Bugged open-world Bethesda games are like cars and wheels. It's just connected, you can't imagine them without.
The other side of the coin, is that there is no other game on the market that offers what Fallout and Skyrim have to offer. Along with the great deal of bugs, comes a great amount of freedom tinkering with the game and the engine. No other game has such open console support that works so well to manipulate the game. Not even GTA V comes close. Even those two games don't compare. The amount of assets in Gamebryo engine that you can actually interact with, is massive, and all these changes are also permanent in the game world.
I hate to sound like an apologist, but the bug fest is inherent to the game and engine.
Bully.
Civilization V.
Zoo Tycoon 2.
These games have been released on the Gamebryo engine. This is the engine that Bethesda used for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas (though Obsidian did the development for New Vegas). None of them demonstrate failures in the same manner and methodology, despite sharing similar complexities.
For Skyrim Bethesda switched to Creation, which is an forked evolution of Gamebryo (
http://peter.corrosivetruths.org/2011/12/21/is-skyrims-creation-just-gamebryo/). Despite this, we still get the same flavor of bugs. CTDs, pathing is terrible, physics behaves only some of the time (flying mammoths), inventory occasionally goes wonky, and things occasionally just fall through reality. Creation is what Fallout 4 is based upon, and the same type of bugs are being reported now (read: magic physics, CTDs, and general bugs).
I don't expect a perfect game, because even someone worthy of praise (CD Projekt Red comes to mind) has them. What I expect is that if you use an engine you claim as your own for well over a decade (Skyrim development+Fallout 4 development) that it doesn't have the exact same bugs that you previous games had. I expect 7 years of development to yield a product that is 98% polished, and the remaining 2% gets fixed in a timely order.
What Bethesda does is push an 85% game out the door. They bug fix and patch until about the 95% marker (generally very quick to 93%, much to their credit). At which point, they stop. Our community takes the torch, and fixes the remaining 5% while adding entirely new content. This is...acceptable. My subsequent problem is Bethesda getting greedy. They agreed with Valve to launch a paid mod system, introducing no quality control, and they sold it as the modders finally getting what was due to them for their work (a pay check). They did this, not stating that for every dollar in mods sales they and Valve took 75% for themselves. This sort of crap with Skyrim is what made me decide Fallout 4 wasn't worth going out and buying day 1, despite the fact that I still want to badly.
It's a testament to Bethesda's investment into their worlds that we accept their crap. It's the surest way to say they make fun games, because if this were EA I'd just say I'll never buy it (2/3 was enough Mass Effect, if that tells you something about my determination). Despite all their BS, I'll still eventually give Bethesda my money. I just wish they were better. I wish people would hold them to common standards. I don't get what I wish for.
There are also big power pylons, much more useful than the shitty little poles. I actually discovered those too late too after using little poles all over the place and wasting hours of time trying to attach wires through floors and stuff
