A Fallout: New Vegas review is on the way, but until it’s ready let me tease you with these two revelations: the game is broken, and the game is awesome. This isn’t necessarily a deficiency on Obsidian’s part; indeed, one could argue that the company simply followed Bethesda Softworks’ long-standing example of producing half-made masterpieces. Like Fallout 3 before it, and Oblivion before that, and Morrowind before that, Fallout: New Vegas manages to find a measure of greatness despite otherwise crippling technical problems. It also proves that few games can be so buggy that we can’t still embrace their redeeming qualities.

Despite conventional widsom, gamers can be very forgiving. They just need to be given an incentive to forgive. Eye candy, ear candy, blood, boobs, these are all great bullet points for catching the attention of gamers, but they’re not enough to overcome a technically flawed title. For a game to win despite itself, to succeed in the face of bugs that would have it kicked back to beta testing in any sane development house, it needs to show real ambition of scope. It needs to put a lot of real, gameplay-affecting choices into the hands of the player for it to be a successful case of Bethsoft-itis.

I’m not talking about Peter Molyneux hype-bition, or the Square-Enix ambition of shoveling more and more money into graphical and audio development. I’m talking about the drive to make a game feel both broad and deep. Give us a big world, give us things to do in it, and give us the freedom to explore, and nearly any technical problem short of formatting our hard drives can be forgiven.

In Fallout: New Vegas, I’ve permanently disarmed one of my companions, just because the script that takes away weapons when you enter casinos is bugged. That’s okay, because he was ridiculously overpowered to begin with, and had the nasty habit of blowing away enemies before I could even see them. I can’t modify the pistol I got for preordering the game, because if I try to use a weapon mod on it, it becomes a placeholder model and doesn’t let me see the gun. I have to save regularly, because I don’t know when the game will crash. Despite all this, I’m having a ton of fun with the game.

New Vegas isn’t alone in its bugginess, either. Fallout 3? Buggy. The Elder Scrolls games? Buggy. The Baldur’s Gate games? Buggy. Planescape: Torment? Buggy. Deus Ex? Buggy. Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines? Buggy. In fact, every one of those games was so buggy, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to call their release versions betas. From a quality control perspective, they probably shouldn’t have been released for months. Despite that, all of these games are beloved.

The western RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torrent are loved because of the epic story and deep gameplay. They don’t just hold your hand and walk you through the plot. They force you to explore, to find every last nook and cranny of the world and actually play with it. Multiple paths, multiple solutions, and multiple quests let you approach any problem in a number of ways.

Action RPGs like Morrowind and Fallout 3 are beloved because they give you massive worlds to explore, and plenty of things to uncover, and while their main stories don’t provide the most interesting of narratives, their side quests are so varied and creative that you’ll come back to replay them just to see if you can find different solutions. Once again, a broad scope of player choices makes these games rewarding despite their bugs.

First-person action games with RPG aspects like Deus Ex and Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines are, again, beloved because of the choices they offer. While they’re more linear in their narrative than the more traditional RPGs, the complex level designs and deep character and skill interactions present multiple solutions to problems, many of which diverge from the traditional approach of killing everything that gets in your way. Thanks to the options they give players, they’re loved in spite of the massive, nearly game-crippling bugs.

If these games were even slightly less ambitious in their interactivity or depth, they would be completely unacceptable. However, with their impressive scope, they’re given much more lenience than nearly any other game on the market. Because they try to do so much and offer so much within the gameplay experience, we’re willing to accept that bugs are a necessary evil.

This is Bethsoft-itis. Sure, the game plays like a beta, but you can faff around so much in it that’s okay. So what if you save every five minutes just to make sure you don’t lose your progress to a random glitch, a game crash, or even just falling through the world’s geometry into the void of unrendered space? You can actually do things beyond “attack,” “move,” and “talk.” These games aren’t perfect, and even if they were free of bugs they would have their fair share of graphical, gameplay, and narrative flaws, but they’re worth it. The experience justifies the pain.

That said, if New Vegas crashes one more time after a firefight, I’m going to light my PS3 on fire.