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How big is Starfield? ‘Irresponsibly large,’ says Bethesda exec
(www.polygon.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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It's not an RPG and it still has plenty of bugs (and Bethesda's are super exaggerated because modders have made big lists trying to clean up every tiny detail because they can).
TOTK is a good game, over a decade later, and the physics are genuinely innovative. But there's all kinds of jank and unpredictability with all the new building stuff. They just lean into it and let you see it as part of the fun.
It's also a lot more self contained. Every enemy and chest is hand placed with no variation. There aren't random wandering patrols, there aren't the kind of actually interactive quest lines, there aren't big skill trees that change how your character moves and fights, and the number of enemies (and NPCs in "populated" areas) encountered is very carefully limited to stay within their constraints. It's good for what it is, but it doesn't seek to provide the living world experience Bethesda (and less expansive RPGs) does. TOTK will probably be one of a small handful of open world games to hold up against time for what it does well, but there's a reason Skyrim does, too, and it's because there's still nothing out there comparable in scope.
Imagine if TOTK was truly immersive with an adaptive world based on more than milestones. I wouldnt have run around 3/4th of the time being the only person that knew where Zelda really was, lol. I'd love it and would play the crap out of it (more than I already do every Zelda game), but Zelda games have never been anything like a elder scrolls or fallout type open world.
I agree that Bethesda needs to step up their QA game, but at the same time I also understand that sometimes weird stuff happens as consequence and isn't something I'd expect a QA team to test for. Hopefully Starfield finds the right middle ground of a huge, adaptive open world and acceptable levels of QA, that they really have not hit in the past. Also hoping they release bug fixes and patches to fix the edge cases as they're discovered... Which is another thing Bethesda has kind of sucked at in the past
I've really enjoyed what I played of ToTK (and think it's a big step up from BOTW), but it's still a pretty carefully limited scope even if it has a big map and the physics it does support are great and interesting. It's not trying to be a Bethesda game, and it's great at what it does.
I'm not saying Bethesda is perfect (and Fallout works less for me than Skyrim, even before whatever 76 was), just that there's a certain scale/complexity where it can no longer be comprehensive. I promise you they invest substantially in QA and testing, but unless they just call the first 6 months after launch an open beta for millions of players to find and report bugs, you can't catch everything, let alone in a way that it can be reproduced and diagnosed. There aren't enough testers out there to do it.
There are lots of options for more contained, more polished experiences, and it would be extremely disappointing if a company like Bethesda, who take on scopes no one else does, scaled back far enough to make a flawless experience. All the stuff that would have to be cut out to make testing manageable would take way more from the experience than the bugs do.