A Skyrimmish Rant

Ah, Skyrim. How many hours have I burned away on you already? And how many more await me? Only time will tell. While I could expound on the virtues of this game, that I've played it as much as I have since it arrived says enough. What I'm blathering about today is: for as pretty and in-depth, all-over questy sandboxy amazing Skyrim is, why is it yet again another buggy Bethesda game?

I tend to forget, somehow, just how many bugs Bethesda games ship with... until I'm playing the next one. Morrowind Game Of The Year Edition for the original XBox is a classic example of face-palm when it comes to just how extensive the bugs are. There are even quests that just stop because you'll never get the journal entry required either due to a total bug or one in which you literally had to kill creatures in a certain order and this was never, ever made clear nor did it make sense via gameplay (Spriggans in the Raven Rock quest chain, look it up, it's not an eyes-off spoiler if it'll break the dern game for not knowing). In the case of that quest specifically, if you saved over your other saved games (and you always should use multiple saves for the same character in a game like this in part because of the bugs) while wandering around trying to figure out what to do next, you were permanently screwed for the entire main plot of the expansion. Oblivion and Fallout 3 had their own problems, especially with crashing.

So, what's wrong with Skryim? Plenty. And I'm not even talking about the ridiculous AI. Let's face it, they call it Artificial Intelligence for a reason. Computers don't think like people, and the amount of man-hours you have to put into programming something that can think more strategically than "I see enemy, I run at enemy RAAAR" is staggering. Skyrim takes it to a point where enemies will use defensive abilities, and quite possibly try to use cover at times. Stuff like that. But if you stealth-kill a guy with an arrow, after his buddy runs around for a minute and can't find you, he'll be like, "Musta been the wind" or whatever and go back to lazing around by the corpse that... the wind killed.

So sure, the AI is ridiculous but whatever. I can live with that. It's the very, very basic gameplay bugs that irk me. Apparently Bethesda only really cares about its 360 sales, because the ads I saw for the game all said to preorder it for the 360... no mention of any other platform. The UI is obviously made for a console and PC gamers have much frustration with how unwieldy it is on PC. Could better keyboard or other controls have been assigned? Most likely. But I have the console version, so...

...I get to deal with issues like how when buying or selling something, the inventory list will swap items around randomly in the list, or swap where your "cursor" is and you can end up either buying or selling something you didn't want to. This. Is. Basic. UI. Coding. Did they not see this in beta? How is this an acceptable ship-with bug? Will it get fixed in a patch? Who cares, how the heck did it ship with that bug in the first place?

Placing items in the game is obnoxiously hard thanks in part to the game's physics engine, similar to the one in Oblivion in which I never did figure out how to pick up items (didn't know you could, once they were on the ground) until about a month ago watching someone else do it on YouTube. Nowhere in the game does it tell you how to do this. Morrowind was awesome for how you could place things... okay it got tricky if you wanted something at a certain angle, but at least it stayed put once it was down. Walking on a table full of dishes didn't send everything flying, you could walk on the table to place your items and everything would stay where it was.

And now with Skyrim, even if you've got an item or several placed where you want them, you can load back into your house later and they'll be where you first dropped them on the floor. From what I can tell, sometimes placing them again where they never should have moved from in the first place will fix the placement, but I've been back three times to [spoiler location] and two things I placed were back where they first fell and now one has completely vanished.

This is frustrating, yes. These are the common bugs. There's a much more rare one where you end up loading 20 feet forward from a door when a new area finishes loading, which is dangerous in dungeons and eye-rolling when you get temporarily stuck in a wall or a piece of furniture, but that one seems to fix itself after turning off the console (but not reloading a save if you die or the like). There's others I'm sure I'm forgetting at the moment. And let's not forget, this is another game that thinks gamers all have HDTVs and aren't having to walk up to their TV and squint to see what the text says. And there is a lot of text in this game, from quests details to item descriptions to backstory books to subtitles to...

Does it mean I'll chuck my copy of Skyrim in the trash? No. I'll keep playing it, and more than likely I'll continue to buy Bethesda games, but y'know, there comes a point. World of Warcraft did it with the stupid f-ing pandas. Bethesda can do it too, and they need to watch out. They have great games with tons of content and very memorable experiences, being tripped up by some pretty darn basic bug issues... and a few more complex ones. Complex I can understand, I guess... once upon a time you couldn't get away with bugs like this because the game was going on a cartridge or disk that would never change, and consoles did not have the ability to update game content via the internets. But the basic stuff? There's no call for that.

You're on notice, Bethesda... not that you probably care about one person whining on one of a billion blogs. From your ads, all you really cared about in this instance was 360 preorders. But hey, little people like me are your fanbase, we buy your games. We stop buying your games... it's over. So, please, at the very least, fix the basic bugs before you ship your games. And a(nother) Skyrim patch would be nice, if you can possibly be bothered to get around to it now that the cash nobody can get back is minting it up in your bank accounts.