MicrosoftandBethesdahave made it clear that armies of QA testers are working away onStarfieldright now. Likely to ensure the uncompromisingly massive RPG is free from bugs and glitches ahead of its September release.
The upcoming epic acts as one of a few major exclusivesXboxhas left in the can for 2023, and I doubtForza Motorsportis set to attract a similar audience. So much is riding on this game, so it makes perfect sense for resources to be put into making sure it doesn’t crash, bug out, or ruin our time with its signature Bethesda jank. I can’t lie though, a part of me is going to miss the flaming disasters these games used to be.
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It feels silly to be begging for a triple-A game to launch broken, or at least with a few quirks a similar game would otherwise iron out in a day one patch. Since the days ofOblivion, games by the studio have attracted a lovable reputation for being functional on a foundational level, but rather busted the second you try and look beneath the hood.
Fallout 3was a gorgeous mess on the right platforms, whileSkyrimearned a deserved reputation for its many bugs and performance problems on release. EvenFallout 4, which brought Bethesda’s brand of RPG into a new generation, wasn’t free of weird issues we’d simply regard as ‘Bethesda being Bethesda.’ It became standard for fans to fix outstanding bugs and issues with mods after release, and we just came to accept that games like this are always going to struggle.
I’ll never forget my first encounter with a giant in Skyrim, an enemy whose wooden club was capable of launching all living things and objects thousands of feet into the air if attacked at a certain angle. It’s hilarious, and must have been such a funny bug to the dev team that it was kept in for us to discover. Woolly mammoths wouldn’t realistically be launched in the air after such an attack, but they were and it quickly became a viral sensation. Those days are sadly over though, with today’s gamers far more fickle and far less patient creatures who will look for reasons to take a company like Xbox to task after failures likeHalo InfiniteandRedfall.
As a consequence, Starfield is probably going to be free of the usual bugs. It certainly won’t be without some of its signature jank and a few hilarious issues throughout its universe, but Bethesda and Xbox are on a mission to prove themselves with this one, and that means a desire to mitigate any and all risk. That, and the busted release ofFallout 76was a warning sign that the bugs and glitches they once relied on for ironic goodwill just won’t fly anymore.
Starfield is still going to have passable gunplay and dead-eyed NPCs staring deep into your soul whenever a conversation takes place, but it seems these usual quirks are aiming to be far less prevalent this time around. Fewer enemies clipping through walls or certain quests now impossible to complete because you dared approach things in the incorrect order.
For most games out there introducing these fixes is an undeniable boon, but for a Bethesda experience it represents a loss of charm, or a neutering of identity we one day considered sacred. I’ll miss it, even if the end result is a game that looks, plays, and ages much better than anything that came before.
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