[QUOTE="kultrva"]Beautifully said, MonkeySpot. The "release now, fix later" mindset that game developers and publishers have is absolutely ruining gaming. In this day and age it's pretty risky to buy a brand new game (as I did with Skyrim) simply because the game is most likely not finished. And guess what that makes you: a dude who payed $60 bucks to be a beta tester.
Do you guys remember console gaming before they had internet connectivity? Back in those days, what you put into the box and shipped to the public absolutely had to be the finished product. If you screwed up, tough ****. The deal was done. Therefore, developers had to work considerably harder back then to make sure that what they put on a SNES or N64 cartridge was of pristene quality.
The "internet age" is encouraging developers to be lazy when they code and release games. Due to the availability of patches, the final product can be released a year after the initial release.
I would just love to see a company work so hard on a newer game that it didn't need to be patched. And trust me, guys, it can be done. It's been done plenty of times in the past.
/rant
lgp_michael
OK as someone that actually knows what I am talking about, your statement, and the one you quote, is RUBBISH. I have been a developer in the games industry for 12 years, I have over 20 titles to my name, and you know what, no modern game with the scope of Skyrim can come out without bugs. I have never worked for or with Bethesda, but I have worked on titles of comparible size to Skyrim. You go on about the good old days before internet access when games were all perfect. Well, a) they weren't all perfect, and b) they were a LOT smaller. The average game nowadays is 5-10 times the size of the average game 10 years ago. And bugs aren't neccessarily linear in count to size either, as a game gets bigger, and more complicated, the more chance that bugs will creep in. There is only so much testing that can be done before your game is hopelessly obsolete and nobody buys it when you launch it bug free 3 years late. Because that is a reasonable figure on how long an internal testing team, or even a beta team, would take to find all of the bugs. As I expect you are someone that has never written a line of code in your life, let me explain. When you have 8 million lines of code (which is what I guess is the size fo Skyrim) with a couple of million lines of scripting ontop of that, with 100 people writing the code, it is a LOT harder to manage and get 100% right than it was when there were just maybe 4 or 5 people working on a codebase of a half a million lines. It isn't a case of 'well, if he presses that button, the jump works, now onto the next bit' you have to worry about what if the ground isn't level, what if they hit a wall on the way, what angle would the wall be, what if someone else is falling off that wall at the same time, what if the wall is collapsing, what if they only hit the wall with their feet, what if there is a hole at the bottom of the wall, what if the wall has a door in it, what if that door is in the process of being opened, or closed, maybe they'll jump into the person that opened it, how tall are they, do they fall over, does the player land ontop, maybe that should be based on who has heavier armour, wow thats already complicated, and that is 'jumping' one of the simplest things out there. There are a thousand different scenarios, and a thousand different actions and they can all link together in a thousand ways. Linking those all together you come up with anything between a million and a billion different things that can happen. factoring will make it more managable, but you start to get the idea of the scale of the problem. They did a good job. Not perfect, but not bad at all. Sorry pal, but that doesn't excuse them throwing out something that doesn't work properly for a certain (big or small) number of people, and then charging them REAL money for it. 
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