As much as people might like to whinge about them, glitches are part and parcel of what makes Bethesda’s games so great. Seeing a dragon do a barrel roll into the sky or watching in glee as a raider’s fist becomes one with his knee makes the experience just that much better. Perfection is overrated.
After realising that Fallout 4 is delightfully buggy, Bethesda have moved quickly, just a week after launch, to announce that they will be releasing patches to clear up some of the game’s more intense bugs. I haven’t come across anything immersion-threatening in my forty hours of exploring the Commonwealth so far, but many gamers haven’t had quite as much luck.
Speaking on their blog, Bethesda said:
It’s true that the freedom our games offer you can lead to unintentional consequences that are sometimes bad, when the game combines too many unexpected elements at once. Given the scale and complexity of the systems at work, especially when allowing you to build your own settlements, we’re happy that Fallout 4 is our most robust and solid release ever, and we’d like to thank our amazing QA staff who worked as hard as anyone to break the game so we could fix it during development. But a hundred testers will never replicate the many millions playing the game now, and we’re hard at work addressing the top issues.
Our process for updating the game will include releasing a beta patch on Steam, followed by full release on PC, then release on the consoles. This process has worked well for us in the past and allows us to get more fixes out faster. Expect to see more updates, that are smaller and more frequent, than a few big ones. This allows us to make sure each fix is working right, as any change can have unintentional side effects in a game this huge. We expect the first beta patch to be up next week.
It’s doubtful that the patch will fix a lot of the game’s performance issues, but it’s a start. If they could also work on implementing some kind of companion tracker so I don’t keep losing Dogmeat, that would also be lovely.
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