Kotaku: Fallout 3 is broken

Per

Per

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There have been plenty of reports of Fallout 3 problems especially with the PS3 version, and Kotaku has had enough:<blockquote>Been sitting on this for a few days, just in case Bethesda managed to get their act together since Fahey's post, but the number of users affected and time that's passed is getting a little much. Seems Fallout 3 is still broken. It's broken on PS3, it's broken on 360, it's especially broken on PC. The console versions are still crashing and freezing and corrupting in various spots, while the PC version...well, where do we start.

Now, before we get too down on Bethesda, the same thing happened with Oblivion. Game was all kinds of broken, eventually patches came out, game stopped being broken, everyone got on with their lives. And the same will no doubt happen with Fallout 3. It's just a shame that, over two years on, people throwing down good money on a Bethesda game have had to put up with the same mess all over again.</blockquote>In less entertaining news, Ctrl+Alt+Del deals a blow of mockery from which the previous Fallout games surely can never recover. The joke seems to be either "Turn-based combat is unrealistic, HAHA" or "Role-playing games use numbers to represent stuff, HAHA", I'm not really sure.
 
That's pretty fucked up. They are selling unfinished games. I wonder if they accept unfinished money?
 
Kotaku is right, the game clearly lacks play testing, and crashes often (on PC at least). Then again, nowadays almost all game are released in what seems to be a beta stage.

I had wished the growth of the console market would somehow make this behavior disappear. After all, old console games were practically bug free as far as major bugs are concerned (crashes and such). Instead, consoles now resort to patching too. Too bad for the occasional gamer that doesn't have an internet connection or simply doesn't want to connect his machine to the internet.

I was also quite surprised by the Ctrl-Alt-Del comic about Fallout 3. I usually enjoy reading this webcomic, and Tim Buckley from his news seemed like someone who really enjoyed the first two games.
 
Interesting. Neither myself nor my buddy who bought FO3 have had any crashes yet. Sounds like a hardware issue with only certain machines.
 
Matt Helm said:
Interesting. Neither myself nor my buddy who bought FO3 have had any crashes yet. Sounds like a hardware issue with only certain machines.
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How does that explain the purported console problems then?
 
I feel like the trend is simply one of not enough testing, across the board, in the gaming industry.

It's not just a matter of bugs. There are tons of gameplay issues in many games that *ought* to be terribly obvious after bringing in a group of fresh eyes to take a look at a game.

In FO3, things like the ability to just back out of the hacking game to get a free redo, the random mysterious NPC deaths and the doomed caravans come to mind. But there are plenty of other games where this is obvious.

In Spore, for example, every time a planet is attacked in space stage, I have to click through a distress message EVERY TIME while moving to the planet. This is just an obvious annoyance that should be dealt with.

The obvious reason behind this is testing takes time and money, and unfortunately for consumers just about every business tends to save as much of both as possible, pushing us to the limits of our willingness to purchase a product.
 
Ixyroth said:
Matt Helm said:
Interesting. Neither myself nor my buddy who bought FO3 have had any crashes yet. Sounds like a hardware issue with only certain machines.
Click to expand...

How does that explain the purported console problems then?
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I have no idea, I don't do consoles at all. My buddy and I have widely different machines, I think the only thing in common is the OS with the same SPs.

Frankly, I think the real thing to know is how many of the complaints are legit and how many are bullshit posted by people who validate their lives by whining.
 
It's about time someone was reporting on this. I personally gave up on th game after having 2 crashes within 1 hour of play. On top of that the whole escape from the Vault was running at such a low fps even with every setting at the bare minimum (and I'm playing on a system that met the min requirements and could play Oblivion at the Medium to High settings).

I could say this is surprising but BS is know to release games which seem to lack even a modicum of bug testing. The fact that it crashes on a console (which I never even heard of happening before) is ridiculous.
 
Matt Helm said:
Interesting. Neither myself nor my buddy who bought FO3 have had any crashes yet. Sounds like a hardware issue with only certain machines.
Click to expand...

Oh fuck, again?

Look, just like I said in the last thread on the topic of crashes, people need to learn to stop using incidental evidence to say a game is not bugged. The first time I played Vtm:B with the official patch it ran like a dream, but I still know it's a bugged-ass game, and I'm not going to prance around with my personal experience and claim Troika made a perfectly polished game just because it ran fine for me.

It is a fact that Bethesda released an unfinished, bug-filled mess. Not just for the PC, but even for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Too many people have had too many bugs, crashes, lock-ups, save-game corruptions to even try to claim their hardware set-up for it.

That's not a point of contention. To claim Fallout 3 is a polished game is farcical. It is as inexcusably bugged as Fallout 2 or any Troika release was. And while Fallout 2 was a rushed sequel, and Troika always had too little budget and time (and the company just wasn't very good at slashing content for polish, which sucked), Bethesda really has no valid excuse.

It is an insult to consumers that the game was put out in this stage, but it is even worse that we know that a large portion of the team was put on DLC design a month before release. Designers? Fine, they can't do much about bugs. But every programmer and techhead in the entire Bethesda office should be doing overtime to fix this messed up piece of technical shit, and the apparent fact that they're not fully justifies Kotaku's incensed reaction.
 
Matt Helm said:
Interesting. Neither myself nor my buddy who bought FO3 have had any crashes yet. Sounds like a hardware issue with only certain machines.
Click to expand...

Well, if Microsoft themselves had to ask Bethesda for a patch to fix the crashes on exit, I don't think it's just a scarce issue. They probably received an alarming amount of reports.

What I don't understand is the absence of 0-day patch. Usually developers send the game in production and meanwhile try to address these issues before game launch by providing said patch. Bethesda seems to have already moved on to TES:V, given their current communication on patches or SDK.

As far as I'm concerned, I experienced crashes on exit every time (using Alt-F4) and occasional random crashes, especially during menu popups (looting, entering V.A.T.S., ...), every hour or so. Not enough to make the game unplayable, but immersion didn't need another hit in the face.
 
Yeah, I have noticed a few bugs in game and crashes upon exit (before the most recent patch) but nothing that would cause me to agree with that review. In short, I don't see (from my game play experience) how FO3 is "broken" (and I play with everything set to high).

Of course, i'm not saying that people aren't having issues with the game, i'm just saying that "I" have not and that I think it's a stretch to say that it's broken because you've heard from a lot of people that they've been having issues but fail to provide any % or numbers of those users affected by said issues in comparison to the total amount of users playing. And of course, i'm using a PC not a console, but the reviewer seems to think that the PC version is pretty bad off... I don't see it.

Also, when you're dealing with PCs, you've got to look at the systems people are using as well... From my experience, most issues are caused by the user having incompatible hardware on their system (ie, dead stick of ram, shotty PSU, drivers that aren't updated) or software conflicts. And because of that it's hard to really say that a piece of software is "broken" when it could be any number of other things that are causing the program to crash.

O and lets not forget the minimum game requirements either... Face it, there are a lot of users out there who should invest in a PC upgrade. Just because you have the minimum requirements doesn't mean your going to run that program without hitches, that's why it's called "minimum" and not "preferred". Look, if you've got a system that is near or just above the minimum requirements, chances are you're going to have issues... That's with any game, not just Fallout 3. Look at all the issues people hae had with Crysis for example.

And no, i'm not excusing the developers from rushing games out the door without providing the proper debuggin first... But at the same time, there are countless variants of PCs out there and you can only test so many, so yeah, bugs are going to happen, but to say a game is "broken".....
 
Monolith2013 said:
Of course, i'm not saying that people aren't having issues with the game, i'm just saying that "I" have not and that I think it's a stretch to say that it's broken because you've heard from a lot of people that they've been having issues but fail to provide any % or numbers of those users affected by said issues in comparison to the total amount of users playing. And of course, i'm using a PC not a console, but the reviewer seems to think that the PC version is pretty bad off... I don't see it.
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By that argument, I can't call Fallout 2 or Arcanum buggy releases because I don't have exact statistics on how many people encountered bugs. That's ridiculous. You have to have your head stuck extremely far in the sand to even try to claim this game is not broken - and not only on the PC, but even on consoles, which is just ridiculous.

Look, it's no surprise since Oblivion was also a broken release, but I'm not sure what's with some of you defending the polish of what is clearly a broken game.
 
Brother None said:
It is an insult to consumers that the game was put out in this stage, but it is even worse that we know that a large portion of the team was put on DLC design a month before release.
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I wonder, how long will it take for some brillant mind in VG industry to realize that patches could be sold as DLC :lol:
 
Per said:
In less entertaining news, Ctrl+Alt+Del deals a blow of mockery from which the previous Fallout games surely can never recover. The joke seems to be either "Turn-based combat is unrealistic, HAHA" or "Role-playing games use numbers to represent stuff, HAHA", I'm not really sure.
Click to expand...
It looks like they are referring to some fictional Fallout PnP game with overcomplicated mechanics.
 
kyle said:
I wonder, how long will it take for some brillant mind in VG industry to realise that patches could be sold as DLC :lol:
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Not a new idea, AFAIK. I know at least one independent game which charges extra for every major patch (UnReal World). It's understandable if you're running a one man project. Would be pretty fucked up if major developers started doing that, though.
 
It's NOT broken on his, mine or many other people's PC. It IS broken on many other other people's PC : ).

I wonder what is so miraculous about "our" PCs that the game is mostly stable and bugfree.
 
Per said:
/comic.php?d=20081112]Ctrl+Alt+Del[/url] deals a blow of mockery from which the previous Fallout games surely can never recover. The joke seems to be either "Turn-based combat is unrealistic, HAHA" or "Role-playing games use numbers to represent stuff, HAHA", I'm not really sure.
Click to expand...

That's a shame, isn't it a story line in his comic that the main char is supposed to be a hardcore fallout fan?
 
Sorrow said:
It looks like they are referring to some fictional Fallout PnP game with overcomplicated mechanics.
Click to expand...

GURPS?

Paul_cz said:
It's NOT broken on his, mine or many other people's PC. It IS broken on many other other people's PC : ).

I wonder what is so miraculous about "our" PCs that the game is mostly stable and bugfree.
Click to expand...

Coincidence.

My PC only reaches the minimum requirements of Fallout 3, but it is fully updated on drivers, doesn't run a lot of background programs that could possibly conflict, and hasn't had any issue running games like Far Cry 2 (the Far Cry 2 game-stopping bug aside, but that's not a hardware conflict) - which, by the way, doesn't just "not crash", it also runs a lot more smoothly than Fallout 3 on higher graphical settings.

Look, I'm getting a bit tired of this broken record act: Fallout 3 was broken on release and desperately needs patches on all platforms it has been released on. I don't know if you're actually trying to imply that somehow this is the fault of people's PCs, but if you are: you're wrong.

And I really don't get this stubborn denial of a simple fact. Feedback simply shows it having major technical issues on all 3 platforms. To deny that would be like denying Fable II and Far Cry 2 have game-stopping bugs just because you didn't run into them, or like claiming STALKER CS is fine just because it ran fine for you. Is that seriously what you want to claim?
 
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