Resurrected Entertainment

Archive for November, 2008

Spoiler: Fallout 3 has bugs. Sorry.

November 4, 2008

We’ve been playing Fallout 3 for a few days now and it seems to have a few problems, but nothing too major so far. Over the last week or so, I have read a number of posts and articles complaining about the stability of the game. Well, my response to these people is to just relax and try and fix your problem with the debug console – Xbox and PS3 users are out of luck, I’m afraid.

With a game of this size and complexity, you must allow for the initial round of bugs, even ones related to the main quest. Bethesda simply does not employ enough people to cover the same amount of ground as the community. As an example, how many people do you think have purchased a copy of the game since it was released? I’m lazy, but let’s just say 100,000 copies were sold. As is the case for almost every piece of software, users really do make the best testers since there are a lot of bored people in the world, and everything they do in the game is new and intriguing to them so they tend to poke and prod at the software in ways the game development company never expected. Do you honestly think Bethesda should try and compete with that many play testers? Well in order to have a testing team which can compete with a group that size they would need to charge $1000 for the game. Yeah, no thanks, I’ll live with my slightly crippled software, until they come out with a patch release.

When you think about the number of things which could have gone wrong, the bugs I have seen floating around the Internet are annoying, but not outside what I would have expected from a game like Fallout 3.