Bethesda Needs More Quality Control With Technical Issues After Far Harbor DLC Release

Bethesda, the ever growingly popular studio behind the brilliant Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Doom games to name a few and whenever a new game behind the brilliant minds at Bethesda comes out, I pray with all fingers and toes crossed that it’s not as buggy as any other games but that doesn’t seem to be the case as without fail, every time, Bethesda games will have at least one game breaking bug.

One of Bethesda’s more recent developments, Fallout 4 came with the same things we’ve seen time and time again – with reviewers and players alike making it known that the engine was pretty unstable at times, the AI companion system was buggy, animations were never truly something to be proud of and this is all on top of a mass of glitches and bugs that – sometimes – players themselves had to fix with third party patches.

It’s so much easier eating without a mouth in Skyrim.

It’s understandable for the company to have issues with games, considering their small teams of developers for each game. To put it into perspective, in 2002 with the release of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind they had a team of around 40 people which jumped to 70 with the later release The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and then 100 people with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. These jumps in personnel is considered “big” for Bethesda and like I said, I understand it’s hard to iron out all of the bugs with such small teams (1000 people worked on Grand Theft Auto V, which rarely has issues with bugs).

I’ve never been in the shoes of a game developer, so I find it easy to say “this is broken, fix it” and expect the game to work as it’s meant to, so I’m in no place to criticise but shouldn’t it be expected for AAA games to actually work? It makes it even worse when the game breaks because of a bug. For example, during the first week of Fallout 4’s release there was a glitch that prevents the user from continuing upon entering Monsignor as part of the Settlement quest line:

“It seems to appear once you’ve [passed] a certain [part] in the story (either Valentine or killing a certain somebody after rescuing Valentine) … It is fairly game-breaking as many main story quests go through this area making the game impossible to complete if you have the bug and don’t use console commands.”

See also: Fallout 4 crash in specific area

While PC players can bypass most issues created by the games by delving deeper into the directory of the game and changing settings, or using console commands to skip through the environments that make the game crash, this shouldn’t be something that you have to do – not to mention that console users are basically screwed if something like this happens (until a patch is released).

“You look beautiful”

The reason I’m irritated by the lack of support Bethesda has for its games is because there are things that can be done to prevent things like this from happening more frequently, and even more so if they’re upping the amount of members they have in their teams every year then there would be plenty of willing participants to find the issues that stop players progressing, instead of waiting until the game comes out to release a humongous patch one week later that irons out everything that’s pissed people off so far.

I know I’m not alone here as I’m sure nearly every player has witnessed some sort of issue with Bethesda games stopping them from completing the game. I’m not singling out Bethesda alone, because obviously every game is going to have bugs but those games don’t have their development halted after a few years to move onto bigger things like Skyrim’s was.

It’s not meant to come out of there.

Now, I know this whole article may have sounded like a salty rant against Bethesda, but that’s not what it is at all – I’m a huge fan of their work and always have been since I first picked up Morrowind and no-lifed it for God knows how long. All I’m saying is that there could be more effort put in on their end to fix the issues that occur with their hugely expansive games. I’m not telling you to stop buying their games, and I’m definitely not telling them to stop making them but please Bethesda, just test them thoroughly before you release them.

See also: Fallout 4: Far Harbor Bugs/Glitches List, Invisible Glitch Fix, Updates, And More

What do you think about Bethesda’s blatant lack of quality control with their games? Do you think they should put more effort in or do you feel as if it’s up to us as the players to find the issues with the games and report them? Let us know down below in the comments, perhaps tell us some of your favourite bugs!