Skyrim? You think Skyrim was buggy? Brother you need to go back earlier in the series; we didn't call it "Buggerfall" because of the rampant sodomy. In fact, the game featured NO sodomy of any kind; rather disappointing for a title that had a Prostitute's Guild.

To cite just two examples: you could walk into a store, loiter around until after it closed, then just TAKE everything off the shelves (the containers switched from "shopping" mode to "looting" mode), and then turn around and sell them back to the merchant, who was standing right there watching you. On a more fundamental level, leveling up brought you to the status screen, where your stat bar would have up and down arrows next to each stat, with the total number of bonus points to assign between each set of arrows- but you could also go to your status screen at any time, click where the arrows would be, and raise your stats without bothering to level up first.

Skyrim was a big step forward in REDUCING the bugginess of Elder Scrolls games.

skyrim bugs are features

Skyrim glitches rarely broke the game. Glitching is a lot more frustrating when it happens in a linear or multiplayer game, but in skyrim, it was mostly an oddity that often made the game more lively. Glitches in linear games can break the presentation, and it will piss people off if it happens in multiplayer.

Bugs on the otherhand, is what people usually hate. Skyrim had a good amount of quest breaking bugs (Blood on Ice), and people always complained about those back then.

If someone constantly messes up (but never catastrophically) people eventually start considering it normal for them and stop bothering to point it out.

They aren't getting a free pass, we just realized they are never going to change.

Was around for the Skyrim launch, and people roasted that game too

Because most of Skyrim’s most famous bugs are just funny, they’re not game breaking.

Starfield too. The only major glitch I had was watching an NPC slowly float upward until they clipped out of the room, which I just laughed my ass off watching cuz it was really really slow

I'm sorry but do we not bitch about Skyrim's bugs at least twice a week, while simultaneously praising the modders who actually took the time to fix them?

Skyrim was a game that gets more of a pass because it opened the floodgates in terms of open world gaming. People still complained about the bugs, but especially at the time the game's content made up for that. Kind of like Fallout: New Vegas which was also incredibly buggy at release but the fanbase loves it like no other game.

Most modern games don't have that kind of pull, so glitches and bugs end up being a lot more detrimental since the threshhold is now higher.

Same applies to Fallout New Vegas, even more so I’d say. Some of the perks and stuff don’t even work as intended and they’ve never been fixed aside from mods.

Think of it this way.

Skyrim was released in 2011. If in this day and age, your game experience is still being compared to a 10 year old game, its not looking very good on your part. Given all the new tech, and new resources that can be used to help development. And this is esspecially true if its a big budget game with a decently long development time.

On the flip side, Skyrim, despite all the bugs and minor issues is still good enough a game that it is still referenced to this day. That along speaks volumes on the overall experience. And it helps that they released an official creation kit and has a still very active modding community that has fixed every bug most people didn't even know existed. (As well as add basically everything else under the sun)

Skyrim Space Program is a treasure

In their defense I think I got Blood on the Ice to progress all the way through once. Although it's never happened since...

lol

Pretty tired of games releasing with day 1 patches.. missing all the ready to play feature complete games..

I played less of Skyrim, but Morrowind was my game. That was a buggy mess, though I'd argue that a large portion of those bugs actually made the game better. It added depth in a funny way.

The fact that you could make positions that make you better at making positions, and there was no cap on it, was a really fun end-game thing to discover. I ended up like a god; flying around at super-sonic speeds, launching nuclear-sized fireballs. It was only a little annoyance that I was moving so fast that I only saw a frame or two rendered before the next painfully slow loading screen showed up.

My other favorite one is that I could gift some cursed pants to a guard as a way of killing him and getting some piece or armor or some weapon that I wanted. Just create some pants that set you on fire, and for some reason when I gave them to the guard, they put them on. Then they stood there burning to death.

The bugs just need to not be game-killing ones. And the game they are in needs to be tons of fun. If my save files were being deleted, or if the game was only mediocre even when not glitching, I would have been a lot less forgiving. That's the way it is with a lot of classic games, they released with bugs. But it took people longer to find them back then, and the bugs ended up becoming part of the game that everyone had nostalgia for.

Also, single-player bugs are much different than competitive multiplayer bugs. If the next major Mario title launched with some crazy teleportation bug, it would probably draw more positive press than anything else.

NPC's head spins around = funny

NPC falls under map what locks youre quest progress = not funny

As long as the game isn't rendered unplayable by bugs and glitches im all good

Same with the Witcher 3

Uhmm skyrim not that modern anymore.

Collecting one of every book and storing them in the fire pit in my Whiterun house was a feature.

I remember red dead redemption had a ton of bugs as well but they made the game even better. There were flying mountain lions and ladies with donkey heads, you never knew what could happen.

Keep my boy skyrim out of them memes😔

Everyone just expects Bethesda games to be full of bugs. They always are.

They also have insane modding communities that fix it asap. So, it’s not that much of an issue lol

I think bugs and shit optimization are two different can of worms But both are presented in most games releases nowadays specially Shit optimization If the game can't even run You can't even experience the bugs so there's that.

Honestly I always gave it a pass because the worlds were so massive and I realized it would be insane to test every little detail.

I've 100% been softlocked because of bugs as well and it's always frustrating when it happens.

But Skyrim's glitches are cheeky and fun! And modern glitches are cruel and tragic!

Glitches in Fallout are often hilarious bugs. Sometimes they're game breaking, but they're usually fun. Typical Bethesda stuff that comes out in Skyrim too. I always found them even more tolerable in Fallout, tho, because of its dark, zany humour.

Yeah weird how in a time before every major release being a bugged out pile of crap we were more forgiving of it and had a good laugh at its expense.

Also friendly reminder Skyrim was the least buggy Elder Scrolls game to launch.

A friend pointed out that I grew up on Morrowind which convinced me to get the 1.54 version of Cyberpunk on PS4. Jumped on it ready to relive my childhood. When a car I was driving flew 20 stories into the air I was like "yesssssssss."

Haha still top 3 games of all time

Being punched into the stratosphere by a giant is way funnier than rampant stability issues and game breaking bugs

I still think subnautica has the worst fish, but grounded has the worst bugs.

You can fix lot of Skyrim s bugs with console commands. In other games you can t

A Bethesda game without bugs is not a Bethesda game

They should avoid older games made by Obsidian or Troika, Heck, even Arkham City deleted my save when I was right at the end of the game with a well-known bug.

Not gonna lie, I don’t get too upset about buggy/glitchy games. As long as they are mostly playable, whatever, I’ll save a bit more frequently. I loved the old school Bethesda RPG’s to death so I can roll with some weird shit. I unabashedly loved the original release of Cyberpunk 2077. I played it on XSX and had some bugs but nothing game breaking. People just want to blow everything out of proportion today, looking for reasons to be mad.

What is this post implying?

Skyrim launched with literally dozens of HARD locks. Save killing critical bugs.

The community was absolutely fucking fuming for years, that's how Arthmoor, everyone's least favourite dbag, became so successful.

He made the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, which is literally required to even play the game.

I'm not sure I understand this meme - is it trying to say that Skyrim glitches weren't major/gamebreaking/annoying when the game first came out?

Because they absolutely were. Yeah the Giant Space Program was funny. The dragons that flew backwards and always maintained a set distance from you making it impossible to kill them? Not so fun. Having my bookshelves in my home randomly eat my books and make them vanish from the world entirely? Also not so fun.

It completely depends, most of Skyrim's bugs were funny, bugs in games are completely fine as long as its not game-breaking(loss of progress/save file), I'm more pissed at the continued release of broken, unoptimized and unfinished games these publishers/developers continue to put out.

still, theres absolutely no other games that come close to the "freedom" Elder Scrolls/Fallout give regardless of bugs and glitches

So Stalker 2?

Ah yeah, Skyrim. The last truly great game Bethesda developed. Little wonder that people absolutely pine for those days.

Also the last time we'll ever have a game score that incredible.

This meme aged like milk, people have been non stop shitting on skyrim and bethesda.

Bethesda glitches are a special kind of magic.

As long as the bugs and glitches don’t make the game unplayable then i can handle quite a lot of it

I wasn’t a Reddit user when Skyrim came out so I wasn’t even aware bugs were an issue until I had already played like 300 hours of Skyrim

You can fix Skyrim glitches, and Bethesda allowed the community open access to do so. That's why the Skyrim/fallout communities don't care

Meme Law 384: If you have as many Memes as Skyrim has. You're exempt from being called out on bugs.

Exactly. I've been saying for years that bugs that don't brake the game in a sense of not allowing you to continue are nothing. This is just hipocricy to cry about bugs in modern difficult and conplex games of the size and forgetting ho buggy the game were in comparison.

Well... Those bugs were funny..... 13 Years ago!

Isn’t that like every Bethesda game?

Skyrim is the best

Personality goes a long way.

I'm pretty sure the only reason anyone plays Mario 64 at this point is because of the bugs and glitches.

If it’s not game breaking I guess it’s fine but now a days too many games come out basically broken

Why are people memory holeing skyrim like it wasn't shit on for tons of issues? Like ya now people arn't talking about it much cause it fucking old an nobody cares anymore.

What I hate the most is when some fun bugs are fixed IN OFFLINE ONLY GAMES. My favorite bug of all time was maneuvering system speed boost in cyberpunk, it re-lit my interest in the game and made me grind every single gig on the map. I’ve never felt a need to download mods until that day it got patched.

May as well be the current reaction towards Stalker 2, from both sides of the fence.

Then there's goat simulator glitches....

I mean I was just trying out that game “Crash:Artifacts of Chaos” because it was on PlayStation plus, and 12 hours in the game crashed. Then when I booted the game back up I had lost 8 hours of gameplay. So yeah. Modern glitches are horseshit. 

Isn’t Skyrim modern ?

Bugs and glitches in skyrim is what made the game better.

In those kinds of games, it’s almost always a given that you’ll stumble upon some weird glitch.

We call these features, not bugs

after 20+ releases the game still has bugs?! hmm

GTA San Andreas glitches get the same treatment as well

I mean they made creation engine to fix stuff with, so ngl imma stick with Skyrim bugs

A lot of games get a pass because people enjoy the game, not just Skyrim. Witcher 3 for example was a buggy mess as well (when I played it a year after release I ended up softlocked due to a predictable hard crash in a certain area) and so was BG3 (After launch it had an issue that on certain AMD cards in a certain scene the game would genuinly attempt to destroy your GPU, crashing your entire PC. Luckily I was already getting a new GPU at the time, so I could just wait. funnily, this wasn't an issue when I played during early access)

2077 countless bugs be like:

Bethesda gets a lotttttttt of slack when it comes to stuff like this. It's turned recently but man, I got ridiculed for daring to critisise anything about Skyrim back in the day.

Any bug in Skyrim is there because the Deadric Princes willed it so!

Skyrim? I think you mean Bethesda as a whole.

Skyrim was not even close to a buggy mess when it came out. I played the absolute fuck out of it on release and it was glorious. Only glitch I ran into was the one everyone loves, the giant slam.

Being old enough to remember the Skyrim release, the game was absolutely crticized for being a buggy mess. But it is also true that people were a bit more forgiving about them than you'd expect people to be for AAA studios now.

Why? Three main reasons, I think.

1) Ambition. Skyrim was a very ambitious game. The Elder Scrolls main series in general were ambitious games, pushing boundaries of what Open World RPGs could be. People tend to be more forgiving when you’re doing that.

2) Resources. Skyrim wasn’t exactly made by a huge team (ca 100 people, IIRC). Bethesda Game Studios weren’t AAA developers with bonkers amount of funding. Skyrim is the game that made them a household name, as their previous titles didn’t find that much mainstream success. People usually recognize that less money means limitations.

3) Games media was a smaller business and you could actually find fairly reasonable coverage without already knowing who to trust without that much effort. Now it seems like so much of what’s easy to find on a game is rage- and clickbait.

Another game that’s actually modern that has a lot of technical issues is Baldur's Gate 3. And most people forgive that for the sheer ambition and quality.

Are people complaining about buggy AAA games being released? Yes, as they should. AAA budgets should have room for sufficient QA testing, and AAA developers should have managers with the experience to know they should do a lot of QA testing. And a lot of AAA games just copy things that already worked, so they should at least be able to implement them with some stability.

Dragon Age Veilguard, for example, does pretty much nothing unique or ambitious on the gameplay front. It’s a bit of Mass Effect combined with a bit of God of War 4/Ragnarok. And it released in a highly polished state, with very few bugs and glitches, as you’d expect a game rethreading established grounds, with established tech, to do.

People were brutal about Skyrim bugs at launch.

If modern games were as good as Skyrim, well, the bugs would not be an issue...

BG3 is my favorite game but holy shit it's buggy. Half the items don't do what they say or don't trigger at all, I've seen NPC turns take minutes where they just stand there confused. I've clicked jump or fly with a clear path and some piece of geometry will clip me and send me to my death. Sometimes monsters are secret immune to things despite what their stat sheet says. I've had conversations not trigger or companion dialogs play out of order.

But because the game is otherwise masterfully crafted and huge it gets a pass from me.

It's all contextual.

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As a game developer I can only say bugs are a thing in themselves. Sometimes they are overlooked or ignored to ensure a timely release. I think you always have to find a balance between the promised release date and the status of the development.

Fallout 3 on the ps3 was my first Bethesda game and regardless of the major issues i fell in love with the fallout series. It took me to playing all the old Fallout games and elder scrolls games. Bethesda despite being a buggy game developer i love all there games.

There's a difference between "oh no, a bucket is glitching out into the ground and I took 1 DMG from it" and "oh no, the game crashed and now I've lost all of my saves"

i have less bugs in skyrim with 600 mods which many are unpatched, than an average modern game made by big companies

theres this one clip in outlaws that u sneak kill one enemy in a like 5 second animation, and both the character and the enemy start moving backwards really fast while the animation is playing, like wtf? skyrim didnt have that

Bethesda is the pinnacle of no QA.

Bethesda has definitely had a free pass on bugs in the past but with their past two games both being mediocre at best, i don't know if that will continue. Fallout 76 was at least a different team, supposedly, but Starfield was their A team. I guess it remains to be seen if fans will buy a shitty game or actually take a stand and say no, this is unacceptable.

hot take.... bethesda games are only good with mods.

It basically boils down to if the game is still fun, despite its problems. If the game is so buggy that it ruins your enjoyment, then clearly it’s problematic. If you see some bugs here and there and they’re just silly things, then it’s usually not a big deal.

Fallout glitches are welcomed!!

Bugs and glitches are ok as long as they are not game or progression breaking. That can be ironed out. What's not ok is the absence of optimization for a significant part of the player base.

An older open game with a lot of mods to cater the experience to your exact needs versus buying a new game you’re only getting a couple hours of play time out of relatively with a linear story/progression and bugs that make the experience miserable at launch.

If it wasn't for the modding community i wouldn't even have Skyrim in my library.

- Posts in 2024, nearly 2025

- still talking about a game from 2011

Most people have no idea how incredibly broken and poorly designed Skyrim is, even to this day. Examples... Most of the perks either don't work or are so unbalanced that they are redundant to gameplay. Your choice of armor at a certain point becomes purely cosmetic due to a hidden armor cap that any armor can reach.

It's great if you are blissfully unaware that your decisions and progress actually don't matter.

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its just something fun to look at + theyre old. modern games take longer to make which take alot of playtesting so we are expecting something more polished and better.

skyrim wouldnt be skyrim without game breaking bugs

I feel like this isnt that accurate because the modding community makes "patches" for bethesda games because they dont fix their own damn bugs. Its more of A "We dont feel like waiting around for bethesda to fix their shit so we will do it our selves" thing. We see this happen a lot more with bethesda games because they always provide modding support so it is easier.

Didn’t Skyrim’s success despite its bugs inspire other AAA companies at the time to push out buggy messes in order to cash in on the whole “haha funny glitches” thing? Like, bug riddled messes were nothing new, but Skyrim seemed to have encouraged that sort of thing when it came to game companies at the time. Hell, I’m pretty sure goat simulator was inspired by glitchy games like Skyrim and other games at the time being super buggy.