Castrum - According to Stephen Totilo over at Kotaku, who spoke to Skyrim Creative Director Todd Howard recently, Bethesda is working on stamping out the more annoying, game-ending bugs typically associated with their games. They're also implementing a Sports Game-like streaming content system in Skyrim, whereby changes to the game's data can be made within a few hours:
Before launch, Howard said, Bethesda is testing Skyrim rigorously and more heavily using a system that runs automated versions of the game overnight, searching for bugs and helping the team squash them. "We're getting better at it," Howard said.
They are also adopting this new EA Sports-style "live update" system that will let Bethesda tweak the data in their game almost immediately. If a quest isn't triggering because players are doing some unforeseen combination of actions, that might be addressable by tweaking the data tables that dictate the flow of events in the game. If the game is proving to be unbalanced in an unexpected way, that can be fixed on the fly too. And these fixes—Howard prefers to call them "improvements"— will take effect fast. "We can change stats on a sword and it will be available to everyone in a few hours," he said.
As anyone who has read my posts on this blog for the past couple of weeks knows, Skyrim will undoubtedly be my Game Of The Year, bugs or no bugs, so this news simply reassures me of my stance on this game. The sands of time cannot bring November 11th quickly enough.
Source: Kotaku
