Unfortunately for players, we have become accustomed to bugs being a part of video games. They always have been, mind you, but with the arrival of patches, there’s no doubt that the final quality matters less, as everything can be quickly fixed with an update. In Bethesda’s games, bugs have been a common and repeated issue, but Starfield has surprised by having fewer than expected.
In a recent conversation on Ted Price’s podcast, CEO of Insomniac Games, Bethesda’s Executive Producer Todd Howard explained why Starfield has been released more polished than the average game. The answer? Well, because the game has been finished for almost a year, and the studio has been playing it since the past Christmas.
“One of our goals over the last holiday was to get everybody home and have Starfield be essentially done. There were bugs, but we said, ‘Here’s the whole game, and you can play it,'” Howard points out. “The whole team played it all year, played it all the time, changed it, and fixed it. We got a lot of help from QA people.”
In this regard, Howard acknowledges that the game “is not perfect in any way” and that “there are obviously things we’re fixing, and we’ll continue to do so, but given the scale we had in terms of bugs that prevented you from playing or performance issues, especially on consoles, I think we ended up in a pretty good place.”
As a curiosity, Starfield used some automated systems to review data. This was done quickly to locate errors and receive a report that pointed out the issue, such as that it was slow at that point or this could break. Thanks to this, the team knew where to go instead of searching one by one.
