this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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There's going to be a lot of bugs. There should be a lot of bugs in a game advertised at this scope.
If you don't have bugs, you don't have real emergent behavior, and your "huge game" is shallow. Polish the gunplay, the stealth, the basic mechanics that people use every day absolutely, but you can't conceivably test every inch of a massive world and all of the varied quest lines with all of dozens of combinations of perks, plus weapons and followers people will play with. If we pretend there are 3 archetypes and 3 levels players could be at when entering a given area*, with 5 different base weapons and 5 different mods per weapon, you already have 225 combinations to test that quest at to find every edge case. And testing a quest for a specific combination isn't one play through. It's several different ways to approach every potential interaction. A character not being a stealth archetype doesn't mean that a real player won't try to approach an encounter with stealth. Also, enemy behavior isn't (or shouldn't be) linear and predetermined, so doing the exact same thing should result in different outcomes, and you have to allow for that, too.
You can't genuinely comprehensively test systems with the complexity a game of the scope Skyrim (and we're hoping Starfield) has. Even with an unlimited budget it's just not doable.
*obviously there are way more combinations of skills, but just for illustration.
Are you genuinely saying the buggier a game is the better it is?
That's kinda weird. I've played tons of expansive games that don't have the amount of bugs a Bethesda game has. Beth games are buggy because they know people will buy it and defend it. They have no incentive to put in working QAing their game when people will write 3 paragraphs on the internet white knighting about it
I get what he's getting at. Systemic games tend to have a crapton of edge cases that, statistically and combined with something open-world, will have a higher density of bugs.
I'd still argue that Bethesda is extremely gung-ho about shipping those products utterly broken and not respecting the minima of quality they are beholden to. Those are the games they wish to make and theirs is the burden of making sure they function properly. It comes with the territory of huge sales they each enjoy. There is a sliding scale between utterly broken and more buggy than average. They lean toward the former on release day, and that's not okay.
I would also make the point that while it's true consumers are a little too uninformed, reviewers absolutely are taking the piss when it comes to pointing out and properly tanking reviews on account of technical issues. It seems that even the most broken, egregious technical problems results at most in a 10 or 20% docking of the final score.