Are We More Lenient of Bugs in Large Games?

When Fallout: New Vegas came out last Tuesday, it was met with great reception. The average rating for the PC version at Game Rankings is 85%, which as far as I am concerned, almost puts it in the “must buy” category. You could say that the game lived up to the hype, as its predecessor, Fallout 3, set the bar quite high, with its string of 90% scores. With such excellence, can there be a downside?

Although I’ve used both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas for benchmarking purposes, I haven’t actually “played” either, so I am not familiar with the stories, gameplay, or the included bugs that are ready to infest your game-time. But I do remember well a Fallout 3 story not long after its launch, where a section of the game actually had developer markers and code revealed to the player. How something like that got through testing is beyond me. It was quickly patched up, though.

That of course was far from being the only bug, so when New Vegas hit the stores, I half-wondered if it would prove to be a lot less buggy than the previous game. After all, would a developer want to suffer the same sort of embarrassment twice in a row? Well, it seems that yes, yes it would. A mere week after its launch, sites like YouTube are filling up with videos showcasing some of the game’s worst bugs.

The best one was found by Ars Technica, and can be viewed here. It shows off multiple bugs in a single video, and some of them are outright hilarious. As funny as they are though, the fact of the matter is… if you play the game, you are going to encounter one or more of these bugs. So what’s the deal with all of the ~85% ratings? Are reviewers liars?

As Ars tackles, the answer is probably “no”, and I agree. If the game itself wasn’t that good, and bugs like this existed, it’d be easy to not let them go. But where the game is what many consider to be a masterpiece, it’s easy to let them slide, because once you ignore them and get on with things, the experience is outstanding.

The problem with that, though, is that it basically tells developers to go ahead and release buggy games, and that of course isn’t a good thing. To get the game out on time, it was released with bugs intact, and ready for gamers to locate. The company has already patched up many of them, but still, this is certainly not a trend we want to see grow.

Fallout’s glitchy debut hasn’t occasioned many debates about the level of polish expected in a game at release, and Amazon has yet to be carpet bombed with one-star reviews. People seemed to be annoyed at the news of the game’s flaws, but they were annoyed while on their way to the store to buy it. It seems the gaming public has largely shrugged its shoulders and gotten over the fact that Obsidian is going to release games that don’t work perfectly at launch. The gamer who decided against picking up the game due to these issues was a rare find in our forum thread discussing the game; a thread that is now 23 pages long.