AndalayBay Posted October 7, 2011 Share Posted October 7, 2011 Yep, I think someone mentioned that already.And I just ordered the Collector's Edition Strategy Guide... So now I've spent $225 on this game - it had better be amazing! Actually I'm one of those people who likes to support a vendor even if they aren't spectacular every time :grinning: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 7, 2011 Author Share Posted October 7, 2011 You're buying the strategy guide? For $75?!? That's crazy. As if the CE wasn't already expensive enough? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ysne58 Posted October 7, 2011 Share Posted October 7, 2011 You're buying the strategy guide? For $75?!? That's crazy. As if the CE wasn't already expensive enough? I don't think I can justify spending that much for a strategy guide. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndalayBay Posted October 7, 2011 Share Posted October 7, 2011 No the Strategy guide is a mere $46.99. It's hard cover with lots of pretty pictures. The rest is this lovely thing called taxes. They total 13% here. So between the taxes on the game and the taxes on the guide, it comes to $222.59. :tongue: At least shipping is free... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 7, 2011 Author Share Posted October 7, 2011 Amazon.com - no tax. Only way to fly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndalayBay Posted October 7, 2011 Share Posted October 7, 2011 Nope. No can do. Us Canucks have to shop from Amazon.ca - so they can charge the tax! *sigh* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prettyfly Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 Something for you Arthmoor.A guy on Bethsoft is worried that Skyrim will be full of bugs. He says Ok bethesda is well known of buggy games, the community has correct more than 6,000 to 7,000 thousands of bugs in oblivion and it's expansions.We see now that rage is a tragedy for the pc version with all that problems with textures and patches to patches, fixes and upcoming patches announced that makes me real worried about skyrim and the overal quality of the pc version. What do you think? are you worried? Ignoring the fact that Rage wasn't made by Bethesda (he didn't really accept it when about fifty people pointed that out to him), I presume he is getting the 7000 figure from the UOP. So I respondThe 7,000 bugs you are referring to are things like rocks floating slightly, spelling errors and slightly malfunctioning AI packages. Nothing in the least bit game breaking, or even likely to be noticed. Oblivion has lacked game breaking bugs since version 1.2.0416. In return he says to meI can quote you about a dozen ways off the top of my head to break the Thieves' Guild questline without doing anything more out of the ordinary than talking to NPC's or exploring, but if you wanted to know them, you'd have already read the UESP.The number of object placements fixed was between 70,000 and 80,000. Haven't made an exact count. Everything else is between 1,800 and 2,200.The more you know... I'm fairly confident about this one but could you confirm that the guy is a deluded moron? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 8, 2011 Author Share Posted October 8, 2011 He's a deluded moron. The UOP fixes in total something around 2500 bugs and that's including the work done on the Supplementals. There is no truth whatsoever to the 80,000 figure for object placements. TES4Edit claims a total record count in the UOP of 100669. Keep in mind that TES4Edit counts things like the GRUP child structures as records too so conservatively you could say about 90,000 actual records, of which the VAST majority is simple typos.He may be right about the Thieves Guild, it does have several break fixes. So I won't fault him for calling Bethesda out on never fixing that. Actual seriously broken shit like that should have been patched officially.Also, UESP is as unreliable a source as Wikipedia itself, so I wouldn't accept anything backed only by information there as fact since there are people running that place who log "bugs" for stuff that really isn't.Of course, if you want the absolute definitive response (and I doubt he does) Kivan is the one to ask. Bottom line though is that the UOP is mostly typos and floating rocks, which nobody is seriously going to call a bug. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Kaira Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 Actually, Oblivion still has one game-breaking bug left behind in it that only Bethesda could fix...The A-Bomb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 8, 2011 Author Share Posted October 8, 2011 True, and since that's still broken on the consoles as well, it can be seen as proof they still considered PC to be the superior platform. They just didn't fix it because modders found a way around it.I've sometimes considered projects like the UOP to actually be a bad idea because they tend to promote developer laziness in fixing the things they break. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndalayBay Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 True' date=' and since that's still broken on the consoles as well, it can be seen as proof they still considered PC to be the superior platform. They just didn't fix it because modders found a way around it.I've sometimes considered projects like the UOP to actually be a bad idea because they tend to promote developer laziness in fixing the things they break.[/quote']I strongly disagree. Companies consciously evaluate how many bugs they are going to fix and then they stop. They have to. It's not laziness. It's a matter of balancing the quality of the finished product and how much money it is going to make. If you hold back on releasing a product until all known bugs are fixed, you will go bankrupt.Microsoft has a stated policy that they will release a product once 80% of all known bugs are fixed. They will only release patches beyond that if something that genuinely breaks the product is found. Unfortunately Microsoft is such a bad software company that that's continual.I work as a computer consultant building custom applications for clients. They will get upset if I fix every minor bug because they have to keep me on contract longer. So it's a matter of balance. Get a base functioning product and then if time and money permit, fix the minor bugs and polish it up.Projects like the UOP have no impact on Bethesda's decision on how many bugs to fix. The UOP has probably served to help Bethesda determine which design decisions resulted in game play bugs that only surfaced after playing for a long time, like the abomb. The abomb is not a problem in the vanilla game because you would usually be done before it surfaced. It only surfaced after mods came out that extended a player's game time well beyond what the game was originally designed for. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 8, 2011 Author Share Posted October 8, 2011 Not true. The abomb has been documented as game crippling on the XBox 360 as well as the PS3 and it's been well known for longer than the equally crippling formID bug the last official patch addressed. They could have included an abomb fix with that and called it a day and there would be nothing left that was TRULY broken in the sense that you couldn't play anymore.Yes, there would be quest bugs preventing completion of many of them, and on consoles who don't get the benefit of the UOP, those bugs still exist, but I honestly believe that since consoles weren't the primary focus for MW and OB (despite OB being a 360 launch title) they didn't feel obligated to fix the less critical stuff and in turn it's promoted lazy QA on their parts.The main reason I say this is because FO3 illustrated many of the same kinds of dumbass mistakes, one of which still exists to this day despite there having been 7 official patches. I won't count F:NV against them because that disaster is entirely Obsidian's incompetence shining as bright as ever.Now with all the huge issues on the Rage port to PC, even iD has succumbed to the lazy QA process. Of course, this whole thing is now a pandemic among PC game developers. We've grown so used to it that we actually accept this as standard practice when it certainly WAS NOT back before the internet gained high speed capabilities, and certainly before users could fix shit themselves instead of waiting for official patches.I think it will be a net benefit that Kivan won't be picking up Skyrim right away. It means Bethesda will have more incentive to fix their game properly instead of releasing a pile of bugware like they've been doing.Also, "because Microsoft does it" is a really lame excuse for poor software quality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndalayBay Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 I do agree that game developers do not have the same kind of quality control that professional software developers have. Quite frankly the impact isn't the same. But yeah, if you keep producing bad products, you will piss off your users to the extent that you'll find yourself out of business. Even professional software developers have problems when they try to support more than one platform. You'll usually find that the Mac version of something is superior to the Windows version and vice versa. In the consulting business you can get premium rates if you are one of those rare people who is conversant on multiple platforms and you have the benefit of working for a company that's trying to develop for multiple platforms - it's pretty rare actually.For the abomb, I was trying to say that it was a design decision that caused a bug by long game play. It does sound like Bethesda hasn't been very diligent in fixing it however. I can see them not fixing it for Oblivion, but it should never have carried over to FO3.And yeah, while it's a lame excuse, it's nevertheless true: companies follow the Microsoft model. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sigurð Stormhand Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 True' date=' and since that's still broken on the consoles as well, it can be seen as proof they still considered PC to be the superior platform. They just didn't fix it because modders found a way around it.I've sometimes considered projects like the UOP to actually be a bad idea because they tend to promote developer laziness in fixing the things they break.[/quote'] I strongly disagree. Companies consciously evaluate how many bugs they are going to fix and then they stop. They have to. It's not laziness. It's a matter of balancing the quality of the finished product and how much money it is going to make. If you hold back on releasing a product until all known bugs are fixed, you will go bankrupt. Microsoft has a stated policy that they will release a product once 80% of all known bugs are fixed. They will only release patches beyond that if something that genuinely breaks the product is found. Unfortunately Microsoft is such a bad software company that that's continual. I work as a computer consultant building custom applications for clients. They will get upset if I fix every minor bug because they have to keep me on contract longer. So it's a matter of balance. Get a base functioning product and then if time and money permit, fix the minor bugs and polish it up. Projects like the UOP have no impact on Bethesda's decision on how many bugs to fix. The UOP has probably served to help Bethesda determine which design decisions resulted in game play bugs that only surfaced after playing for a long time, like the abomb. The abomb is not a problem in the vanilla game because you would usually be done before it surfaced. It only surfaced after mods came out that extended a player's game time well beyond what the game was originally designed for. Balance is one thing, but game-breaking bugs are the equivilent of Word randomly corrupting your files at any given moment, which almost never happens. Beth's bugs are far too numerous and frequent, even accounting for the massively increased complexity of modern games. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Kaira Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 Y'know what? Who needs tessellation?When a game built on a badly aged, clunky, and inefficient engine still manages to surprise me with just what it can do. Now that I've seen the light that is 16x Anisotropic Filtering, I'm not worried. :smile: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 On a previous subject, Kivan has spoken. 70,000-80,000 object placements.1,800-2,200 everything else200-200 quest50-100 quest-breaking to questline-breaking~10 crashes to desktopThese are estimates of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Kaira Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 Well, I guess that makes the guy replying below him idiot of the week. Bad trolls will be bad... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 And good trolls will be good: http://www.lexmirnov.ru/2011/10/skyrim-map-leaked-in-english.htmlNo real spoilers there as much of that was already visible in the CE preorder images. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prettyfly Posted October 10, 2011 Share Posted October 10, 2011 That's a good troll. A very good troll. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 10, 2011 Author Share Posted October 10, 2011 It's also been confirmed as legit in a roundabout way through Pete's Twitter. It was given out to some Russian press event in the form of a deck of cards, which someone then pieced together, scanned, and uploaded. They're not happy about that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted October 11, 2011 Author Share Posted October 11, 2011 And bad troll is bad - some asshole leaked the entire game manual. That I won't hunt down and link. Methinks Bethesda's aggressive marketing campaign has now backfired on them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prettyfly Posted October 11, 2011 Share Posted October 11, 2011 I looked up this leaked game manual, but by the time I got to the sixth page I was so bored I stopped. I don't know if I'll even bother with the manual when I get my hard copy of the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ysne58 Posted October 11, 2011 Share Posted October 11, 2011 I looked up this leaked game manual' date=' but by the time I got to the sixth page I was so bored I stopped. I don't know if I'll even bother with the manual when I get my hard copy of the game.[/quote']I made it to the third page. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dallen68 Posted October 12, 2011 Share Posted October 12, 2011 I don't know why anyone would be all that in to a manual for a game they don't have. Anyway, for the last couple TES games, the only part of the manual that was even *remotely* necessary was the quick reference card. I really hope that skyrim includes a way to *not* have to sit through the tutorial. (I mean, tutortials are fine the first two or three times-the tenth time-not so much) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Kaira Posted October 12, 2011 Share Posted October 12, 2011 Morrowind was no better on that. Yes, the tutorial was shorter, but that didn't stop it from being annoying as hell. Plus, you couldn't save until it was over, so you had to go through the whole thing again if you wanted to make a new character. Every time.Starting in Oblivion, you actually did have an option to skip the tutorial. Play through it once, then save at the very end where character revision takes place. Then every time you want to start a new character, you load up that save, and have a quick-start point.I doubt Skyrim will be any different, since every single BGS game from Morrowind onwards had a forced tutorial, though it will assuredly follow the pattern set in Oblivion, so that will help to minimize the issues. At least until load orders start to get really big. And by that time, we will probably have alternative start mods out anyways. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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