Obsidian: Why Fallout: New Vegas crashes

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 7 February, 2011

"We're gamers, too."

Fallout: New Vegas creator Obsidian Entertainment has explained why the sprawling openworld RPG suffers from technical issues – including console-crashing bugs and corrupted save files.

The Bethesda Softworks published game was built with the creaking Gamebryo engine – used to construct The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 before Fallout: New Vegas.

But Gamebryo wasn't Obsidian's tech - a fact that contributed to New Vegas' well-documented problems, Obsidian said.

The Square Enix published action RPG Dungeon Siege III, however, is the first game to be built using Obsidian's own, internally created game engine, Onyx.

For project director Rich Taylor, it's made all the difference.

"Stability and being bug free are extremely high priorities on this project, and we actually talk about it internally constantly," he explained to Eurogamer in a new interview. "The advantage here we have over, for example Fallout, is when we have a question about how something works, I walk 10 feet outside my office door and go talk to the programmer who wrote it. That's a lot different than trying to get someone on a mailing list, or get someone on the phone who's in a different time zone or across the country. Those sort of things have made it possible for us to stabilise things and keep things working as well as we like.

"Here we have the advantage of, no matter who runs into a crash issue, we're able to get it up on the screen with a stack dump and look at it and peel back the information on it, and identify exactly what happened and get it fixed. That's been a change.

"When we've worked with other engines sometimes you get a crash and you're like, well, I don't know. We didn't write this. Why is this happening? You get a bunch of engineers in there trying to reproduce something that takes hours to reproduce. Those kind of things can be difficult when you're not able to develop your own tech. But our crash and stability tools on this project have been phenomenal.

"So having our own technology, having the actual engineers who wrote it right here, available and working on it, and they're very passionate about making it as stable and solid as possible, certainly worked well for this project."

Since New Vegas' hugely successful launch, Bethesda has released a number of patches designed to improve the performance of the game.

In October last year Bethesda told Xbox 360 owners to save often while playing as it worked to fix a bug that prevented gamers from loading save files.

"Well, no one wants to run into a crash," Taylor replied when asked whether gamers complain too much about bugs and glitches. "We're gamers, too. I certainly go home and like to play other games that are out there. And when you run into a crash and it disrupts your experience, that's not fun for anyone. We understand that.

"That's why, as the project director on this game, I'm very militant about us addressing the crashes and memory issues."

Picture of Wesley.

About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (29) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • spiritsnake #1 1 year ago

    looking forward to it

  • BabyJesus #2 1 year ago

    I'd believe you, if everyother game you've made wasn't buggy as shit. Even Fallout 1 and 2 were broken pre patch.

  • darkphoenix #3 1 year ago

    I never played a game this buggy ( on consoles, at least )....
    Crashes frequently, bugs everywhere, some of them game-breaking.
    Yes, I save often, as in every other RPG/game that lets me so.

    The memory issues are the worst, with loading times increasing, even doubling in an hour or less.
    After 3 or 4 hours, it becomes a chore...

    Techical failures apart, it's a great, great game that is keeping my life hostage, somewhere in the Mojave wasteland.

  • cowkiller #4 1 year ago

    What a load of tosh. If using licensed engines was the cause of all game crashes, every Unreal powered game, for example, would be a buggy mess too as the dev's didn't code the engine. What he means is Gamebryo is a buggy mess to start with, and we made it worse!

  • RodHull #5 1 year ago

    Sounds like an iffy excuse. Whilst the scope of Fallout: NV was immense, I'm yet to play an Unreal powered and 3rd party game that has been as buggy.

  • homerramone #6 1 year ago

    Sounds like cobblers to me. Besides:
    1. Why then did Fallout3 crash a lot too ?
    2. if its the same reason then why did they use the same engine again for vegas ?
    of course in any case its matterless whoose engine you use if you actually bother to test it properly (and not say 'we will just patch it when you find its broken if you do!)

  • bobfish09 #7 1 year ago

    This is the first time they're using their own engine for a game, so we'll see if they manage to produce their first non-broken game with it.

    If they don't, then we know the engine isn't the problem.

  • glottis0 #8 1 year ago

    Anyone who's worked with big codebases will read these as fairly reasonable assertions - I suspect he was more stating why it's easier this time around (i.e. with the new engine for the new game), and Eurogamer spun it to sound like an excuse as to why Vegas was buggy.

    More and more of this Daily Mail nonsense going on in the 'news' articles lately.

  • Zephro #9 1 year ago

    Trying to debug large codebases made by someone else is always a nightmare so sounds reasonable. Also Gamebyro is clearly a pile of crap.

  • Murton #10 1 year ago

    In fairness to Obsidian, their Fallout has far more scope than Bethesda's and is actually more stable, even though it suffers the same memory issues as any other GameBryo title.

    It is however worth noting that 4J studios managed to defeat any memory leakage that existed in Oblivion and their PS3 port surpassed Bethesda's original in just about every measurable way. In fact the only issue I encountered in the PS3 version of Oblivion was the vampirism bug which has never been fixed to my knowledge except for in player-made patches on the PC.

    I've always thought Obsidian were a highly talented studio who tend to get dicked around a lot by publishers leading to games that don't live up to expectations. KotOR 2 had its release date brought forward by LucasArts, Alpha Protocol should have been delayed for polish, and Fallout NV was hamstrung by a shitty engine and should also have been delayed for polish. Not saying that Obsidian are blameless, just that their publishers deserve a fair share for not being more realistic with the deadlines.

    On topic, wasn't overly keen on Dungeon Siege 2, but 3 looks pretty good and I'm confident that Obsidian will have done a good job on it from a creative standpoint at the very least, from a technical standpoint we'll have to wait until release.

  • waynenot #11 1 year ago

    Ahh - didn't realise KOTOR 2 and Alpha Protocol also used Gamebryo, too. That would explain them being broken - oh hang on...

    There must be a common element between the three, though - what could that be?

  • TheTrueSpin #12 1 year ago

    Rubbish.... especially as most the bugs we found in NV were VERY easy to reproduce. The whole game stunk of a product that was rushed to market with little quality control... but when you are riding on the back of a successful game, who cares, eh?

  • SAMagic #13 1 year ago

    It's something I suspected would happen (external developer picking up another's tech that wasn't of perfect integrity to begin with) and I certainly sympathize with them, but why wasn't it anticipated? Did they just push on with making the new content regardless?

    Hopefully Bethesda and Obsidian learn from it, though history has a nasty way of repeating itself in the games industry.

  • darkmorgado #14 1 year ago

    I can sort of buy that excuse.

    Now please explain NwN2, KoTor2 and Alpha Protocol.

  • coomber #15 1 year ago

    i'm looking forward to dungeon seige 3. its bound to be more stable than sacred 2 which is the only console based dungeon crawler,

    Christ, forgot I'd bought Sacred 2. Must dig it out from whatever drawer it's in!

    As for criticising Obsidian, it's like Murton has said - they have been mucked around by publishers. When they finally get the respect they deserve then perhaps they will be in a position to tell publishers to back off and give them more time...and we will get to see what they can really do.

  • peppergomez #16 1 year ago

    So, basically, FNV=Fail?

  • knocker #17 1 year ago

    The size of the codebase is irrelevant. Maybe for unit/component testing. But the bugs in this game were so immediately apparent any half decent test team would have found them. And I'm almost willing to bet yours did. These problems weren't caused by technical problems but commercial priorities.

    Pretty weak blaming your workers for not having the skill to find, analyse and rectify bugs.

  • Stop-gap #18 1 year ago

    Wait, isn't this just parts of the Dungeon Siege III interview chopped and changed to make a "new" article?
    Couldn't Obsidian have been asked about this in proper depth rather than taking an aside from an interview about something else entirely? I'm sure there's still plenty of folk who feel they're owed an explanation over the state of NV.
    Edited by Stop-gap at 07/02/11 @ 20:05

  • Gastrian #19 1 year ago

    Post deleted at 17:56:43 13-04-2012

  • Turbotim3 #20 1 year ago

    This was the buggiest game I had ever played and notice I said was because I got rid of that piece of crap quickly

  • outerheaven8 #21 1 year ago

    Everything has it's problems, people need to stop thinking that coding a game is a piece of piss.

  • roquey Verified Lead Quality Assurance Tester and Compliance Specialist, Universally Speaking #22 1 year ago

    The only bugs i came across were the odd scorpion and ganger in the floor. dont personally know why the fuss.

  • respectyourelder #23 1 year ago

    @waynenot

    Tou che sir, tou che!

  • respectyourelder #24 1 year ago

    I haven't really come across too many bugs in NV, but i am playing it now on the patched up version.

    Corrupted save files on an RPG is a huge deal; if i'd put in any more than 5 hours on a game and lost my save i'd be fuming. But then again i learnt long ago to have regular rolling saves.

    All that aside, it's still an excellent game.

  • SomaticSense #25 1 year ago

    Murton: "In fairness to Obsidian, their Fallout has far more scope than Bethesda's and is actually more stable"

    More stable than FO3? My experience of both suggests a resolute no.

    NV has been by quite a long way the buggiest console game I've ever played.

  • metallicorphan #26 1 year ago

    Somatic Sense-'NV has been by quite a long way the buggiest console game I've ever played.'

    this,i had a few bugs on Fallout 3,less bugs on Elder Scrolls 4 but F:NV was all over the place,my biggest problem was that some missions couldn't be even started or finished..which is a shame,as the game could of been a masterpiece

    I remember KOTOR2 and the bugs(the ending as well!!)and gave Obsidian the benefit of the doubt as i heard LucasArts were up their arse to get it released,however it still got some bad press for the bugs in KOTOR2,so Obsidian should of learnt from that...I definitely wont be buying an Obsidian title again on day one anyway

    they certainly need to sack their game testers,unless Obsidian just blatantly ignored everything they said

  • peppergomez #27 1 year ago

    Bugs. Bugs never change.

  • kongzi #28 1 year ago

    My new vegas was much more stable on pc than fallout 3 was on my 360... still pretty buggy tho, some crashes, but anything based on unreal engine does the same. A new engine is cool, but it's gonna take a couple of highly polished games to lose their image of the buggy studio.

  • DigitalDelay #29 1 year ago

    Well I'm not buying any of those excuses, or any of you people siding with Obsidian. This game totally wrecked my ps3 slim. I dont say that lightly, I know it did, sony even replaced it under warranty with that as the reason! I'm a firm believer of "if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing properly". Rich Taylor and Co are evidently not. Big shame.