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Microsoft Game Studios head Matt Booty has tempted fate by claiming that Starfield will launch with fewer bugs than any other Bethesda game. Notably, he only says it will have fewer bugs, not necessarily that the bugs will be less severe, but it's still a bold claim for a studio that's become notorious for its extremely buggy games at launch.

"We have an awful lot of people internally playing it," said Booty on a Giant Bomb livestream (as spotted by VGC). "Working with Todd and the team, I see bug counts and just by the numbers, if it shipped today, this would have the fewest bugs that any game from Bethesda has ever shipped with."

However, this will be the first game released by Bethesda Game Studios since its acquisition by Microsoft in 2020. Phil Spencer, speaking on the same livestream, said that they pushed back Starfield's expected release date after the acquisition and have been prioritizing squashing bugs.

"Truth be told, when the acquisition closed, this game had a significantly earlier ship date than where we're actually launching it," Spencer said. "I think Matt said we have every QA person in our entire company playing Starfield right now, looking at bug counts, looking at the quality of where we are. The nice thing about what we showed today from my perspective is: that was the game. We've been playing the game for quite a while and that's the game."

With Starfield launching on September 6, 2023, Microsoft only has a few months left to finish squashing bugs if they want to make good on this promise.

 

[Engezerstorung]

I'm claiming that i'm owed 1billion dolars

 

[ZeroFX]

Heh, that's easy to say with all the infinite money being thrown at Todd's face, even though I doubt.

 

[AkiraKurusu]

Still annoyed they're continuing to port bloody Skyrim to every new platform, without officially adding in the fanmade patches and stuff. Or doing that themselves (though fan patches would, by their very nature, be way more comprehensive than any in-house effort, especially in-house Bethesda).

That's not giving me much confidence Starfield will have minimal bugs and glitches; are they still using their decrepit old Creation engine for this? Instead of something more modern?

 

[TomSwitch]

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Microsoft Game Studios head Matt Booty has tempted fate by claiming that Starfield will launch with fewer bugs than any other Bethesda game. Notably, he only says it will have fewer bugs, not necessarily that the bugs will be less severe, but it's still a bold claim for a studio that's become notorious for its extremely buggy games at launch.

"We have an awful lot of people internally playing it," said Booty on a Giant Bomb livestream (as spotted by VGC). "Working with Todd and the team, I see bug counts and just by the numbers, if it shipped today, this would have the fewest bugs that any game from Bethesda has ever shipped with."

However, this will be the first game released by Bethesda Game Studios since its acquisition by Microsoft in 2020. Phil Spencer, speaking on the same livestream, said that they pushed back Starfield's expected release date after the acquisition and have been prioritizing squashing bugs.

"Truth be told, when the acquisition closed, this game had a significantly earlier ship date than where we're actually launching it," Spencer said. "I think Matt said we have every QA person in our entire company playing Starfield right now, looking at bug counts, looking at the quality of where we are. The nice thing about what we showed today from my perspective is: that was the game. We've been playing the game for quite a while and that's the game."

With Starfield launching on September 6, 2023, Microsoft only has a few months left to finish squashing bugs if they want to make good on this promise.

Any software I release from here on shall have fewer bugs. ( Here I said it too, not that anyone is keeping count haha )

 

[Ettino]

So, they basically just said "We will release an unfinished game and people will still day one buying it anyway. Becasue they're stupid and we love money" right?

 

[xdarkx]

By fewest bugs does, Microsoft mean less than one bug than what Bethesda games usually have?

 

[FAST6191]

To be fair charitable and mostly knowing elder scrolls/skyrim and fallout bugs from challenge runs and silliness I could see this claim being a reasonable one, even more so if this is a spit and polish reskin of an existing codebase. There are styles of coding*, types of testing both automated and human driven that would fairly easily eliminate most things, as well as design considerations.

My bigger concern would be if that would spoil some of the fun, though easy enough to add most of that back in with mods.

*will skip the technical things and also lesson in "safe coding" but easy enough to clamp values to avoid overflows and excessive values, remove game breaking special items, clamp location rate of change values to avoid horse tilting, avoiding falling through the floor is more tricky to do to not also accidentally sequence break but still possible, hardcode AI paths/give them magic teleport to player upon exiting dungeon, do some kind of state machine in menus to avoid duplication (though this does make them more annoying to the end user), flags/unique ids on items to similarly avoid duplication, skew internal growth curves to dodge respawn/wait forever for stealth in tutorials, do better statefulness to avoid NPC inventory fun and games, hold more values in save data to avoid quicksave resets...
All this makes coding a bit more annoying, and these days a marginal increase in memory/save size and aside from the state machine menus does not impact the end user that much.

Now I don't expect this as most of their games seem to be "wouldn't it be cool" systems slapped together with less concern for cohesive fantasy world building and magic systems (from a gameplay perspective, actually tend to do half well with the lore) than random high school kid's creative writing efforts but it is within the realm of reason.

 

[AdenTheThird]

We’ll see about if it “just works” this time around

Little lies, stunning shows, people buy, money flows...

 

[Bladexdsl]

and pigs will fly

 

[tech3475]

Little lies, stunning shows, people buy, money flows...

I will be disappointed if we don't see the battle spaceship with the dragon animation.

 

[Sir Tortoise]

So basically it's gonna be buggy as hell, but they're trying to preemptively play it down by saying that the number of bugs (that they know of) will be fewer. They could have multiple severe bugs they know they can't fix before launch, but that's fine, because those are only single bugs each

 

[nightstalker27nl]

the modding community will fix it again for bethesda and bethesda will then steal mods and creations from the community and sell it on the creation club for 20 euro's worth of points without crediting the orginaly creator or compensating them

 

[Bladexdsl]

yep one of the reasons i don't want anything to do with SCUMesda anymore.

 

[ZeroT21]

And here I thought the game having bugs was Bethesda' main feature

 

[Purple_Heart]

Fewest Bugs? oh that means oy 2 Tons instead 3 Tons of bugs.

 

[Lazyt]

What do they mean it will have bugs

 

[LuigiXHero]

Seems weird that they know how many bugs they are shipping it with.

Every game ships with bugs they know about. You have to release the game sometime.

 

[Hyatt]

For Bethesda it's few, for us it's many

 

[Tony8690]

doesnt this look similar to no mans sky??

 

[FAST6191]

What do they mean it will have bugs

There was a rumour going round that they had to remove the bugs lest Starship Troopers sued them. This was the deal they made.