Starfield is Bethesda's Least Buggiest Game to Date, Say Sources
https://insider-gaming.com/bethesda-bugs-game-sources/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works234
Comments118https://insider-gaming.com/bethesda-bugs-game-sources/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
Man, "15 hours in and not a single bug." I love Bethesda, but I feel like that's an incredibly bold claim to make and that his definition of bug is probably a bit loose. I wish they wouldn't make this big of a hubbub about it and just let the game speak for itself if it's really that solid.
I wanna hear how bug free the game is from those 2,000 hours in one save file weirdos.
Yeah the games solid til about hour..269? Then everyone T-poses and then falls into geometry.
Yeah, maybe the 2,062 cheese wheels I have stored in my house could be bugging things out but I doubt it.
👎 Not recommended
6,940 hours playtime
Bugthesda strikes again!
Think the game is stable? Try teleporting nothing but cheese wheels for three straight days.
#CHEESEWHEELGATE
"So I killed an entire city, which caused the dead body clean up cell to overfill and explode dead bodies into the void, which first makes it rain dead bodies and then crashes the game."
Yeah true. Why do the talking when you can do the walking.
This actually gives me more concerns than before, which is probably not what they intended.
Exactly. By pointing a big red arrow at the problem they've historically had to the point of memory it just serves to make the skeptics more skeptical and create concern in everybody else since it's just a big "source: trust me, bro".
We'll just have to see.
Honestly I dont think I will care if I see bugs, but if people are going "there arent any bugs" im gonna keep my eyes out for them.
I'm guessing bug free just means their game didn't crash. Or they're just really unobservant.
The funny thing is we kinda expect bugs, not game breaking bugs, but bugs that we understand would be there since people are about to have more than 100 hours of gameplay. With possibly over billion hours of game testing time from consumers. So there will be bugs.
That's such a low bar that it's clipped through the floor.
Least buggiest? Are we just giving up on English, "journalists?"
I seems in general journalism has gotten worse and worse with their grammar. I honestly wonder if their editors even look at even the title before things are posted online.
When I used to do copywriting for junk SEO, I began to suspect that my editor didn't actually read anything I wrote and just passed it through a content uniquness filter, so I started putting in random references to HP Lovecraft stories in the articles I got assigned.
They all got published, no questions asked. For a while if you searched "Homeopathy and the Esoteric Cult of Dagon" my content was the only result
For a while? So are other companies now hustling in on your game.
I imagine that LLMs have been trained on his reviews by this point and are vigorously producing articles exploring the intersection of pop gaming and the Elder Things.
Alas, I just tried searching that and a few close variants, and find nothing but this Memmy post.
Hah, this was about 10 years ago - I doubt anything I wrote is still around.
Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn't make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.
Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.
What are editors? — journalists probably
I mean, an automated grammar checker should get this. Shouldn't even require a human editor.
https://languagetool.org/
Plugging it in there catches it and suggests "least buggy".
Rewording things is also one of the few things that LLMs seem to be able to reliably do, too.
I think the title is a joke about how Bethesda games are notoriously always full of bugs. Like, to the point that it's just expected for any new Bethesda game to be a bug-riddled mess at launch.
Hell, there are still bugs in Skyrim that never got patched, even after they re-released it onto modern platforms. Not even obscure bugs, but things normal players will encounter in their playthroughs.
He's saying the "Least buggiest" is not proper phrasing. It should be something along the lines of "the least buggy/bugged" and it's a pretty bad title for someone claiming to be a "journalist".
It doesn't have to be "proper" if it works as a joke. It implies that a Bethesda game can't be merely "buggy," it must be the "buggiest," even if it's (paradoxically) less buggy. So, "least buggiest."
All he claims to be is "a[n] FPS fanatic, social media guru, and a father."
Doesn't matter what he claims, he just wrote an article for a publishing/news/media company. That's called journalism, professional or not.
Now define "claim" (verb).
It's crazy that they haven't used things like the unofficial patch to fix their own damn game. Like they could pretty much just copy paste that shit and be fine. But no. More than a decade later and that shit is still around and even propagated to things like FO4 and FO76.
Someone distributing it for free doesn't mean they can legally just put it in their code and sell it.
If it is licensed in a way they can use it, they'd still have to do a bunch of testing and validation to actually do it.
It's not that simple. Even using it as a base gets you into a legal gray area. Learning from a work and incorporating elements into your own work is legal, but copying someone else's legwork like this is legally murky even if you don't take the actual code.
If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.
If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.
If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person's code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn't been noticed or isn't being pursued because there's not likely any money in it anyways.
It's that murky area that I'm guessing they'd want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.
Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)
Wow they name dropped a youtuber. Nevermind, went to my favorite source for gaming, Dexerto, aaaand it's the same shit.
The author is basing this claim on feedback from FIVE people who have been playing the game. If Bethseda are only expecting a similar number to play it once it's released, then this is a useful metric. Otherwise it's meaningless.
It's basically nothing more than a badly written advert.
No worries about launching horses or trolls into orbit in a space game.
"Redfall is looking awesome, it has Arkane's best gunplay yet."
I remember this one. Don't trust AAA developers and game journos. Wait for reviews before buying.
I don't believe you.
Seems like a standard marketing move to get ahead of the meme. We'll see how this article ages by next week, but I pretty sus. 😂
"You won't find any bugs if you don't do any QA"
-Todd Howard probably
deletes the Jira ticket
“Problem solved!”
Nah gotta mark it as cannot duplicate then close. Gotta rack up those sweet story points.
You can't fault his logic. /s
iirc they have focused on QA significantly more than with their previous games
I don't think that the issue is the quality of their QA. Well, okay, maybe that's a factor, but I don't think that that was the big one for Fallout 76.
Some of the issues in Fallout 76 that they shipped with, they had to know they were shipping with. It wasn't that QA didn't turn up problems, but that they took too-ambitious a plan, ran out of time, and then didn't delay the release to fix all the broken stuff. Yeah, they did a lot of work to fix the game post-release, but by then, a lot of players had already been soured by the initial bad experience.
They did significantly delay the Starfield release, so I assume that they are trying to put this out in a more-sane shape.
I have like zero hype for this game, and absolute bangers of games have dropped recently. I'm definitely going to put this on the "maybe" list and let other people test it out for me, I'm in no rush.
I still don't really know what it is. Because it seems to have random generation so that makes me think it's just going to be another no man's sky.
The big problem with randomly generating a bazillion planets is they're all boring. Random terrain generation will always result in dull terrain because an algorithm isn't creative, it's not even AI level aware, it's just maths.
I'm excited for it because Bethesda. I've always put hundreds of hours into their games despite all the ranting and raving.
I'm definitely a bit worried for the same reason as you are though. I think those are likely filler exploration radiant quest type stuff. I'm cautiously hopeful that the story is good and long and deep enough to keep me playing though.
Plus come on... space and customer ship! :D
Yeah, I have thousands of hours in Bethesda games. Something about sneaking around murdering bandits, mutants, mythical beasts, heavily armored soldiers, etc. especially sniping them with a bow in Skyrim and watching everyone run around like "who shot Steve in the face!?", that was just... chef's kiss. That and finding something interesting around every corner, and just the visual aspect of it. It's hard to explain but there is a certain Bethesda magic that no other game really captures. Plus the modding...
I mean is Bethesda and for what is seen there will main quest and so on.... Yes there will be random generation for random planets or sections not designed for those quests, and for random quests like Skyrim random quests... But I wouldn't say like No Man's Sky, it should be rpg (at Bethesda way, not like Baldurs Gate of course) with a more defined story and so on, characters, etc. Of course I haven't touched No Man's Sky on years... So maybe they have something for that now?
It looks like they're doing what star citizen does with terrain generation where they hand-make tiles of landforms like mountains/cliffs, hills, etc, then the procedural generation takes over and stitches them all together in ways that "make sense." So it's not 100% hand crafted, but it's also not "strange landform" NMS type nonsense that is entirely made from maths so you only seem to get rounded features. From what I've seen the environments look absolutely stunning! As someone who plays NMS too I can say they look 100x better than NMS.
Don’t fall for the investor hype. Current AI aren’t even close to being intelligent or aware. As you said for algorithms, it’s just math, algebraic topology and graph theory to be precise.
I see the npcs still have the signature Bethesda empty stare… is that a stylistic choice or do they just suck at face mocap?
Do they even use facial mocap? Fallout 4's best facial animations were all reserved for Preston Garvey, and they are so not very smooth, I always assumed they were done by hand.
Clearly the game needs a Dogmeat facial expression mod.
https://img.ilcdn.fi/IzG_zochUwlOAhQBDnbDTftjGcg=/full-fit-in/612x/img-s3.ilcdn.fi/33c3f60a7ac4a5c63152c9835552888c10104f6688c6c17f342543889a49dee2.jpg
https://post.bark.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/main1.jpg
https://theawesomedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/derpy-dog-portraits-by-kevin-sarasom-28-1.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/75/21/77/75217779432d335f6bbd2b6e370b6cee.jpg
https://justsomething.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/15-dogs-with-facial-expressions-that-are-so-human-it-s-hilarious-12.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cYNlJYQI3Uw/maxresdefault.jpg
neither. They probably just haven't implemented default facial expressions yet (but probably have support for them).
Your daily reminder to not preorder. Least buggiest is not a high bar, TBH.
That's a really low bar NGL
I'm going to wait for launch and reviews for sure
I was thinking the same thing. I'm sure launch will be a bit of a shit show, but at least we usually get some entertaining bugs.
I'm a little disappointed I was looking forward to Skyrim bugs in Space
The Giant Club space program could now actually send you to space; but there are no giants 😔
That we know of
That title hurts my eyes!
Least buggy*
Bugleastest
Pressing x
IIRC didn't Microsoft hold the game back specifically to ensure it didn't launch in a horrific state? Bethesda games are known for being a nightmare at launch, and even with these assurances, I'm still expecting the first few weeks to be a mess. That being said, if any Bethesda game was going to launch well, it would be this one.
It's been held back for a full year and the rumors/leaks from when it got pushed out of 2022 was that it was in about the same state as their games usually launch in, but the higher-ups were worried that someone would make a viral youtube compilation of bugs (cyberpunk being an obvious example) and have their flagship title turned into laughing stock.
IIRC spaceflight was something mentioned as working well but looking really jank, so they spent time fixing that as well.
I expect to encounter many bugs still, but hopefully nothing like fallout 76
No fatal accidents in this workplace in over 30 days!
That's not much of a brag. Just because the monsters in this game won't mysteriously fly off into space only to reappear right behind you seconds later, doesn't mean we should celebrate.
no, no, no
you see this is a space game, they are supposed to fly off into space in this one
FEATURE
It's not a brag, period. Not having a buttload of bugs should be the bare minimum every game should strive for. It's like saying "we sell the least rotten food in town".
Its pretty sad that we've gone from "most epic adventure" and "largest open world you've seen" to "least buggiest game"
Nonetheless, I've enjoyed most Bethesda games and I have gamepass on pc and will definitely try the game.
I'll believe it when I see it.
I mean even Skyrim ran pretty nice, till you started playing it long enough to start finding the bugs and jank. Of course, it helped that it had all the familiar jank from the previous games.
Just love the pre-release reviews being all "this is shit" when the game hasn't even released yet.
Today I've been playing My Friend Pedro and man it's been incredible.
You're welcome and have fun 🍻
I enjoyed Fallout 76, but I also ignored it until something like three years after release, at which point it was in a decent state.
It wasn't Fallout 5, which is what I really wanted, but I got my money's worth out of it.
Only bug I hit that was kind of obnoxious was the occasional inability to pick up an item from a corpse, where one would have to look away from the corpse and then back. While being a bit immersion-breaking, it was also pretty easy to work around.
Honestly, the whole Fallout series has been pretty buggy, starting with Fallout 1, but still, a good series. Some of it just comes from the complexity of having a bunch of scripts running that can interact in odd ways in a relatively free-form world.
One of my bigger wants for Fallout 5 is easier diagnosing of problems with mods and trying to be more-robust against such problems. Maybe produce more-foolproof API functionality for common script tasks or something.
a big part of the hate for fallout 76 wasnt even about the bugs, to this day i am 100% convinced that it was stoked massively by folks that bought it expecting a game it was fundamentally never trying to be, never marketed to be and never going to be
That's probably part of it. A big chunk of the aspects that I didn't like about it relative to Fallout 4 -- from killing off slow-mo/pause VATS, to not having a world that can change much, to limited-size "settlements", to limited moddability, to having immersion-breaking other players jetpacking around with not-in-theme names, to having limited story content -- come from the fact that they built it to be a multiplayer game.
But even so. I've seen some footage of the game at release, and it was pretty bad. And not just bugs, but the content...I mean, a Bethesda game not having human NPCs?
I will give them props for putting a lot of effort into fixing the game post-release, but I still feel that the thing shouldn't have shipped when it did. It simply wasn't ready when it went out the door.
Also, some of the fixes they did do that I think people did like -- like reducing the severity of the food/water/radstorm survival elements, which many players didn't like having to hassle with, or reducing the role of PvP, which a lot of the playerbase didn't like -- didn't result in game rebalancing. Like, the player shelters were clearly intended to be a significant element to deal with radstorms, but radstorms are essentially ignorable. Food was intended to play a bigger role, and there are features oriented towards things like reducing the rate of one's demand for it, but that was removed.
If you look at Fallout 4 or even moreso Skyrim, modders went through and rebalanced the game long after the release. I'm not saying that everyone who played those games got to enjoy those changes, but I think that they were good ones. Fallout 76 isn't really moddable in that way, so it's dependent on Bethesda's devs to do all that...and they didn't really do that.
There were no really memorable moments from the game, the way, I don't know, the battle for The Castle or the arrival of the Brotherhood of Steel's aircraft or some other moments in Fallout 4 really stuck with me. I guess to some extent that's part of just having to make a lot of the content something that you play over and over, but it still was kinda disappointing.
And I'm not demanding that they work for free. I bought all the DLC for Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I'd happily have bought something like the (excellent) DLC packs for earlier games in the Fallout series for Fallout 76. But, instead, they only sold mostly-aesthetic content in the Atom Store. Which, okay, great, if someone really wants to decorate their player camp and wants to pay for it could be appealing to someone. But they didn't create a route to pay for more story content, more maps or the like. They did create new free content, but that necessarily has a limited budget, and again, was kinda oriented around multiplayer (and didn't catch on much with me and didn't seem to be terribly popular with players on the fo76 subreddit, either).
There are some things that I did like about it, that I don't think it got credit for. The building mode performance was significantly-improved over 4. They toned down the "everything is dark and awful and evil and every person and company is twisted" aspect in 4, which I think was a big plus; there were plenty of people just trying to live their lives in difficult situations, which felt more like 1. I'm not absolutely rabid about the new areas, but the Mire looked nice by the standards of their engine, was a good use of their engine's godrays. They did a bunch of performance and stability work (that had to happen, given that one couldn't just "reload earlier saves" if something broke in a saved game a la the single player games).
I could have lived with Fallout 76 not being Fallout 5, but what I wished that they could have done was to keep selling single-player content in traditional DLC form. A lot of MUDs and similar games have a "remort" feature where one can start with a new character and earn some persistent rewards for doing so, so playing through story content multiple times is still fun. "New Game Plus", kinda. The online aspect for single-player content would just be to provide DRM, so that people wouldn't just go swipe all the stuff that they're selling in the Atom Store. And the stuff on offer in the Atom Store...ugh. If you look at the mods in Fallout 4, people created high-resolution texture packs, new companions, new story content, and they don't have anything like that for sale. You could have segregated anything that affected balance out of the multiplayer areas, had very solid single-player-only content. It might not have been Fallout 5, but I think that it could have done a much better job of making people who wanted that happier while still providing a multiplayer game for those who wanted a multiplayer game.
This just in: the least-stinky shit you ever took still smelled like shit
Least buggy?
Guess journalists are forgetting how to grammar.
Do the NPCs in this game give anyone else a sort of uncanny valley feel
I think we've all learned our collective lesson at this point (or at least, we should have) not to over-hype games, nor to pre-order them.
I'm going to have to temporarily move in with my dad in October potentially for a few months, should be some decent reviews in by then so I'm looking forward to killing time with this game!
The people who have "learned" "the lesson" are a loud minority. The vast majority of consumers will put money wherever they feel like it, philosophy be damned.
Reminder it’s on gamepass!
Thanks. I think I had GP a while back just to play AC: Valhalla, so I won't get a cheeky deal... I'll probably buy it on GOG, as it seems like it's not going to be the sort of game I complete within a month or two, I prefer to 'own' a game than rent it once I'm satisfied it's for me.
It will be a few years before it's on GOG, so it really depends how patient you are. Fallout 4 only appeared on there a week or two ago to give you a frame of reference.
Oh dang. thanks for the headsup. Will it not be on steam day1?
It'll be on Steam day one, yeah.
For anyone who may have forgotten or may not know: the game is a day 1 launch on game pass. I already have it preloaded and I didn't preorder. You can easily see how buggy the game is for yourself next week.
I sincerely don't mind their balance between bugs and ambition, but all this shit has me terrified.
Oh no, what'd they break this time?
I feel bad for the teams that had to go into "double crunch" mode after BG3 came out. Just so they can get the game into not embarrassing shape for launch.
Or they could, you know, wait for it to be ready to release. How about they wait to announce it until the game is done, and then spend the last few months polishing it?
It's hilariously sad when you require a headline like that because of your previous games.
Well then im not interested
What a ringing endorsement.....
Based on their other games, that's the bare minimum we should expect
(x) doubt
In the case they are actually being honest, they could just be speaking relatively - which still doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me that Starfield is going to be seamless and smooth at launch, or even a few months past launch.
In the case that they are just clearly lying, it's an intentional strategy: they're counting on the fact that they will gain more money from this than they will lose from people discovering it was a lie after the game launches.
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Lol nice stroll down memory lane.
Can't believe people are still gonna trust this Bryan Kohberger-looking motherfucker anymore.
As in no giant bug beasts?
Todd Howard should spend more time debugging and less paying for positive articles.
Yeah, because when you've used the same engine for the past 15 years, I'd expect you to iron out most of the issues by now.
I kid because I love. I'll play the fuck out of it regardless, but I'll almost be disappointed if this game isn't a glorious mess at launch.
Morrowind came out in 2002 so it's actually been 21 years
Not gonna lie, that makes me less confident
Probably the result of Bethesda having to answer to Microsoft who gives final approval.
Lucky to receive it for free. No way am I trusting those who made 19 versions of Skyrim and didn't fix bugs present in the first ver.
Does it come bundled with some hardware?
Yes, the latest generation of AMD CPUs, or the latest two generations of AMD GPUs. If you buy the more expensive ones you can get premium edition.
That's some good shit.
It's also in game pass from day one
Gamepass usually means unmoddable, which is basically against the whole point of Bethesda games.
Good for them. Where the hell is the next Elder Scrolls already? That poor old woman who plays Skyrim is gonna die before it comes out.
Maybe if they make enough money on this, they can expand and develop The Elder Scrolls and the Fallout series in parallel, as well as whatever else they have cooking, instead of working on only one title at a time.