Aggrogate

Bethsoft-itis: Making A Masterpiece Out Of A Beta

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.