Starfield has been hyped as Bethesda’s biggest game to date, which is perfect. Microsoft absolutely cannot afford to be cast in a bad light by another game release with a lot of game-breaking issues, similar to Redfall, which launched to the disappointment of many earlier this year.
Bethesda has had a history of releasing games with bugs, with the glitches becoming the subject of memes and jokes within the gaming community. However, it seems that Starfield will be changing the narrative.
Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson reached out to players who have had an opportunity to play the game. According to the report, sources say that Starfield will be the “least buggiest” game to date. Henderson’s sources are still under the embargo and are not publicly allowed to comment on the upcoming space RPG.
Journalist Tyler McVicker, even while under embargo, shared his experience playing the game, stating that he had “not a single bug” in his first 15 hours of playing. Such a comment is very promising for Starfield and indicates that Bethesda made a conscious effort to ensure the quality of the game.
Henderson also reached out to individuals working for Bethesda’s Quality Assurance team. Understandably, the sources spoke to him anonymously and reaffirmed McVicker’s sentiments regarding the bugs. All five employees reported that they encountered minimal bugs and most mentioned only one or two minor issues. More importantly, the few bugs that the QA team found will be addressed with a day-one patch.
It’s worth noting that Henderson’s sources are a sample size compared to the player base at launch. Given the hype that’s surrounding the game, millions of players will play it at launch. Players will eventually find more issues with the game as time goes on. There is also a subset of gamers that try to intentionally break gameplay mechanics.
Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty spoke to Giant Bomb in June and touched on the topic of bugs. He revealed that he had seen the internal bug counts and stated that it would be the least buggy game from the studio if it shipped in June.
“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 any Bethesda game ever shipped with,” Booty shared.
We have to be clear that Starfield will still have bugs. Even the most polished games have bugs. However, having just a few bugs for a game as huge as Starfield sounds fantastic. Bethesda made a great call to delay the game to 2023 to give devs enough time to polish it and iron out issues.
Starfield is coming to PC and Xbox Series X/S on September 6.
