Thursday, February 16, 2012

Bethesda, it is Not Okay to sell Damaged Products


The first game from Bethesda I bought was the Game of the Year version of Fallout 3 for the PS3. People always talked about how great the game was and I decided to try it. They were right, it is pretty fun games, albeit not without its problems. And yes, glitches were one of those problems. And I not talking about small ones, like a pop-up, a texture fail or flying characters. I am talking about game breaking glitches, like getting stuck in the scenario. And that about a old game that I got at discount.

Then, Skyrim was being made and several people praised how great the Elder Scrolls series were and I decided again to give it a chance. I bought very close to the launch and played very little. Because the stories of game breaking glitches on the PS3 were so notorious, I decided to wait for the patches before re-starting playing it. And after the 1.04 patch, the problems seem to be subsided, but far from solved.

I will come here later, maybe.
Bethesda is famous for their ambitiously big titles and for their equally enormous problems with bugs and glitches. I find acceptable that in a game this size, I will always cross around a bug or a glitch. It is near impossible to find all of them. What I find unacceptable is how much widespread and game breaking those bugs are on Bethesda's games.

It not occurrences that happens to few players, it is very generalized, something a strong QA process would have found before launching. It seems that Bethesda is so much more concerned with launch dates than product quality. I don't know what pass through their heads, but launching a fault product in hope the fans will forgive the bugs or that they actually expect them is stupid.

If the PS3 is such a problematic platform, I, as a PS3 only owner, would prefer that they didn't launch the game at all. I prefer to pass on a faulty product than being delivered something far from working. But I learned a valuable lesson here. Never buy a Bethesda game at launch. Always buy it after six months so the game start behaving as it was supposed too. Or don't buy it at all, at least at the PS3. I don't feel like Bethesda is doing any favors to the PS3 owners by launching a bad product. 

So, I learned my lesson. Next Bethesda game, no matter how awesome people say it is, will be added to the 'buy it later at discount' list. Because it is not okay to sell a broken game with the promise of a fix later, Bethesda.

Maybe next year.

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