No, You Shouldn't Have to "Fix it with Mods"
/I'm a big Bethesda fan. Hell, I'm a big games fan. Something about doing in a game what I can never do in real life; it's just so compelling. That's not to say that I lose myself and get emotionally attached to games and game companies. Excuses for rushed and unfinished games and calling bugs "charm" - it ain't me.
Sadly though, some people do see it that way. They look at bugs in Morrowind and Oblivion and Skyrim and think "oh that's a shame but a quick mod will fix it", but it never occurs to them that the game shouldn't need fixing in the first place. Why should the customer be expected not only to do a company's job for them, but pay for the privilege of doing so? How would you feel if you bought a laptop that randomly shut down unexpectedly, and found out that the manufacturer both knows about the issue and does nothing about it, because millions of people continue to buy the laptop and fix it themselves? You'd wonder if you were in an episode of the Twilight Zone or something, but that's exactly what's happening with Bethesda's increasingly faulty game lineup.
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People see something undesirable in their game and they think "oh, I'll just mod it". This is the correct response when you encounter an game element that you don't like, or when you want to add something that wasn't included in the game, such as armour or maps or abilities. However, it’s the absolute wrong response when you encounter an aspect of the game that’s broken or incomplete. Mods are supposed to augment the finished gameplay experience. They are not a substitute for actual game development on the part of the studio.
Unofficial patches fixed hundreds of problems that Bethesda didn't even bother to fix - more the than 1800 in oblivion alone, without DLC. Including DLC, unofficial patches fixed over 3,000 bugs, in The Elder Scrolls 4, ranging in severity from item placement to game-breaking and crashing. These should not exist. Players should not have to work to finish a game’s development - be it clearly missing features, horrendous bugs, or otherwise. Bethesda doesn’t even bother to fix bugs between releases, so the idea that they just can’t fix it all goes right out the window. Case in point: In Skyrim, you can have your follower fire an unlimited number of arrows by trading with and giving them just one. Years later, the exact same bug shows up in Fallout 4, still not fixed. They don’t even bother to fix their code when they reuse it!
When a product is paid for, one expects it to work well without modification. No other product or service works the way that games do. How long would a hairdresser stay in business if they messed half of a customer’s hair up and simply told them “you can fix it yourself if you don’t like it”? Not very long. What if you paid for a brand new house to be built, but once you move in, you realise that the plumbing was ripped from a 20 year old house, and the electric wiring needs major work? What if you were just told that you can replace the plumbing and wires if you don’t like it? Would that be an acceptable response from the builder or anyone else? It would not be. Neither of these examples would fly for one second, so why is it okay for a video game, a product just as professional as any other, to be so half-baked?
Some people like to kid themselves and claim that bugs are what give Bethesda games their “charm”. Personally, I don’t see the “charm” in losing hours of progress thanks to a crash, or being unable to progress in a quest because of broken logic or scripting. Maybe fans are actually referring to “wacky” bugs like the “turn people into piles of mush” “turn people into piles of mush” glitch in Oblivion, or that one where Skyrim giants send you flying into space with one blow. Wow. Sacrificing stability, reliability, and peace of mind that my game will work right, for a few visual gags that are kinda funny the first time you see them? What a bargain! Great trade, community! Great trade.
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Maybe you’re the kind of person who is of the impression that big open worlds will never be perfect and that Bethesda games have a disproportionate of bugs since this is the only type of game they’ve made in recent memory. This is not the case. Developers do not code and test every possible scenario and gameplay combination in a game, they create systems, tell them how to behave, and the game resolves during gameplay according to the rules given to it and it’s systems by the developers. The trader in the Morrowind starting area is a prime example of this. Developers don’t need to account for every possible trade deal between the trader and the player, they create the rules for the trade system to follow and let it do it’s thing. However, a bug with this particular trader causes him to give out free gold for as long as the player cares to take it. Bethesda has buggy open world games, but a trading system is not an open world. It’s not sprawling, and it certainly does not have a huge amount of variables to resolve. Despite all this, despite how easy the bug is to identify, Bethesda, as sloppy as ever, either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
A final reason for the constant excuses made for Bethesda is that, for a long time, they were pretty much the only developer making their kinds of games. Who else was making sprawling RPGs back in the Morrowind days? Maybe some were, but they were nothing like Morrowind. Bethesda got a pass because they were the only game in town, but this time has come to an end. The Outer Worlds, Witcher 3, and a new upcoming game from the developers of Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, all these and more, offer what was once the domain of Bethesda and no-one else. Expect to see this behavior to drop off once people see more and more developers doing what Bethesda does, better than Bethesda ever did it. They won’t have to “fix it with mods” because the developers would have already done that. Except it isn’t called “fixing” when they do it. It’s called “releasing an actually finished product” - a concept that clearly eludes Bethesda.
Whatever excuse or reason people come up with to explain this behavior, it all comes down to one thing; profit. Why would a company spend more time and money making the game look, play, and run it's best, when they can just release it and let the community finish it for them, for free? Games companies exist to make money, after all. That their product makes people happy is a nice side effect. The likes of Todd Howard would say that they like to see people building on their work rather than just leaving it as it, but that’s nothing but excuses and marketing spin. Don’t you believe it.
So enjoy the games if you like, but don’t make excuses for them. Demand better from Bethesda, and any other games company for that matter, when they release clearly unfinished games because the community with finish them for free. That’s not acceptable with any other product and it isn’t acceptable here, no matter how many people claim it is. Mod the excuses out of the conversation.
