Eccentric Flower:201101/Dear Bethesda Softworks

Some years ago, having played your games Daggerfall and Morrowind and liked both of them a great deal, I bought your game Oblivion.

However, before I got too deep into playing it, I heard about your revolutionary new difficulty system, where essentially everything in the world - the toughness and variety of the opponents, the quality of the loot, et cetera - all scaled up as your character leveled. I had a fundamental philosophical difference with that because I believe a rat should not become tougher to fight as you level. The whole idea of a game such as this is that enemies which were astoundingly difficult when you were level 5 are trivial when you're level 10. The things you have already learned to dispatch trivially should not keep coming back to haunt you; rats should be a walkover for anyone over level 2.

So I never got very far into the game, and somewhere in there the hard disk I'd installed it to died, and I got a new computer, and life went on.

But recently I have been in a situation where there are currently no online games I want to play, and I saw the Oblivion CD sitting there, and in the ensuing years a body of web pages had developed which demystified many aspects of the game and on the whole made it more playable, and one of the tips they provided was breathtaking in its simplicity: Just don't level unless you have to. Since you have to voluntarily sleep to level, and the actual skills you use aren't dependent on your level at all, and there's no other reason to sleep, the only reason you'd actually NEED to level is to build up your base statistics or on the rare occasions a quest has a minimum level.

So I began playing, and by a combination of not-sleeping and putting the difficulty slider all the way to easy, I got a game which was just about at the right level of recreational challenge for me - which is to say, Not Very Hard At All - and I was having a fine old time. I made it all the way to the top of the Fighters' Guild, the Mages' Guild, and the Thieves' Guild, and I was just beginning to work on the Dark Brotherhood. I had deliberately not gone too far in the main quest but far enough that I could enjoy closing an Oblivion gate every now and again. Life was good.

When I started Oblivion tonight, I hadn't played for a couple of days, because I have had two sets of migraines less than a day apart, and they have sort of dampened my will to live, and a game like that is usually the worst thing I can do for a headache. But tonight I was feeling mostly up to it, and I launched the game - only to discover that none of my games from my previous play session would load completely. Each would attempt to load, get some distance in, and then the whole game would crash. I could get one save game to load - a very old one I kept as a "just in case I didn't really want to start this" point before beginning the main quest line in earnest. That was save 88, for reference purposes. The ones I was trying to load were 142 and 143. That should give you an idea of how much effort is being lost here. Neither of my two rotating save games would load; nor would the autosave; nor the quicksave.

An hour later, having tried everything I could think of, I still couldn't get any of those games to load.

Poking around the web, I discover that sometimes, even when you avoid all the pitfalls, Oblivion simply corrupts its save games, and the problem is pernicious; by the time a save game gets to the point where it won't load, it's far too late. Some sites say the only way to avoid this is to never overwrite a save game - you'll still get the corruption, of course, but if you've been saving often enough, you may have a hope of finding an older save that works which isn't too far back. Of course, your save games run 3 MB each, so if I'd done that, I'd have eaten 500 MB in space or more just in save games so far.

The save game information tells me that I am a little over 137 hours of play time into this game. One hundred and thirty seven hours. And there was still plenty left to do. I had barely scratched the main quest line. I was working on Daedric shrine quests. I had gradually, carefully stepped my character up to level ten. I was having a really good time.

And then your busted-ass game decided, with utterly no warning, that every save game I had which was newer than two weeks ago was unfit to load.

You understand, I was already not particularly sanguine about the quality of your code. At the insistence of some sites whose advice I trust, before beginning the game I had installed not only your two official patches, but also what is called the Unofficial Oblivion Patch - a mammoth project containing hundreds of bug fixes, many of which were for obvious, blatant, game-breaking bugs - bugs you never bothered to fix. I hope you're not going to argue that the unofficial patch introduced instability, since, based on the resources I have available, it seems that if I hadn't installed that patch I would have hit my first throw-the-CD-against-the wall game-crashing bug weeks ago. All the sites are full of warnings about how buggy the original was - things you couldn't do in a certain order, things you couldn't do at all, things you could do but would regret it later when your game became unplayable, and so forth. It's sort of sickening to contemplate just how buggy this game was when you released it, actually. By not playing it back then, by waiting until resources became available to clean up your mess, I unknowingly dodged a bullet!

In short, the patch was what kept me playing this game for a month beyond what you earned yourself on the quality of your own work, such as it was. The patch kept me playing, due to the effort of unpaid amateurs to fix all the serious bugs in your game that you just couldn't be arsed to fix. AND YET, despite their pain and effort, you managed to screw me over anyway. You have managed to waste my time in a stupendous and colossal manner.

I'm sure you have long since swept Oblivion under the rug. It came out years ago, after all, and surely your revenue stream from it has dried up by now. You don't care, and I wouldn't expect you to. What's interesting, and frustrating, is the huge body of evidence that you never did. That you released a hunk of stinking crap, knowing it had more bugs than an ant farm, and not caring so long as you took the money and ran.

Once upon a time, some years ago, I'd have told anyone who stood still long enough that Bethesda was the best name in the RPG business. That no one else was making the kind of open-ended worlds you were trying to make, that no one else was doing what you did; certainly not doing it anywhere near as well. I wish it hadn't taken 137 hours for you to hit me with your little stinkbomb, but now that you have, I see clearly the way things stand. I will never buy one of your games again, and if there is any soapbox available to me, any web site I can preach on, any way I can reach potential customers, I will do my damnedest to make sure no one else ever buys any of your games again either.

You were good once. I'll try to remember you for that, and not how far you have apparently fallen since then.