Thursday, April 17, 2014

Skyrim belongs to the glitch gremlin!

I was taking a look at whether the unofficial Skyrim patches had been updated since the last time I'd updated them in late February (yeah, I have to update them manually since they're not on the Steam Workshop), when I came across this sentence in the description that I'd somehow missed or just skimmed over previously:

The goal of the Unofficial Skyrim Patch (aka USKP) is to eventually fix every bug with Skyrim not officially resolved by the developers to the limits of the Creation Kit and community-developed tools, in one easy-to-install package.

Note the words "every bug". Yeesh, talk about ambitious - we all know of Skyrim's reputation as a giant mass of glitches. But you know what? They're actually making a pretty good job of it. Look at the list of fixes they've done over the years! And the one for Dawnguard! And the one for Hearthfire! And the one for Dragonborn!

What really blows my mind is that these fixes are made by a dozen people or so, and are still doing a very thorough job of it too. They're not being paid money for it like Bethesda's staff is, they're going to all that trouble just for the rest of us to enjoy the game better. Heck, one could say they're doing a much better job than Bethesda ever did, considering the blatant stuff that never got fixed in the official patches.

Interestingly, one of these blatant bugs only got fixed very recently in the unofficial patch, which is the fact that the Black Star could previously capture any type of soul, whereas it was meant to only be able to capture the souls of NPCs. This is one of those bugs that makes you wonder "how could such an obvious issue make it to release, much less never get patched?". And yet it seems to have been a very complicated thing, because not only did the unofficial patch attempt to do something about it only recently, but their first attempt ended in failure, and as a result the Black Star couldn't capture any souls whatsoever. Luckily this was then fixed properly with a response time that can only be called amazing, coming from a dozen community members.

Of course, they can't catch and fix everything, not even gamebreaking glitches that would make a questline impossible to finish if you're playing a console version, but hey, these unofficial patches are more than good enough to make doing so... foolish, to say the least.

Edit: Speaking of terrible glitches, look what I just ran into. A staircase floating in the air, well above where it should've been. Unfortunately, this means I was stuck in a tiny area, so it was console time to get me out of there.

6 comments:

  1. Oh yeah, the ES modders are absurd. The unofficial morrowind patch was updated for like 7 years. I must be pretty lucky with Skyrim, I've never had much bug trouble with it. Out of curiosity, are you using any mods? Or uninstalled any? Sometimes that seems to completely mess up terrain like in that staircase picture.

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    1. Just a UI mod and something that adds extra shortcuts on a controller. That's it.

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  2. Yeah, Skyrim is a frightfully buggy place- to the point that glitches take more lives than bandits. Also, what is your playstyle? I go with crossbows- with the right mix of enchants and smithing improvements, the enhanced dwarven ones can do over 500 damage (without an alchemy-enchant loop, obviously.)

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    1. Swing sword until everything's dead. Not complicated, really.

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  3. I don't understand why gamers play this game, complain about the glitches, continue playing it, and go on to say that doom is better than hexen.

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  4. For the most part, Skyrim's glitchfest gives me something to talk with my friends sometimes,but this no patching bullshit that Bethesda is trying was annoying as hell at launch

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