I think that it must be personal. I love their games, after putting hundreds of hours into Morrowind and its expansions (with almost none of the crashing problems my roommates all had) I was really excited about Oblivion.
I bought Oblivion the day it came out and was hooked. I didn’t like it as much as Morrowind, but it was still really fun. I have played at least a dozen different characters in that game, but I have never made it further than about halfway through the main game. This was Bethesdas first strike against me. It seems that no matter what I do any character I start on that game will eventually be corrupted somehow. Either the save game simply won’t load anymore or some item in my inventory will cause some sort of problem which prevents me from opening my inventory. I finally gave up. Bethesda had won that round.
With Fallout 3 Bethesda really had to step up their game to get me again. In August of last year I won a private playable demo of the game at PAX, they hooked me early to make sure I would still buy the game after their last attack. I bought Fallout the day it came out as well. I love the game, spent hours playing it over the course of a few weeks. Then it simply stopped working. Without changing anything on my computer the game no longer runs faster than 1 FPS (and sometimes as low as .2 FPS, when you can actually time your FPS with a stopwatch you know something is wrong). After uninstalling and reinstalling the game, updating my drivers, and doing everything else I could think of I have given up on another Bethesda game that I so wish I could play.
I just fear that they are working on another great game that I really want to play, I just know that it won’t end well.
I love Bethesda games, but they are notoriously buggy. The only thing I can really say is that it is imperative that each time you save, make a new file, and save very, very often. When something goes bad, revert to an older save. If you start loading up on the mods, which I quite like, this becomes even more essential.
Oblivion and Fallout 3 use the same engine, so it’s not too surprising that if you had lots of trouble with one, you’d have trouble with the other.
If it makes you feel better, just to get Fallout 3 to run on my computer I had to turn off all decals, shadows, and reflective surfaces. Something about how my Radeon 9800pro isn’t supported, and the game would error with these things turned on. (Which makes no sense to me, seeing as it should be the same engine as Oblivion, and that worked fine!)
Now none of the characters in the game have heads, as apparently character heads were a decal. It’s freaky. I gave up after about 20 minutes.
no, that’s just part of the atmosphere. They’re all mutants!
The Oblivion engine, imo, really does suck a fat one. It’s just not very well made and has a lot of notorious problems. I remember needing a much better computer than I should have needed when oblivion came out because the engine just wasted too many resources. That said, I’ve never had any save bug problems or anything, though I have had severe drops in frame rate for no apparent reason
I remember when it first came out I couldn’t ride horses because when I moved that fast it would pause and load every 5-10 seconds.
Yeah, the problem is that it is so hard to keep saves straight now that they don’t let you name them yourself (stupid console compatibility). I think I might go back to Oblivion now that I can’t play Fallout and try it again with a more rigorous saving system. Of course that means I’ll have to spend an entire afternoon setting up all of the mods that I want to use, but searching for new mods and trying them out is half the fun.
Edit: That was supposed to be posted from Alistair McCello, I forgot that I was on my girlfriends computer.
I remember having a problem with Oblivion which was only fixable by deleting all but the most recent savegame and making sure you didn’t have too many save files. Now I don’t know what to think!
