News - Xbox 360 Skyrim has texture issues

[HEXUS]

Bethesda currently working on a solution to combat the texture resolution bug.

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[Brewster0101]

We seem to live in a time when games are allowed to be released broken - anyone else fed with this attitude that developers can't seem to get stuff 100% right anymore. Maybe these modern developers/programmers need to start with something simple - like program a game first for a ZX81.

[shaithis]

It does appear to be one of the few really bad things the internet has created

[Hicks12]

High resolution dont load? there isnt any.... i dont see how you can call them high resolution textures .

Either way, stupid bug but easy to fix one would assume, i just want them to release high res textures for pc as its terrible, the game was only 5gb which it shouldnt at this scale!

[AlexKitch]

We seem to live in a time when games are allowed to be released broken - anyone else fed with this attitude that developers can't seem to get stuff 100% right anymore. Maybe these modern developers/programmers need to start with something simple - like program a game first for a ZX81.

As much as I agree with your sentiment, we (I'm speaking as a games developer in the industry) aren't writing ZX81 games any more. We're writing games with tens/hundreds of thousands [perhaps even millions] of lines of code and all of this code needs work on every platform and hardware configuration.

As much as you can argue that solid code should work properly in the first place, this just isn't how things work in the real world, unfortunately. Bugs happen.

Rather than blaming the programmers, consider blaming the Q.A. department for not finding the bug in their months of testing. Again though, it's difficult to effectively test such a huge game on so many possible hardware configurations.

[Rob_B]

Well, to blame QA isn't a good idea either as I've read many things where bugs are picked up but it is decided (for monetary or release date reasons) to leave them alone, after all there is finite resources to deal with them.

For something like Skyrim/Fallout 3/NV I give them some leeway on scripting/quest etc as the games are so vast, however, regarding textures no game gets let off as it's an obvious thing they can and should fix before release.

[Brewster0101]

As much as I agree with your sentiment, we (I'm speaking as a games developer in the industry) aren't writing ZX81 games any more. We're writing games with tens/hundreds of thousands [perhaps even millions] of lines of code and all of this code needs work on every platform and hardware configuration.

Rather than blaming the programmers, consider blaming the Q.A. department for not finding the bug in their months of testing. Again though, it's difficult to effectively test such a huge game on so many possible hardware configurations.

Q.A. department certainly does have to take alot of heat for these issues. But you talk about different hardware configurations - isn't the Xbox 360 one platform with one spec to programme for.

And you refer to modern games have millions of lines of code compared to ZX81 games. It only took 1 or 2 people to make ZX81 games in the 80's when hundreds/thousands of lines of code which was considered complicated. Now modern games are made with tens of programmers, millions of dollars and vast resources. Clearly blame also has to be laid on the programmers for not doing a good job in the first place.

[Smudger]

To coin a phrase incorrectly - a bad developer always blames his tester...

[AlexKitch]

And you refer to modern games have millions of lines of code compared to ZX81 games. It only took 1 or 2 people to make ZX81 games in the 80's when hundreds/thousands of lines of code which was considered complicated. Now modern games are made with tens of programmers, millions of dollars and vast resources. Clearly blame also has to be laid on the programmers for not doing a good job in the first place.

Even with a hundred million dollar budget and a team of 20 specialist graphics engine programmers alone, once you divide that team up across all platforms (PC, PS3, 360) you're left with a surprisingly small subset of programmers concentrating on any one platform.

I know from bitter experience how much of a nightmare PC game development is, not at least because of the inherent problems of coding for infinite number of configurations, but also the amount of distraction this causes for focusing on the other platforms.

In my honest opinion, the days of perfect games being released are long gone and can never possibly return unless consumers are willing to foot the bill for the extra development/testing time. For me, that would be a deal breaker - since I refuse to buy any game that costs more than £30 (an increasingly difficult challenge). I'm happy with a few post-release patches

[RedFlames]

firstly.. I'm *not* a code-monkey, i did games design at uni yes but it was the art-design side of things...

but they way i understand it the advantage of making people program on something on a ZX81 first was to see how they coped with restricted amounts of memory etc. doing more with less and what not and these good habits stayed with them when they moved on to more complex things.

[Dareos]

After the fiasco that was Fallout : New Vegas, I refuse to buy anything by Bethseda until its been out for a couple of months. I am desperate to play Skyrim (thankfully there is a plethora of great games out atm) but will hold off for the first few patches to sort it out. Its extremely annoying that you have to do this, but the NV bug was gamebreaking imo and should either never have occurred, or been patched a hell of a lot faster than it was.

[AlexKitch]

I know Bethseda's reputation with new releases is far from sterling, but I've been playing Skyrim all weekend (pretty much literally, to my shame) and I've got to say that I'm impressed.

Apart from one old lady who seemed to be levitating 10 inches from the pavement and a cow mounting a fence, I didn't find anything particularly wrong with the game. Certainly no crashes or blocking issues

[Noxvayl]

I don't expect games to be released bug free, I don't think I've ever played a game without some sort of bug, but what I do object to is releasing a game that has a bug in it able to prevent customers playing it.

So far I haven't heard of such a bug in Skyrim so it's an improvement over previous Bethesda releases. I'll still be waiting for a few patches before I buy the game though, unless an awesome sale occurs where I buy the game and leave it until it's been patched. The game generally drops to an acceptable price after a few months which is another factor I look for, I don't buy games for more than £25... well I haven't yet and I don't plan to either.