My first Bethesda Softworks game was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind which remains one of my favourite games of all time. However having said that, it was filled with bugs. In fact here’s my youtube retrospective on it:
One infuriating bug was when the game would suddenly have a message appear that seemed to lay blame on the player having a dirty disc. Well sorry Bethesda, but I always keep my discs in immaculate condition so it’s not the disc nor the machine at fault (as all my other games ran perfectly fine).
There was another bug within the game whereby you could create spells that would increase your stats – permanently, as well as creating items that were god-like in status thanks to a bug relating to the use of soul gems (in which you could capture the souls of creatures within a gem to enchant an item). Plus the game would often freeze for no reason whatsoever.
There are many more to add to this but I think you get the point.
Because I hadn’t played any of the others within the series, I asked a friend of mine about his experience with Bethesda’s games and the first thing that came from his mouth was “terribly buggy”. He went on to describe how his experience with the series will always be remembered because of the buggy code and the fact that “they were ambitious in their ideas but their coding was truly awful”.
It seems that my friend is not the only one who thinks of the word ‘bugs’ when talking about Bethesda because on USEP one person implies that their games are ‘accompanied’ by them: “Unfortunately, since the release of Daggerfall there have been a plethora of bugs that accompany it.” (Source).
Well fast forward to 2011 and we find that nothing much has changed. Skyrim for the PS3 has massive frame rate issues which deem the game unplayable (as demonstrated by examples on youtube):
Even after a recent patch it seems that there are still many players who experience the problem:
What’s even more worrying is the notion that this won’t be an issue that’s easy to fix, as it could be something relating to the ‘divided memory pool’ of the PS3 which doesn’t affect the Xbox360 and PC versions – which by the way have no issues.
Strange thing is that Bethesda have again laid blame on something else other than their ability to code games properly. In a recent statement Bethesda seemed to lay blame on the PS3 architecture, though we need to remember that the PS3 is a ‘fixed’ format; users do not have to forego spending extras on upgrading the hardware like PC users do. How then can they do this when it’s easier to create a game for a fixed format than it is for a format that has hundreds of different setups? It doesn’t make sense. Well, it does make sense and I’m back down to earth now – Bethesda’s coding is what makes sense here for it’s crap. Pure and simple.
Before Skyrim was released I asked that same friend whether he would be purchasing the game upon release and at first he again told me that he expected the game to be buggy. However I championed the cause and believed that Bethesda had truly left behind those days where their games were released with bugs and all. Plus you have to remember that for all of Morrowind’s misgivings, it was still one of my favourite games of all time.
I asked him again just before launch if he would buy it and surprisingly, he had had a change of heart and said he was going to buy the game. I’m just glad he purchased it on the 360 for if he’d bought the PS3 version he would probably never talk to me again!
This will probably be the last Elder Scrolls game that I ever buy, but I’m left with the lingering question: Bethesda, when will you learn??
http://www.inentertainment.co.uk/20111205/ps3-users-split-on-skyrim-framerate-issues/
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