Bethesda VS Bugs: Fallout 4 Release Issues.
11/11/2015
Written by: Victor S.
Edited by: Jessyca Y.
Fallout 4 was released yesterday and, like most Bethesda games, it’s on its way to being the biggest release of the year. Fallout 4 pre-orders topped Steam’s “Top Sellers” hours after being announced and the game has stayed as one of the top sellers since. As of the release day, even the season pass is higher on the list than Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. With numbers like these, Fallout 4 is projected to make greater sales than Bethesda’s last major release, Skyrim, surpassing the fantasy giant’s over-20-million units sold.
Unfortunately, Fallout 4 also shares Bethesda’s other trademark, bugs. The Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls franchises have become infamous for bugs, with issues ranging from misplaced items to game-breaking crashes, and Fallout 4 is no exception. After the release of Skyrim, Todd Howard, director of Fallout 4 and various other Bethesda titles, told Destructoid and Game Informer that Bethesda would be developing new techniques to combat the bugs that have plagued their games. Fallout 4, however, still hosts the usual suspects, with claims of bugs popping up all over the place directly after release. These include frame rate issues, crashes, progress-halting bugs, and unusually long load times.
The PS4 version, specifically, is seeing the most severe bugs. Some users of the PS4 versions of the game experience severe frame rate problem, with users on Neogaf and Twitter making claims of the frame rate dipping into the single digits on the PS4. One Twitter user, Dennis, posted a glitch in which weapons become invisible, with the players characters reload animations playing out with no weapons in their hands.
https://twitter.com/ItsameDennis/status/663393520460423168
This glitch obviously has very little negative impact on gameplay, but it is definitely immersion breaking.
Fallout 4‘s bugs, while severe in some places, were not unexpected despite Bethesda’s claims of working to fix them. While great strides have no doubt been made to fix the issues plaguing their games, even the most diligent modern developers can’t hope to remove every last bug and glitch without great effort. Bethesda has a reliable history of patching out many of their major bugs, with unofficial patches clearing out the multitude of smaller glitches. Even with both official and unofficial sources doing a great deal to combat issues, Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas, Bethesda’s most recent titles in each respective franchise, still feature numerous issues to this day. These issues most likely have to do with the scale of Bethesda titles, combined with testers having to comb every inch of landscape and missions to search for bugs. With the typical Fallout and Elder Scrolls game including hundreds of hours of playtime, this equals thousands to tens of thousands of man hours in testing. With strict seasonal release dates, there are sure to be things that would be missed. Added to this is the dark and confusing world of mods and their conflicts with each other.