I'll believe in Bethesda actually squashing bugs when I fucking see it in action.
This
is the company that sold us the same game, like ten times, with the same bugs, many years after the community themselves made patches to unfuck the hot mess that Bethesda left lying around.
Warning: This is a general information post based on the long-term franchise, and thus, is probably not particularly interesting; skip to the last paragraph if so.
It's funny, but that's categorially false--you can consult
both the UESP wiki
and the change log for
Skyrim Unofficial Patches (and relevant community pages) on Nexus and see literal lists of existing community bug fixes that are obsolete--or even worse, harmful--because the actual game framework beneath them was altered. This is
still happening as late as the AE release, which was patching new content (except at this point, considering
Skyrim hasn't actually had that much content added that we've long since crossed the tipping point where AE is more responsible for breaking unsupported, unofficial mod content than actually fixing anything obvious, though if you didn't play the game modded, you'd never know that).
Don't get me wrong, it's a good line--I'm very familiar with it, considering I played
Morrowind on the original Xbox and was on the ground floor of
Oblivion modding before Nexus was implemented, much less Vortex (which I don't even use anyway personally). But the problem is, it assumes literally millions of people haven't played
Skyrim on home consoles across two hardware generations (never mind the rest of the franchise) prior to the relatively recent development of Xbox One consoles featuring mod support (and even then, the Community Patch efforts aren't actually compatible wholesale with console), then Playstation supporting it, than not supporting it, and then whatever their policy happens to be is this week.
It's funnier to assume Bethesda has no interest in bug fixing, no doubt, but it's not actually born in reality. This is not the same as "they don't release buggy games" which is relevant to
Starfield; in fact, it actually requires that they do release games with some bugs, otherwise there wouldn't be anything to be done in the first place. And the exacting tracking required in the mod community (and the UESP wiki) is irrefutable evidence of it. Are there still bugs that exist? Absolutely, except at this point, many of them are not things the same average user would actually consider "part" of the original
Skyrim--for example, free DLC home content that comes with improper altitudes, causing it to be "sunken" into the terrain (and for further irony, this "official" free DLC content was an adopted mod itself). Whoops!
As noted, it's entirely possible that
Starfield will still have a plethora of bugs; in fact, if we consider the scope of the game, we can theorize (without any proof, obviously, so not in a scientific way) that considering
Starfield had 250,000 lines of dialogue in October of last year (compared to 111,000 total in
Fallout 4, and some 60,000 in
Skyrim), it will be a game multiple times the size its immediate predecessors, and potentially feature multiple times that many bugs. Not the craziest theory ever presented, but it could turn out incorrect in either direction.
But yes, "LOL Bethesda patching bugs, I'll see it when I believe it," while a good (well, I guess that's a matter of opinion) stinger, isn't actually born in reality. Either it's demonstratably incorrect, or the observer doesn't actually experience the content in the first place, and it's just incorrect through ignorance. The relevant "problem" is more the opposite--Bethesda fixes bugs, which because they open the game to modding (in fact, they know full well that it adds considerable value to the game among their audience, even if a clear minority only engage in the practice), are potentially the cause of unanticipated glitches and new bugs (on the macro level, every time there's a major release update, thereby breaking the Script Extender, itself a mod framework). Bugs on console (without mods, or for that matter on PC without mods) are identified,
sometimes fixed (actually they're very thorough if you consult the changes logged in UESP, but considering they've been doing it for
more than a decade you would think so), but then with the addition of more content, resurfaced in other ways (techncially not the same bug, but as far as the player is concerned, obviously a bug), and thus must be addressed again. And suddenly the last ten years isn't so surprising.
Modding is a wildcard. I literally don't play Bethesda's RPGs without modding them (the
Fallout setting is, forgive me,
so boring and ugly), but even I know that they can't exercise any responsibility in that area; the best we can hope they do is weigh their own content patching (the majority audience) against what it will mean for the modding community (the minority audience, but with much higher enthusiasm). I'm deliberately disabled AE updates because I use a First-Person Perspective mod that was replacing one abandoned years ago, and the creator hasn't actually updated it (who knows if they will; we had the same issue with DAR.dll). How has this effecting Bethesda? Can you name another major developer and studio who
actively communicate with a single mod creator to try and give them warning before a patch hits? Because that's what Bethesda has done for (at least) the last two major
Skyrim updates, with SKSE, because their updates inevitably break it. There's a reason why people in my use case actively disable updates--but that's simultaneously making the decision, "No, I don't want to actually use Bethesda's own bug fixes--produced with their own labor, as a far-profit enterprise--because of
x."
Everyone else? No, they get bug fixes. Though clearly, there are a lot of bugs, otherwise Bethesda wouldn't have this longstanding reputation in the first place. But "Hah, Bethesda fixing bugs? When would they ever?" isn't different than claiming
Cyberpunk 2077 or
The Witcher 3 (two in fact quite buggy games on release, despite the fact that the collective memory has been inclined to give it a pass), and then were just left as they were, and not in fact radically overhauled to the point of being very different experiences for many users afterwards. Considering I waited almost 2 years to play
Cyberpunk 2077, that would be a very different reality to a latecomer like me.
So, that's the actual, potentially useful general information--which is the only thing we can use to extrapolate a
possibly useful prediction of
Starfield based on some evidence (as oppose to a full unuseful prediction based not based evidence). Don't mistake me, I will still mock Hello Games for thinking they could release
No Man's Sky, advertised as a multiplayer video game, without actual multiplayer gameplay involving more than one player, with the apparent reasoning, "Well, this video game is really, really big, maybe no one will realize two players can never actually interact at any point because they don't exist in the same universe, at least until we change this," only to find out 1) actually their game isn't that big and 2) two or more players will immediately find the same space in said universe, and find they don't exist in one another's space. That's not actually a glitch, so much as the software working exactly as intended and the developer simply being caught in a
hilarious (well, in my opinion) and immediately disprovable falsehood. It'd be the equivalent of Bethesda putting
Skyrim to market in 2011, advertising "Oh, and there's VR," and hoping because so few people own VR headsets in the overall audience, no one would notice it wasn't actually there.
However, it's not actually that useful to anyone playing
No Man's Sky today, because no one would actually play that Playstation 4/PC release software. At least, I hope they wouldn't, because (even putting aside its own bugs) it kind of sucks and is vastly inferior to the product of multiple years of fixing and content expansion from Hello Games.
ASDX (and others) could mean it satirically (
) or were acting out of ignorance, because in the end of the day, these are video games and not everyone actually plays video games, but this is the actual situation. How buggy will
Starfield be at launch? It's remains hard to say, because we've seen evidence of entirely new gameplay interfaces being implemented (for example, interplanetary travel) alongside conventional ones (first-person combat); that is prime real estate for an entirely new category of fixes. As I noted, this is far and away a "bigger" game than the last three
Elder Scrolls and last three
Fallout titles combined (maybe not
Daggerfall); there is a lot of room for bugs potentially.
Bethesda never fixes bugs? No, not today anymore than "
No Man's Sky has no multiplayer, and
Final Fantasy XIV is unplayable trash!" They have a long, painful history of fixing bugs, fixing fixes of bugs, and fixing fixes of fixes of bugs, and being ignorant of it doesn't actually change that. If a player isn't aware of that, playing
Skyrim on console (where bugs still
do exist, and even if they didn't, Youtubers would be finding new ones by generating tens of thousands of wheels of cheese and raining them from the sky), it's just because they don't know how buggy the games used to be by comparison (which I suppose is complimentary of Bethesda's ability to fix bugs, and critical of their ability to release a game without said bugs in the first place). Will
Starfield buckle that trend? Very hard to say.
EDIT: Also, how SV handles italics and emoji are still the bane of my existence.
www.polygon.com
