Even before release, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty was confident Starfield would be the least buggy Bethesda game at launch. That proved to be the case, with most reviewers (including our own Francesco) praising it as the most polished Bethesda game released in recent years.
Speaking on the latest episode of the AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook podcast hosted by Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price, Starfield Game Director Todd Howard said that Bethesda ended up in a pretty good place at launch with both bugs and performance (though he acknowledges it’s not perfect and will be improved with updates) thanks to the whole team testing it since the last holiday when they were allowed to play the game at home.
One of our goals last holiday was that everybody went home for the holiday break and Starfield was basically done. There were bugs, but we said ‘Here’s the full game, you can play it on your. We flighted it on the retail Xbox; you can play it at home on your Xbox and your PC and this should be the game you’re playing over the holiday. So we, the whole team, tested the game really all year, just playing it all the time, tweaking it, fixing it. I don’t want to say how many bugs that our games create. We had a lot of QA help.
It does help to understand what kind of bugs your game can create and then see patterns, using systems to go through the data. We do use some automated systems that run through every space in the game just to look for stuff and then get a report ‘Here’s where it was slow, here’s where it crashed, here’s where something else went wrong’ so that we can focus on more of the systemic gameplay. ‘Here’s 10 ways to break this quest’.
We’re really happy with where we landed on this release. Given the scale of Starfield, I think the team just did an amazing job. It’s not perfect by any means, there are things that we’re obviously fixing and going to continue to fix, but given the scale of it where we ended up both on bugs that would block you from playing and performance was obviously a big one for us, particularly on the consoles, we ended up in a pretty good place.
Howard also stressed once again that Starfield was structured in a way to be easily updated and expanded over time in the coming years. Player patterns have shown Bethesda games to have really long legs and the developers want to be ready for that.
The next big update will add several features to Starfield, including brightness and contrast controls, an HDR calibration menu, a Field of View slider, native NVIDIA DLSS and 32:9 Ultrawide monitor support on PC, and an eat button for food.
