If they'd done that they would have been fired or sued. - Edit 1
Before modification by Werthead at 04/04/2012 12:10:50 AM
As for Obsidian, true, their development time was cut short by LucasArts. But they didn't have the backbone to stand up for themselves and say, "Do you want a bad/mediocre game released with the Lucasarts' name attached to it?"
Er, it doesn't work like that. Obsidian was given a project to do and then had their schedule slashed. They probably said to LucasArts, "This isn't going to work," and got a reply like, "Sorry, this is the situation, deal with it." Obsidian would be forced to comply or face legal action for breach of contract.
Obsidian's perennial problem is that they want to be independent and work with different studios, rather than pursuing the normal course of desperately wanting to be bought out by a single studio (as we saw BioWare do with EA, disastrously for DRAGON AGE 2 and MASS EFFECT 3 as it turned out) for a more regular income. This means working for hire, being paid a flat rate rather than percentages on each copy sold and being utterly at the mercy of their contract and their publisher's wishes.
The biggest problem is that in this realtionship, QA is handled by the publisher, but with each of their big game problems (ALPHA PROTOCOL, NEW VEGAS and KotOR 2) the publisher (Sega, Bethesda and LucasArts respectively) dropped the ball. LucasArts needed KotOR 2 out before Christmas no matter what and they ran out of time for any substantial QA. Fortunately, the actual game wasn't really buggy, just incomplete in some areas. Bethesda did fix NEW VEGAS, but not until after release (when the game's reputation was already battered). Sega and Obsidian's relationship seems a lot more acrimonious, as Obsidian was trying to develop an original IP that could become a big franchise for them, but Sega's interest in the property was variable and they refused to pay for Obsidian to do anything at all after delivering the alpha build (which is essentially what was released).
Some of this is rotten luck, some of it is down to the culture of the industry. Obsidian are unusual now in being an independent, relatively big developer. Most of their contemporaries have been swallowed up by the big publishers so these problems don't really come up as much now with other companies.
And with New Vegas we found out why. Even with a full development period, they will only get about 80%-85% there.
They didn't have a 'full development period' for NEW VEGAS either (a year for a game of that size is insanely fast), although this did know this ahead of time and so were able to scale back their more ambitious ideas (and hold back some of the stronger storytelling elements for the DLC, to have more time to work on them).
The problem with the glitches is that Bethesda accepted the game as it was given to them and were supposed to do QA and bug-fixing themselves (as it was their engine which they knew inside-out) and didn't bother. Conspiracy theorists have even said they did this deliberately so NV would get lower review scores so they wouldn't have to pay Obsidian their bonus (publishers give developers a bonus if the game scores 85% or more on metacritic; NV scored 84%). However, I honestly don't think Bethesda are that asshattery. They just dropped the ball on QA, probably due to time. Note that the game now is pretty stable after much patching.
Also, Bethesda themselves have pretty ropey bug records. SKYRIM isn't too bad (apparently the game was finished early last year and they had an unusually long period of bug-fixing and polishing), FALLOUT 3 was variable by user (and some of the DLC was totally screwed; POINT LOOKOUT barely worked on some PCs), OBLIVION was rocky in places and, going back quite a while, DAGGERFALL was one of the most disastrous games ever released for bugs (it makes the worst of Obsidian's games look totally polished in comparison). Yet they seem to get nothing but critical praise. A bit weird, really.