UESP Forums

Going through this website for guides on quests for Oblivion, I noticed that just about every quest had some sort of bug (which was then fixed with patch) and I was wondering if Skyrim will suffer from the same thing. For example, if you look at http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:The_Ultimate_Heist#Bugs in the "Bugs" section.

I got the Oblivion GOTY edition around christmas 2010 so I really didn't encounter many bugs, about 99% of them already being fixed. This year I plan to get Skyrim on release date and then I thought I should wait until they release patches to fix the bugs before getting the game. Because I doubt (though I could be wrong) any website will be able to figure out every single game breaking bug and have solutions for it.

An example of a game breaking bug in Oblivion: During the main quest, Mankar won't go through the portal and not go Paradise and you cannot finish the quest. If you didn't know about this you'd have to start the whole game all over again just to beat it.

Anyone else have the same thoughts?
I will probably get Skyrim for PS3, which means, no console commands for me lol

I encountered the bug in the Legacy Lost quest where the Ogres don't appear or wander off or something. This means I can't complete it and move on to the final quest in the "mini quest line" and I can't get the Estucheon of Chorrol. This doesn't stop me getting any achievements so it's not too bad but it's still annoying. In Skyrim i'd settle for a smaller amount of working quests than a massive amount that are crap and don't work. They just need to quality test again and again til it works

its just the price you pay for games like these, they'll always be bugs, personally imo they lengthen the game. I can not tell you how many times my argonian has saved kvatch. And i dont just mean reload the save. I mean start from scratch and redo the whole damn game. Still i learn to get over them.

oh and expect bugs up the ass when you buy this game, it looks so good theres no way this one wont have the most bugs of any game they've produced.

I like bugs...most of the time. When they don't make a game unplayable every time you play, then it's good times.

Skyrim should be made in such a way that it can be "hot fixed" (I think that was the term anyway). This is where they could make a patch fairly quickly and have it force-downloaded by XBL/PSN users. I imagine that most gamebreaking bugs can be fixed fairly easily and quickly by a team of payed professionals.

Hopefully they'll have come up with some new methods of testing or tools for detecting potential conflicts that lead to most of the bugs you see. It does however seem like Skyrim's new quest system might be more resilient to changing conditions though as one of the blurbs mentions missions changing in some dynamic ways, so hopefully this includes in-built detection for all quests where a character can be killed, with appropriate failure handling.

While I certainly sympathise with why bugs can creep in easily in a game with this kind of scale, I think Bethesda should have learned a thing or two. Fallout: New Vegas meanwhile was pretty ridiculous as if you look at a wiki for it I don't think there's a single mission without a bug! Some new planning methods or custom tools ought to help at least reduce the bugs.

The one thing I find most strange though is that no-one bothered to approach the unofficial oblivion patch guys to propose evaluating and releasing their fixes as an official patch, as I personally prefer playing Oblivion on my XBox but the lack of those fixes means I have to play with the uesp wiki open most of the time to avoid any of the more serious bugs, along with a robust and paranoid saving scheme, which pulls you out of the experience a bit!

I mean in a way I'm looking forward to playing Skyrim on release day as I was a bit later to Oblivion and Morrowind and in both cases ended up looking up a load of quests to try and avoid bugs, whereas Skyrim can be all new and entirely up to me to make the decisions without knowing what the exact consequences might be! But the ever looming threat of bugs can dampen it all if you accidentally break the main quest an hour in!