Post edited 1:30 pm – January 3, 2012 by Craig Chamberlin

Well I have been playing Skyrim over the past few weeks, as many of you may already know. I have been such a fan of this game I even created a Skyrim Giveaway for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 or PC – and the drawing will take place on January 9th of this month. Only a week away.

As of yesterday, I had to stop playing Skyrim for awhile, as it has become, in my opinion, frustratingly buggy in alot of areas of the game. Now, this doesn't by any means make the game a terrible game, but it clearly shows that the game was extraordinarily under-tested prior to it's release. The reason? Patches, of course.

Once upon a time a game needed to be extremely well polished before it was released. Now, developers are throwing that aside and hitting release dates prior to polishing the game. Even the new Zelda, Skyward Sword, supposedly contains a game breaking bug that can literally keep you from beating the game.

In my instance, I found out that I will not be able to get a certain disease cured on Skyrim, which means I will be forced through the rest of the game to live with a condition the storyline insisted I would be given a choice to cure. So my choices? Reload back hours of gameplay or just live with it. Frustrating, I know. But it doesn't end there, as of right now I have over 3 quests in my quest log that didn't properly register as completed when I finished them. So those are stuck there as well.

With the release of online patching, game developers have become extremely lazy during the test phasing of their game development. Essentially, they have transformed the first three months of gamers into their beta testing environment for fixing problems that should have been fixed prior to release. This marks a frustrating point for gamers such as myself who have a special appreciation for game flow. When you encounter a bug such as the one I encountered in Skyrim, it detrimentally affects the character you are attempting to develop.

To take matters even further, game developers have been releasing content with games that users are required to pay to unlock. Once upon a time, an "expansion pack" used to mean getting a collection of new content, but now it just means unlocking content that should have been included with the game in the first place.

Gears of War 3 did this to me recently with their first downloadable content. The "features" were only 1 megabyte in size to download but they unlocked 3 maps and a slew of features in horde mode. Now there is no way Epic is going to convince me that this feature was not already in the game – they essentially made me pay $10.00 to unlock features from a game I already paid $60.00 for. Of course, I got them because I love horde…

What are your thoughts on this subject? Have developers taken downloadable content and patching to liberally? Do you have any experiences with this lately. It seems worse around Christmas time.

Great thoughts. I've been playing games for awhile now as well and you are correct, the attitude has always been there. Unfortunately though, even consoles are connected to the internet pretty much at all times now, it used to be that the game really had to have very few bugs out of risk of the customer base having no connectivity to fix any problems there might be.

Now that games are moving to a SAAS (Software As A Service) platform it appears developers are beginning to use it as a crutch moreso than they used too. The "we can patch it later" becomes far more prominent because they know almost 95% of their customer base is connected to the internet and can download patches.

This is true now for console games as well. It used to be the only games that could be patched were PC. It is just unfortunate that this is the case. There are some expected bugs when someone plays any games, but when primary quest arcs are literally broken, then, in my opinion, the game was released unfinished. This is, of course, my opinion and probably means very little to the developers. They saw the risk and assessed the revenue on a release date far outweighed the risk of reputation damage associated with bugs and errors.

Besides, in a game as massive as Skyrim reviews will probably be out long before most of the bugs are discovered by major review companies :)

It's just an interesting climate as games move to SAAS platforms and all gaming systems are now connected to the internet at all times.