YES. Oblivion and Fallout 3 have been atrocious across 3 different machines for me, unfortunately I won't touch any further games from Bethesda due to this.
Let me tell you something that you might not know. Bethesda uses basically the same engine for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. It's just heavily modified. They try to save money which I can understand, what I can't understand is that Morrowind, at least to me, is a notoriously buggy game. They were stupid for that, you have a buggy engine(yes, it is the engine that is buggy), and you want to use it for Next-Gen gaming. That's terrible. I do agree it is a very capable engine, but there is one thing you never do as a programmer. Reuse a buggy engine! You just don't do it
I would really like to see a class action lawsuit filed against Bethesda by all the dissatisfied owners of their games. They seem to take the attitude that their customers should pay them to be dissatisfied and then compliment them on what a "great" product it is.
Not realistic to expect a bug free game? Maybe not, but the A-bomb bug in Oblivion is not a typical bug. It almost seems to be an intentional plant in the game to make you stop playing and go buy more games. I played Oblivion on my PS3 for hundreds of hours and experienced all kinds of bugs, glitches, crashes, freezes and whatever else you can think of and I worked around all of them and still considered Oblivion superior to any rpgs anywhere. But when the A-bomb hit, that all changed. Because no matter how great you make a game, if it doesn't work at it's most fundamental basic, advertised way, then Dragon Stomper for the Atari 2600 will do just as well.
I like the point LordCancer brought up. They were REAL QUICK too fix bugs and glitches that gamers actually thought were fun to exploit. But when it came to game ruining and game ending bugs that gamers SCREAMED to Bethesda to fix, they suddenly declare 'it's not worth our time, but thanks for you money'.
So we should be grateful anyway? It's such a wonderful game that we should just keep shoveling money into Bethesda's pockets for faulty products? I don't think so. People paid good money, a LOT of good money. Money on consoles, controllers, guide books, games and whatever else, regardless of xbox or ps3 brands.
If you bought a high performance sports car for around $70,000 and it just stops running after a few thousand miles are you gonna except 'Well, it's a flaw in the fuel injection. Just be grateful you got to drive it around as long as you did. Go buy another...'?
I'm not getting Fallout 3 SPECIFICALLY because Bethesda made it. Why get into another game like I did Oblivion just to be let down again. What's the old saying 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!'. And now their pitching Fallout Vegas. They got some damn nerve. I'm also just as angry with all the various gaming media, TV, online, mags that are pitching it for the sake of advertising dollars, knowing full well Bethesda screwed everybody with Oblivion and Fallout 3.
Il never buy a game from Beth they suck at fixing games. They need to make some device that detects bugs in the game and fixes.
Developers (I'm pretty sure all of them do) have de-bugging and de-glitching scripts to run on the games. These should take care of at least some notable bugs. Bethesda takes great care in making the environments and quests and other details, but then don't review to see if it can be played and rush it out to be shipped. How did these games pass beta-testing? It makes if they had it at all. Bethesda should have waited a few months to rid the game of the disastrous bugs and glitches before saying it's ready. If Bethesda keeps it up, they'll be saying good-bye to their once loyal fans.
I don't hate Bethesda for releasing buggy games, I hate them for deliberately ignoring bugs. New Vegas on the PS3 has had a slow-down/freeze problem and save corruption problem since day 1 which Bethesda has never tried to fix. It has an average occurence of once very few hours. Pretty pathetic.
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