Starfield has "fewest bugs that any game from Bethesda has ever shipped with", Microsoft says

dylan@lemm.ee to Gaming@beehaw.org – 70 points –
Starfield has "fewest bugs that any game from Bethesda has ever shipped with", Microsoft says
eurogamer.net
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I dunno though, it's a pretty low bar

Why is it square? Wasn't there always the X in this picture?

I have no idea, tbh.

PlayStation Square would be Xbox's X, no? Could be that. Or it's the only common button between all consoles.

Thatā€™s one of the least reassuring statements Iā€™ve ever seen a company make about their own product. Theyā€™re basically saying ā€œit sucks less than the other stuff weā€™ve crapped out!ā€

I'll believe it when I see it. I'm not preordering anything anymore.

Yeah how can they say it has the "fewest bugs any Bethesda game has shipped with" when the game hasn't shipped yet??

Yeah how can they say it has the ā€œfewest bugs any Bethesda game has shipped withā€ when the game hasnā€™t shipped yet??

Issue tracking has been a part of software development since the beginning. They know and have always known roughly how many bugs they have shipped games with. Just like any company that releases a product knows roughly how many bugs they are shipping with. I pretty much guarantee you that any software that has ever been released has had a huge backlog of bugs of varying levels of importance sitting on some form of backlog.

So, it's pretty straightforward for them to know how this game is comparing against their previous releases. Not to say that there won't be plenty of bugs that have been missed, but that's not really the point.

But it hasn't been shipped yet? Plenty of developers have shipped out a game they believed to be bug free only for the players to discover hundreds of missed bugs on launch day.

Plenty of developers have shipped out a game they believed to be bug free only for the players to discover hundreds of missed bugs on launch day.

You are mistaken if you believe that developers believe the games they ship are "bug free", and I would bet that many of the bugs you think are "missed" are actually already known on an internal issue tracker somewhere. But those bugs were determined to be shippable. And again, that's not specific to games, but software in general.

Theyā€™ve probably never heard of a Sprint either. For those that donā€™t know they call it that because itā€™s the process where the project lead runs from all the bugs by shoving them all away from everyoneā€™s purview.

I speedrun games as a hobby :P we exploit a lot of bugs developers are unaware of lol. A lot of speed games are older though, so we've also had a long time to find some of the more obscure ones. Bug fixing is an ongoing process in modern games. I dont think it's possible to have considered every single possible situation in a game engine, at least not for an average developer. But you sound more in the now about their internal processes, so you're probably right and I misinterpreted what they meant by that quote.

The bar to beat is not that high. If you don't clip out on the starting cut scene 10% of the times it already beats Skyrim's release.

I never clipped out during the cutscene of Skyrim, I don't think.

It's hard to be totally sure though because I've definitely had the cart go for a tumble.

Do they have any idea how little that narrows it down?

ā€¦and they said Vista was better than XP.. Win 8 was better than 7.. Win 11 is better than Win 10. Iā€™m not sure Microsoft is the best at compare/contrast.

Oh really? The famous and trustworthy reviewer of games 'Microsoft' is saying this? Are they competing with IGN next?

Most bugs don't show themselves right away, once it releases the combined play hours of all the internal testing will be surpassed within the first day. That's why there were 3 (so far) duplication glitches found in TOTK immediately when Nintendo had been looking for that sort of thing all throughout the development of the game.
Let's say 500,000 people download it on launch day and start playing it immediately and each play for an average of 6 hours, that's 3,000,000 hours of combined playtime.
Unless they have an enormous beta community they haven't got anywhere near that amount of testing in on the game.
I'm not saying there's not going to be less bugs than previous games, I do believe them on that because it being a flagship game from Xbox game studios they're going to put a lot of pressure on the team to get it right, but don't take that to mean there's no bugs at all and especially no game-breaking ones.
Keep your expectations tempered and please don't pre-order games.

I appreciate all the informed takes people have in this thread.

Good QA/testing teams can make or break your product, but there's only so many things they can cover in such a massive project

Iā€™m not saying thereā€™s not going to be less bugs than previous games, I do believe them on that because it being a flagship game from Xbox game studios theyā€™re going to put a lot of pressure on the team to get it right, but donā€™t take that to mean thereā€™s no bugs at all and especially no game-breaking ones.

Isn't this almost exactly what Phil Spencer says from those quotes in the article?

Okay so it has one less bug than the others... so still a massive amount of bugs

I'm not great at high-level maths like that, but can infinities be sized different in a way that makes a comparison of quantity valid?

Yes! There's actually two facets to consider:

  1. Infinities can be countable or uncountable:

    • The set of integers is a countable infinity. This is pretty obvious, since you can easily count from one member to the next.

    • The set of irrational numbers is an uncountable infinity. This is because if I give you one member, you can't give me an objectively "next" one. There's infinitely many choices.

      Example: I say what's the next member of the set of irrational numbers after 1.05? Well, there's 1.050001, 1.056, etc.

  2. Can a member of an infinite set be mapped to a corresponding member of another infinite set? And if so, how?

    Spoiler, there are three different ways: surjective, injective, and bijective.

In this situation, the sets are both countable. QA can open bug #1, bug #2, etc. It's also - for now - at least a surjective mapping of Starfield bugs -> Skyrim bugs. Because they're both countable, for each bug in Starfield you can find at least one bug in Skyrim (because it's a known bigger set at the moment).

But we don't know more than that right now.

I love that this comment represents more work into the issue of bugs than Bethesda bothers with.

This is pretty obvious, since you can easily count from one member to the next.

I'd just like to chip in that it isn't necessary for a countably infinite set to have an obvious method of counting. Listing all of the rationals in numerical order isn't possible (what's the smallest fraction above 0?) but it is nevertheless possible to create a bijection with the naturals.

There is the same number of even numbers as there are even and odd numbers.

OK, on one side, 9999 is less than 10000 and it doesn't make it any better. On another side, Microsoft is literally the one selling you the game. What the hell are they going to say? "Oh yeah, BTW, this is an unusable bug ridden fest! Hahaha! Bethesda right?"

Next on the news, ExxonMobil says CO2 emissions are not that bad... Jfc

But did you see the sheer number of bugs on launch in previous Bethesda games? This is like saying "lighters are the least dangerous fire yet." Shit's still gonna burn your house down, yo.

Fallout 4 wasn't bad at launch. A whole LOT better than New Vegas, I'll say that much.

I'll never understand why Bethesda catches these accusations so much harder than other devs that are just as bad. Hell KOTOR 2 was so broken at launch an entire mod needed to be made to finish the game. Not unofficially patch it, literally add so much that we just saw a company have to give out refunds because they couldn't include it in official console releases.

Obsidian has a long history of this, yet they're somehow beloved even though their entire rep is "we make well thought out games, and then don't finish them because we're awful at time management". I mean look at the full list. Neverwinter Nights 2: Buggy at launch, busted, toolset was messed up so nobody came over from part 1. Kotor 2: Buggy at launch, missing a ton of content, never got fixed. Alpha Protocol: demolished for having awful AI. Again, largely unpolished and taken to task for it. Dungeon Siege 3: literally killed the franchise.

It's hard to be a Bethesda fan on the internet, so many developers lean on fans to come in with patches and fix their games and ONLY THEY get heat for it. Heck, V:TM Bloodlines is one of the most popular games of all time, and it's NOTORIOUSLY glitchy without the unofficial patch.

And none of this was ever a problem whatsoever until Bethesda rescued Fallout.

I half wonder if people remember that Van Buren was canceled, and the last canonical Fallout in production was the sequel to the Slipknot soundtrack having bawls guarana shilling dumpster fire that was Brotherhood of Steel.

So we are still going to have a way above average number of bugs, just not the typical Bethesda amount šŸ¤·.

Sooo slightly less crammed with them?

I mean i get it. They make super open world games that are very free form. Its got to be near impossible to make a bug free experience. As long as they still allow missing, they can get away with a lot.

But fallout 76 was a mistake. It will be a long week before i forget that.

I hate that ā€œNot as many bugs at launch as the rest of our games!ā€ is the standard we measure AAA, high budget games by

Sounds like an Onion headline.

Fewer than infinity is still infinity. That being said, the Starfield deep dive from the other day made the game look amazing. I hope it's good.

Bethesda has really gone downhill since the acquisition. If it's not loaded with bugs, exploits, and glitches, is it even a Bethesda game anymore?

In all seriousness zenimax's studios have struggled to release compelling titles since the aquisition, i truly hope the ABK deal is 100% dead before we get even worse games...

Sounds like "fellow kids" style of marketing to try to drive preorders.

Patient gaming is the way.

Its cute that anyone would think this meant anything to anyone familiar with Bethesda games.

Is it just me or does ist sound like Trump?

"Nobody knows games better than me, believe me. Starfield, my incredible creation, will have fewer bugs than any game in history. I guarantee it, folks!"

Ha! Nice try to get us to preorder, Todd Howard!!

That could be true and it could still ship with a metric shit load of bugs. Donā€™t they realize how high the bar is set? lol

I consider Bethesda to be among my favorite game devs and even I know that this is cap šŸ§¢šŸ§¢šŸ§¢šŸ§¢šŸ§¢šŸ§¢šŸ§¢šŸ§¢

The fewest bugs that their QA team has found, but everyone knows the real QA testing starts on release day.

I am the most handsome man with the fewest flaws, says me.

I have been working for 7 years on a 2D game that I has features they have announced. I don't know whether to feel happy for them to make the game of my dreams or disappointed for having to rethink my project

I mean Starfield took a lot from NMS, which took a lot from other craft-likes and space games. If your game has enough character and differents (ex. Being 2D like you said) it shouldn't matter.

Thank you for your support! , that's true , 2D is such a difference already, the combat is bullet hell type which definitely changes the FPS