1701

Yeah, that’s why we had to wait 5 years for Darth Stoney’s mod for KOTOR 2.

1702

You sure are jumping to a lot of conclusions based on one source. Tom’s having issues, I get that. But I don’t see any evidence it’s widespread at this point. As NMA’s “not really reviews” roundup points out, most of the reviewers out there are hinting pretty positive stuff. I’m not going to go into panic mode about the technical state of the game simply based on Tom’s experiences with one version of the game. If everyone was having this problem, then we’d be hearing about this as a major problem from many different sources - reviewers, pirates, and the apparently decent number of people who actually already have the game legitimately and are playing it on XB360s. And do you really think Bethesda (and this has nothing to do with Obsidian’s past, this is Bethesda’s million dollar franchise) or Microsoft would push out a super-buggy to the point of being unplayable 360 game out the door? Be a little more realistic.

1703

But even with the wealth of mods available for oblivion, there is none that fixes it. Well, unless you make a mod to make the game end after you do the dark brotherhood quests i suppose…

1704

It was installed on the hard drive. I tried uninstalling it to see if that made a difference (maybe the install data was corrupted). No dice.

At this point, my 27-hour-old game of Fallout New Vegas is effectively dead in the water. I’m getting regular freezes in a variety of my saved games, sometimes as the saved game is loading. This has happened on two separate Xbox 360s, and it happens when loading from a variety of saved games, at a variety of different moments.

 -Tom
1705

It’s not just Tom, there was a guy on NeoGAF talking about issues and there’s been a video or two posted of some weird shit.

As for Betheseda’s million dollar franchise, to this very day Fallout 3 GOTY is a crapshoot on PS3 with all the freezing and bugginess. I don’t know what to expect.

1706

I know what to expect. A probably small percentage of people with issues and a whole bunch who won’t have them, including on the consoles where in theory things shouldn’t vary but actually do. I remember some 360 users bitching about Oblivion being crash prone and yet I completed the entire game on a 360 with no issues. So it’s just like every game. This time Tom go unlucky. Maybe I’ll be wrong, but I have a hard time reconciling Tom basically saying it’s unplayable compared to Reiner from GI saying he’s on his third playthrough, none of which were stopped by bugs, just to name one example.

1707

Andrew Reiner from Game Informer:

I can say that I was able to play NV to completion without being stopped by bugs.

And I’m getting many other reports like this. Hell, we’re playing four different games by four different people at Planet Fallout! And the result so far is the XBox review guy has over 25 hours of playing without problems, the Hardcore mode guy has over 20 without problems. Another gaming reporter already played 3 games of F:NV, without problems…

But I don’t want to give the impression I’m doubting what Tom is saying, because I also had reports of gamefreezes and severe slowdowns in a few XBoxes, PCs and even PS3s, and myself had a CTD and watched the “floating stuff” bug a couple of times. And I’m getting a feeling the few slowdowns I’m seeing in a few areas a result of problems with Havock, but still, and again, these are all issues that were present during the release of Fallout 3.

The disappointing thing is that they haven’t been fixed, at least for a few of us, even if the majority of those playing are doing it so with minor or no problems at all. Time to start a “Please move on from your version of Gamebryo” movement, I think…

1708

If the only issues are technical, hopefully the PC users are spared (or at least quickly patched).

1709

I don’t get it, it’s a console game, why would it crash on tom’s console but not anyone else’s? It’s not a bad disk, because he installed to the hard drive. Maybe the console is overheating or something? If it’s really as bad as he says it is, they’re going to get castrated by the media tomorrow.

1710

I also wanted to add that they did that live BestBuy thing the other day with the person playing the 360 version in the background the whole time and while there were a few minor issues, nothing like the lockup/freeze issue Tom is reporting.

To make it clear, I’m not suggesting that Fallout 3 was error free or anything. I had bugs and occassional total freeze moments. Sometimes they would happen really close together, which was very frustrating. Other times I’d go for hours with no problems. My most recent time put into the game saw no repeat of that, so whatever the issue was (same PC, same install of Windows Vista) somehow got fixed.

1711

Anyone reviewing the PC version? I’d be playing on a machine w/ 6GB of system RAM and 1GB on the GPU. Aside from the graphics capabilities, hearing about 360 woes is akin to hearing it plays poorly on a Walmart e-Machine discount special.

1712

Incomplete and unplayable due to technical issues are completely different problems. Granted, both are still problems, but pointing out that KoTOR2 was kicked out the door unfinished is very different from Tom saying that his save files are hopelessly borked.

1713

I watched a guy’s stream of the 360 version (A bunch of stores sold it early), he didn’t have crashes or any noticeable bugs after several hours of gameplay.

1714

And deservedly so. But I think we’d have heard of that from other sources by now if it was widespread. For whatever reason, Tom seems to be at the extreme end of what’s been said so far.

1715

That’s the same as my machine. This time I had to change the setup a bit, put it at middle settings, but raised the resolution to 1600 and put 4 AA and 2 AF. Now it’s prettier with a good frame rate, except when there are many particles, the thing that leads me to believe there’s something not quite right with havock.

1716

Well, I presume I can technically complete the game. It’s just at this point, I’ve got to back up to a saved game three hours earlier so I can play without my Xbox 360 freezing. And I have no way of knowing whether it’s going to start freezing up again in a few hours.

And it’s absolutely not a heating issue. I’m familiar enough with that grind. The first thing I did once it was clear the memory cache trick wasn’t doing anything was turn off the 360 for a while and go play pinball on my PS3 for an hour.

Since it’s happening on two separate Xboxes where the only hardware in common is the hard drive, my guess is that something got corrupted at some point and basically tainted about three hours worth of saved games. Who knows whether it’s a timed event, something to do with one of my companions, or some weapon I’m using. It could be related to the weird presumed memory leak I had at about the 18 hour mark. But short of an Xbox 360 dying, for me it’s a whole new level of severity in terms of having technical issues on a console system.

Also, as I’ve said before, this is 27 hours into the game. It’s not something you’re likely to see if you watch some guy’s feed for a half hour. And hopefully it’s not something you’re likely to see when you get around to playing.

 -Tom
1717

You might have stumbled into something new, that passed the Microsoft and Sony testing. Contact Bethesda and Obsidian to be sure, it’s what I would do.

1718

So you missed the one game killing bug when you played KOTOR on the XBox back in the day? ;-)

That does suck, though. It could be one of those “if these five things happen, the game doesn’t know what to do” scenarios that are really hard for QA to track down with a near infinite number of combinations to check. Some programmer at Obsidian probably just wanted to go home early that night!

1719

1720

Well, they’ve already contacted me. I was kind of hoping for a “oh, that will be fixed in a day-zero patch” response. Instead, they seem just as mystified as I am.

 -Tom