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.
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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
I'll believe it when I see it. I'm not preordering anything anymore.
Yeah how can they say it has the fewest bugs of any Bethesda game has shipped with when the game hasn't shipped yet??
Yeah how can they say it has the “fewest bugs any Bethesda game has shipped with” when the game hasn’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.
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 dunno though, it's a pretty low bar
Why is it square? Wasn't there always the X in this picture?
That's one of the bugs.
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
Its cute that anyone would think this meant anything to anyone familiar with Bethesda games.
That’s one of the least reassuring statements I’ve ever seen a company make about their own product. They’re basically saying “it sucks less than the other stuff we’ve crapped out!”
I hate that “Not as many bugs at launch as the rest of our games!” is the standard we measure AAA, high budget games by
So we are still going to have a way above average number of bugs, just not the typical Bethesda amount 🤷.
…and they said Vista was better than XP.. Win 8 was better than 7.. Win 11 is better than Win 10. I’m not sure Microsoft is the best at compare/contrast.
Company says it's latest product is the best ever
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 mean allow modding. Cant edit my posts on ios yet…
Do they have any idea how little that narrows it down?
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!"
Knowing Bethesda that doesn't say much.
Bethesda continuing to set the bar so low that even they can clear it!
Okay so it has one less bug than the others... so still a massive amount of bugs
The fewest - so 1 less?
Ha! Nice try to get us to preorder, Todd Howard!!
I don't know that I'd brag about that. :)
Doubt
X to doubt, but I will be pleasantly surprised if it’s true
Sounds like "fellow kids" style of marketing to try to drive preorders.
Patient gaming is the way.
I am the most handsome man with the fewest flaws, says me.
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.
Microsoft also says their OS is good
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:
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Infinities can be countable or uncountable:
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The set of integers is a countable infinity. This is pretty obvious, since you can easily count from one member to the next.
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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.
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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.
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?
That's not saying much, but cool I guess?
Doubt
The fewest bugs that their QA team has found. But everyone knows the real QA testing starts on release day.
Oh really? The famous and trustworthy reviewer of games 'Microsoft' is saying this? Are they competing with IGN next?
Doubt.