An open letter to Obsidian Entertainment

Your lucky if you were able to get through New Vegas with only a few bugs, after my play through I could honestly list 100+ quest bugs alone. I had some very funny graphic areas like being attacked by telephone mast and kids ridding around on imaginary motorbikes. Then the usual freezes at loading screens etc

 

I only experienced a few bugs in NV. The worst was losing everything I had stored in the flying robot when I had him upgraded. I was able to get everything back after a little fiddling around. There were also 1-2 broken quests. Compared to F3 and Oblivion, this isn't much.

 

My playthroughs haven't been particularly buggy. A few clipping problems here and there, a couple of broken minor quests and maybe 2 or 3 crashes over a few hundred hours of gameplay (not all one playthrough mind you).

I'm not denying all these bugs everyone claims to encounter exist, just because I don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. I'm just arguing that they're not that common. Maybe the people who encounter so many bugs have conflicting mods installed or the game's installation went wonky? Dunno, could be worth looking into.

 

Could be that. Could be because it's an Obsidian game.

 

I've had NV since day one and I've only had one or two major bugs. The first is my controls being disabled after the BOS and the followers asking for ED-E, but that was fixed. The one that's still a problem is that I can't finish the monorail quest. Mr. New Vegas still says it was fixed, but the dialouge won't pop up to finish it.

 

My biggest problem with NV I'm not really sure if it's a bug or not. Occasionally you'll open up ED-E's inventory to find that he has none of the stuff you gave him. I don't have this problem with any other companion so I guess it's either a bug, or ED-E just has a tendency to misplace things.

"Did I leave that one of a kind Tesla cannon in the sewers? My bad. Beep." - ED-E

 

I'm sure that Pitt's criticsm of Obsidian for Honest Hearts is valid.

Fallout New Vegas was released in October last year. That's almost half a decade that Obsidian has had to work on fixing bugs (according to Russ Pitt's sense of time).

 

And they fixed bugs and are still fixing bugs. If you don't remember, the last patch was released just a few weeks ago.

 

engine crashes: engine issue, the engine is bethesdas, not obsidian

clipping problems: graphic engine issue, engine is bethesdas, not obs

broken quest: most likely obsidian, but depending could be an engine issue not a quest issue

 

It's not as easy as that. Do you even know how games work?

 

I...don't really understand why you are so harsh with the guy.

Obsidian have yet to release one game that isn't completely bug-ridden. The fact that YOU didn't experience any bug with FNV isn't relevant because quite a significant part of the players did and it had nothing to do with their rig or system ( broken scripts, memory leaks etc have little to do with one's computer I'm afraid ).

Sure, as fans of Fallout 1 & 2, FNV was way better than FO3 ( though it was nowhere near as good as FO2, let alone FO1 ) but for everybody else : it was not the gem we claim it is at all.

There's a reason why Alpha Protocol was trashed. There's a reason why Obsidian publicly claimed that they were sorry that FNV was so bugged.

Don't let your appreciation of FNV blind you because Obsidian got exactly what they deserved.

 

So do dozens and dozens of other game studios. "Completely bug ridden" is an usual exagarration often used by "Game journalists".

Because needed more polishing, but was never a "bug ridden piece of shit" like you can read it so often on the web. Again, exaggarations.

Bullshit.

 

I think the problem is double standards. Other developers release buggy games on release (for example...Bethesda) but for some reason they don't have the same "fame" as Obsidian. Which at least has the excuse of making structurally complex games.

 

Well, I have definitely had more stability issues and quest-breaking bugs with New Vegas than I had with Fallout 3. It's a valid point that NV is a larger, more complex game, but it's tough to know how much weight to give that sort of thing. I personally don't think that excuses everything I have experience, although I do still love the game.

 

Wow,this again ! Obsidian makes buggy ass games...face it! If u want to blame the game engines that our pass on to them... fine.Lets just all meet here again when there next game Dungeon Siege 3 comes out...

 

Yeah, so what. Like it was written above, other developers release buggy ass games as well, but in most cases nobody cares.

 

The double standard is pretty egregious here.

Mass Effect 2 was buggy as shit for me for a while, I kept getting stuck on top of cover or in corners. Got really old after a while.

Fallout 3 just plain stopped working for me after they released their third patch for the game, it just wouldn't start.

It really gets on my nerves when people are selective in heaping criticism on things.

If the standard Obsidian release was a buggy unplayable mess (Stalin Vs. Martians, that one truck racing game), then I could understand the position these people take, BUT I JUST DON'T SEE IT.

 

Whats up with all the Alpha Protocol hate? I enjoyed that game and I can´t remember any bugs at all. They might have been there, but I am usually pretty good when it comes to remembering game breaking stuff. Can´t find any..so what did Alpha Protocol mess up (except for the partially silly storyline)?

 

A fair amount of bugs and glitches that, like most bugs, are completely random to get.
That or people got really pissed of at how silly the sneak animation was.

 

It's CD Projekt's fault that Steam doesn't support differential binary patching? Sure, they could have had a little more foresight that to pack the majority of their assets into a large, single archive but are you really faulting them for not designing their game with the patching system of a competing digital distribution platform in mind? Valve needs to step up their game and refine their primitive, brute-force update and validation techniques.