BenSkywalker
Regular
I've been spending most of my free time with Morrowind for the last couple of weeks(Basement is still down ) and have had the chance to witness what is easily the poorest coded console software I have ever seen. Disgustingly bad. Seriously has lowered my views on the entire industry(it's bad even using the extremely low PC standards). I logged about eight hours playing last night and had the luxury of over thirty crashes, one corrupt save game file, and one forced reload over a hosed game due to the extrodinarily linear queat requirements not being spelled out explicitly(become the Nevervaine without being a Redoran House member and fulfilling some other, unknown apparently after searching for an hour, criteria) putting me back about ten hours worth of gameplay I'm simply dumbfounded by how the hell anyone could release such an utter piece of shit on to the market.
This game is flawed in pretty much every possible aspect. Besides the obvious lousy combat system and extensive amount of forced walking which are really just piss poor gameplay choices, they created a game with inter dependant quests without letting you know how they tie together nor flushing them out in the design process to make sure there were not serious flaws destroying save files with 40-50 hours worth of work on them. The only way to work around this is to make sure you keep a save file from every five to ten hours of gaming so you can revert back without losing too much. But then you run into another example of the sub primate level coding, Morrowind fvcks itself all up by mis utilizing the XB's cache and creates can not read disk errors if you have too many save files. Their "solution" to these problems? Go out and buy an XBox memory external memory unit. Fire up Morrowind and delte all but your most recent save game. Then take Morrowind out, go in to the XB'x memory management screen and move the singular save file to your external memory card and then erase all Morrowind save files from the XBox. After that, you only need to play three XBox games and you should be fine for a few hours. That is assuming that you don't trap yourself in a situation where the entire game is hosed and you can't beat it.
If that was all the problems Morrowind had, perhaps it would be simply equal to ET for the Atari 2600 for lousy execution, but there is more! Sometimes, crucial NPCs to the game will drop through the floor and vanish from the world. You can log thirty to fourty hours building up your character to realize that you can not progress anymore(if by some stroke of luck you didn't screw anything else along the way) because a quest giving NPC simply ceased to exist in your game world.
Bethesda's solution to that one?
Start over, maybe it won't happen next time
These are not isolated issues, I have checked and they appear to be quite rampant in the game. The biggest suggestion for dealing with the horrendous design issues is to use a walkthrough and follow it to the letter, that way only the vanishing NPCs will kill your game, and then it isn't too frequent
For the bugs you use their suggestions and you can get a few hours at a time of crash free gaming, if your quest gets screwed up why weren't you using a walkthrough like you always should on an 'open ended RPG'
It isn't always isolated to the incredibly stupid cache management issues, I can hard lock the XBox in a high pitched annoying squeal at will by simply using a high power levitate spell and then using dispel to get rid of it(which is handy when you are trying to rest, but not an option).
My big question is where the fvck was MS's or Bethesda's QC for this game? This is piss poor by PC standards and by FAR the poorest example of console coding I have ever seen. If this is indicative of the level of QC that we can expect from future XB titles I'll throw the console out now. Bethesda is already firmly on my boycott forever list, I would be hard pressed to think how they could have executed more poorly then they did releasing this pre alpha shit on the market.
The saddest part is that Morrowind would have been a great game if not for the problems. As of right now, with about sixty hours in to the game, I'm looking at giving it a solid 0 out of 5- non functional.
This game is flawed in pretty much every possible aspect. Besides the obvious lousy combat system and extensive amount of forced walking which are really just piss poor gameplay choices, they created a game with inter dependant quests without letting you know how they tie together nor flushing them out in the design process to make sure there were not serious flaws destroying save files with 40-50 hours worth of work on them. The only way to work around this is to make sure you keep a save file from every five to ten hours of gaming so you can revert back without losing too much. But then you run into another example of the sub primate level coding, Morrowind fvcks itself all up by mis utilizing the XB's cache and creates can not read disk errors if you have too many save files. Their "solution" to these problems? Go out and buy an XBox memory external memory unit. Fire up Morrowind and delte all but your most recent save game. Then take Morrowind out, go in to the XB'x memory management screen and move the singular save file to your external memory card and then erase all Morrowind save files from the XBox. After that, you only need to play three XBox games and you should be fine for a few hours. That is assuming that you don't trap yourself in a situation where the entire game is hosed and you can't beat it.
If that was all the problems Morrowind had, perhaps it would be simply equal to ET for the Atari 2600 for lousy execution, but there is more! Sometimes, crucial NPCs to the game will drop through the floor and vanish from the world. You can log thirty to fourty hours building up your character to realize that you can not progress anymore(if by some stroke of luck you didn't screw anything else along the way) because a quest giving NPC simply ceased to exist in your game world.
Bethesda's solution to that one?
Start over, maybe it won't happen next time
These are not isolated issues, I have checked and they appear to be quite rampant in the game. The biggest suggestion for dealing with the horrendous design issues is to use a walkthrough and follow it to the letter, that way only the vanishing NPCs will kill your game, and then it isn't too frequent
For the bugs you use their suggestions and you can get a few hours at a time of crash free gaming, if your quest gets screwed up why weren't you using a walkthrough like you always should on an 'open ended RPG'
It isn't always isolated to the incredibly stupid cache management issues, I can hard lock the XBox in a high pitched annoying squeal at will by simply using a high power levitate spell and then using dispel to get rid of it(which is handy when you are trying to rest, but not an option).
My big question is where the fvck was MS's or Bethesda's QC for this game? This is piss poor by PC standards and by FAR the poorest example of console coding I have ever seen. If this is indicative of the level of QC that we can expect from future XB titles I'll throw the console out now. Bethesda is already firmly on my boycott forever list, I would be hard pressed to think how they could have executed more poorly then they did releasing this pre alpha shit on the market.
The saddest part is that Morrowind would have been a great game if not for the problems. As of right now, with about sixty hours in to the game, I'm looking at giving it a solid 0 out of 5- non functional.