Starfield is one of the most ambitious open-world games ever made. That said, if Skyrim and Fallout 4 — the two previous games from developer Bethesda Game Studios — are any barometer, then it’s going to be buggy. The million dollar question is how buggy? According to Bethesda, it’s shaping up to be its least buggy game to date. That said, ahead of its release and confirmation of this, one fan has taken to Reddit to explain that “Bethesda games are buggy for a reason.”
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“I keep seeing posts stating that Starfield will be buggy at launch or that Bethesda’s engine is horrible and outdated. I think what a lot of gamers overlook is that the reason games like Skyrim and Fallout are so good is they truly make you feel like you are in those worlds and one major way they do that is giving the player freedom to play how they want,” reads the Reddit post. “Want go through the main quest or just walk in a direction and see what you find? The other way you feel immersed in the world is the amount of interactivity that is built into their engines. You can pick up any object, body, etc. I feel like in most other popular games I am not as immersed in the world because either the game world limits what you can do or I cannot choose who I can be.”
The post continues: “What I am trying to say with all of this is I think in the past Bethesda’s games have been buggy because it does what other games fall short of and that is create a totally immersive world that grants me the freedom to approach it however I like. Other games that restrict that freedom just have a lot easier time eliminating bugs and glitches. I hope starfield doesn’t have too many bugs but I also hope it’s just as or more immersive than their previous titles so I in a weird way I am hoping for something that is more likely to have more bugs.”ย
As alluded to, this post has garnered a good deal of attention. Many have echoed the sentiment while others have challenged it. To be fair the post, there is some truth to it. The interactivity of the worlds Bethesda Game Studios create is something no other games do at the scale they do. Being able to interact with just about everything gobbles up tons of memory and hurts game performance. It also makes finding and squashing bugs more challenging because with more interactivity mean more possibilities for the game to break. Meanwhile, fixing said bug becomes more complicated because of all these variables. That said, there’s also a sliding scale of an acceptable number of bugs, and types of bugs, in relation to these challenges.ย
For example, on PS3 Skyrim was so buggy and broken it was almost unplayable. You could break your whole game if you didn’t close certain doors or not. Many of these bugs were eventually fixed, but the game shipped in an unacceptable state on PS3. If Starfield has ordinary bugs that don’t break the game or ruin it, many players will overlook this or not care, but that has to be extent of it. Anything more than this is the result of poor design, optimization, and testing.ย
As always, feel free to weigh in with your thoughts. Do you agree with the Reddit post or is there no excuse for shipping a game with lots of bugs?
H/T, Gaming Bible.
