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.
I’m saying that by definition, if a game selling itself as a massive RPG is bug free, it cannot possibly be ambitious enough.
True complexity and genuine emergent behavior literally guarantee that some portion of that behavior is odd and “broken”. If you always know what’s going to happen in a game this scale, your systems are too simple and the scale is pointless.
Edit: also lol at the claim that you’ve played anything of comparable scope without bugs. The literal single 3D RPG of comparable scope to Skyrim in the decade since it was released is Elden Ring, which shockingly, also has bugs. There’s a reason people are still buying and playing a massively dated game without QoL mods on switch for $30 on sale, and it’s because nobody else has even tried to make anything at the same scale.
Yeah, it’s easy to have a bug-free game if everything is hard-scripted to play out exactly in one way. COD SP campaign set pieces are bug-free because literally everything was hand crafted to play out exactly the way it does for every player, in every instance.
They’re not games so much as they’re movie sets, and the player is just the lead actor. Acting simulators.
It’s not an RPG and it still has plenty of bugs (and Bethesda’s are super exaggerated because modders have made big lists trying to clean up every tiny detail because they can).
TOTK is a good game, over a decade later, and the physics are genuinely innovative. But there’s all kinds of jank and unpredictability with all the new building stuff. They just lean into it and let you see it as part of the fun.
It’s also a lot more self contained. Every enemy and chest is hand placed with no variation. There aren’t random wandering patrols, there aren’t the kind of actually interactive quest lines, there aren’t big skill trees that change how your character moves and fights, and the number of enemies (and NPCs in “populated” areas) encountered is very carefully limited to stay within their constraints. It’s good for what it is, but it doesn’t seek to provide the living world experience Bethesda (and less expansive RPGs) does. TOTK will probably be one of a small handful of open world games to hold up against time for what it does well, but there’s a reason Skyrim does, too, and it’s because there’s still nothing out there comparable in scope.
Imagine if TOTK was truly immersive with an adaptive world based on more than milestones. I wouldnt have run around 3/4th of the time being the only person that knew where Zelda really was, lol. I’d love it and would play the crap out of it (more than I already do every Zelda game), but Zelda games have never been anything like a elder scrolls or fallout type open world.
I agree that Bethesda needs to step up their QA game, but at the same time I also understand that sometimes weird stuff happens as consequence and isn’t something I’d expect a QA team to test for. Hopefully Starfield finds the right middle ground of a huge, adaptive open world and acceptable levels of QA, that they really have not hit in the past. Also hoping they release bug fixes and patches to fix the edge cases as they’re discovered… Which is another thing Bethesda has kind of sucked at in the past
I’ve really enjoyed what I played of ToTK (and think it’s a big step up from BOTW), but it’s still a pretty carefully limited scope even if it has a big map and the physics it does support are great and interesting. It’s not trying to be a Bethesda game, and it’s great at what it does.
I’m not saying Bethesda is perfect (and Fallout works less for me than Skyrim, even before whatever 76 was), just that there’s a certain scale/complexity where it can no longer be comprehensive. I promise you they invest substantially in QA and testing, but unless they just call the first 6 months after launch an open beta for millions of players to find and report bugs, you can’t catch everything, let alone in a way that it can be reproduced and diagnosed. There aren’t enough testers out there to do it.
There are lots of options for more contained, more polished experiences, and it would be extremely disappointing if a company like Bethesda, who take on scopes no one else does, scaled back far enough to make a flawless experience. All the stuff that would have to be cut out to make testing manageable would take way more from the experience than the bugs do.
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.
I’m saying that by definition, if a game selling itself as a massive RPG is bug free, it cannot possibly be ambitious enough.
True complexity and genuine emergent behavior literally guarantee that some portion of that behavior is odd and “broken”. If you always know what’s going to happen in a game this scale, your systems are too simple and the scale is pointless.
Edit: also lol at the claim that you’ve played anything of comparable scope without bugs. The literal single 3D RPG of comparable scope to Skyrim in the decade since it was released is Elden Ring, which shockingly, also has bugs. There’s a reason people are still buying and playing a massively dated game without QoL mods on switch for $30 on sale, and it’s because nobody else has even tried to make anything at the same scale.
Yeah, it’s easy to have a bug-free game if everything is hard-scripted to play out exactly in one way. COD SP campaign set pieces are bug-free because literally everything was hand crafted to play out exactly the way it does for every player, in every instance.
They’re not games so much as they’re movie sets, and the player is just the lead actor. Acting simulators.
Totk is a very complex and fairly expansive game and is relatively bug free imho
It’s not an RPG and it still has plenty of bugs (and Bethesda’s are super exaggerated because modders have made big lists trying to clean up every tiny detail because they can).
TOTK is a good game, over a decade later, and the physics are genuinely innovative. But there’s all kinds of jank and unpredictability with all the new building stuff. They just lean into it and let you see it as part of the fun.
It’s also a lot more self contained. Every enemy and chest is hand placed with no variation. There aren’t random wandering patrols, there aren’t the kind of actually interactive quest lines, there aren’t big skill trees that change how your character moves and fights, and the number of enemies (and NPCs in “populated” areas) encountered is very carefully limited to stay within their constraints. It’s good for what it is, but it doesn’t seek to provide the living world experience Bethesda (and less expansive RPGs) does. TOTK will probably be one of a small handful of open world games to hold up against time for what it does well, but there’s a reason Skyrim does, too, and it’s because there’s still nothing out there comparable in scope.
Imagine if TOTK was truly immersive with an adaptive world based on more than milestones. I wouldnt have run around 3/4th of the time being the only person that knew where Zelda really was, lol. I’d love it and would play the crap out of it (more than I already do every Zelda game), but Zelda games have never been anything like a elder scrolls or fallout type open world.
I agree that Bethesda needs to step up their QA game, but at the same time I also understand that sometimes weird stuff happens as consequence and isn’t something I’d expect a QA team to test for. Hopefully Starfield finds the right middle ground of a huge, adaptive open world and acceptable levels of QA, that they really have not hit in the past. Also hoping they release bug fixes and patches to fix the edge cases as they’re discovered… Which is another thing Bethesda has kind of sucked at in the past
I’ve really enjoyed what I played of ToTK (and think it’s a big step up from BOTW), but it’s still a pretty carefully limited scope even if it has a big map and the physics it does support are great and interesting. It’s not trying to be a Bethesda game, and it’s great at what it does.
I’m not saying Bethesda is perfect (and Fallout works less for me than Skyrim, even before whatever 76 was), just that there’s a certain scale/complexity where it can no longer be comprehensive. I promise you they invest substantially in QA and testing, but unless they just call the first 6 months after launch an open beta for millions of players to find and report bugs, you can’t catch everything, let alone in a way that it can be reproduced and diagnosed. There aren’t enough testers out there to do it.
There are lots of options for more contained, more polished experiences, and it would be extremely disappointing if a company like Bethesda, who take on scopes no one else does, scaled back far enough to make a flawless experience. All the stuff that would have to be cut out to make testing manageable would take way more from the experience than the bugs do.