Microsoft Game Studios head Matt Booty has said Starfield, at present, has fewer bugs than any other Bethesda game at l…
  • Chainweasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • psilves1@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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

    • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

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

    • LadyAutumnEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

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

      • Kaldo@beehaw.orgEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        And the devs are probably in bugfixing/last minute polish phase right now since the game is out in a few months, it’s way too early to tell.

      • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • LadyAutumnEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
            8·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • LadyAutumnEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                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 general summary of how “bugs” work in software development is simple at a high level.

                1. Someone reports the bug (developer, qa, player, user, etc)
                2. Someone prioritizes the bug
                3. Lower priority issues are put on a backlog to potentially be worked on later
                4. Higher priority issues get fixed (most of the time)

                The product releases when an acceptable level of bugs from steps 3 and 4 are reached, and “acceptable” never means zero or even close to it.

                So, the developers have a pretty good idea of how many bugs there are, in addition to the more general sentiment that the people testing have about the stability of the game.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • ursakhiin@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • ram@lemmy.caEnglish
    20·
    1 year ago

    Let’s not trip over these bars we’re setting here.

  • CoskiiEnglish
    17·
    1 year ago

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

  • magnetosphere @beehaw.orgEnglish
    17·
    1 year ago

    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!”

  • bcoffy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    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

        • araly@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I hope that can be Bethesda improving, would be really nice. but at the same time, having less bugs when you’re knovn to have many many bugs shouldn’t be too hard an improvement

  • daguito81@beehaw.orgEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    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

  • Klinkertinlegs@beehaw.orgEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    …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.

  • WraithGear@beehaw.orgEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    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.