I kind of wish that games would have a way to "auto-profile" various settings. Like, take a sample of potentially problematic in-game scenes, toggle settings one at a time, spend an hour or something running through rendering them while the player does something else, and indicate their peak FPS impact on your particular system.

Games do often have a mechanism to try ramping down through quality presets until they hit one that hits a pre-chosen FPS target and recommends that preset, but that doesn't try flipping all the switches. On the dev side, that should be a small amount of effort to add above-and-beyond "try all the presets".

Another benefit is that if you use mods, that would adapt to it. If you, say, use a mod that converts a lot of lights from being non-shadow-casting to be shadow-casting, a popular change to make in earlier Bethesda games, that would take that into account in showing performance impact of, say, a change in the shadow quality setting, whereas a preset set of decisions would not.

I'm saying that by definition, if a game selling itself as a massive RPG is bug free, it cannot possibly be ambitious enough.

True complexity and genuine emergent behavior literally guarantee that some portion of that behavior is odd and "broken". If you always know what's going to happen in a game this scale, your systems are too simple and the scale is pointless.

Edit: also lol at the claim that you've played anything of comparable scope without bugs. The literal single 3D RPG of comparable scope to Skyrim in the decade since it was released is Elden Ring, which shockingly, also has bugs. There's a reason people are still buying and playing a massively dated game without QoL mods on switch for $30 on sale, and it's because nobody else has even tried to make anything at the same scale.

I get what he's getting at. Systemic games tend to have a crapton of edge cases that, statistically and combined with something open-world, will have a higher density of bugs.

I'd still argue that Bethesda is extremely gung-ho about shipping those products utterly broken and not respecting the minima of quality they are beholden to. Those are the games they wish to make and theirs is the burden of making sure they function properly. It comes with the territory of huge sales they each enjoy. There is a sliding scale between utterly broken and more buggy than average. They lean toward the former on release day, and that's not okay.

I would also make the point that while it's true consumers are a little too uninformed, reviewers absolutely are taking the piss when it comes to pointing out and properly tanking reviews on account of technical issues. It seems that even the most broken, egregious technical problems results at most in a 10 or 20% docking of the final score.