Major video game launches are a huge deal these days, and sprawling, feature-rich open-world titles like Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout: New Vegas come very close to being MMO-like in their courting with danger. As soon as the early reviews begun pouring in, New Vegas indeed turned out to be just as bug-riddled as Fallout 2 originally was back in 1998:
At least the player above got in-game, though – while personally installing Fallout 3, I was met with a faulty DVD, an “Error: -5006 : 0x8000ffff” notice and finally the magnificent extent of Bethesda’s Windows 7 support. A veritable brick wall, in other words… in any case, New Vegas senior designer Chris Avellone, who also worked as designer on the aforementioned Fallout 2 (a connection that we detailed in an earlier post, From New Reno to New Vegas), quite unsurprisingly explains away the bugs with the length and scope of the game:
I think when you create a game as large as Fallout 3 or New Vegas you are going to run into issues that even a testing team of 300 won’t spot, so we’re just trying to address those as quickly as possible and so is Bethesda. … It’s kind of like the bugs of the real world – the sheer expanse of what you’re dealing with causes problems. 1)http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=271206
In other words, having never completed Fallout 3, it becomes much easier for me simply to stand back and enjoy the show of fireworks until this latter-day Frankenstein’s monster gets stitched together and squeezed into yet another “Game of the Year” box. I don’t mean at all to imply that I find enjoyment in Obsidian and Bethesda’s misfortunes; instead, what’s exciting to me are the dynamics and mechanics of a major botched launch… after all, instances such as these are rare glimpses into closed-door game design and corporate decision-making at its most tangible, glimpses that only really become available if something goes truly awry. (more…)
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