Microsoft Game Studios head Matt Booty has said Starfield, at present, has fewer bugs than any other Bethesda game at l…
  • magnetosphere @beehaw.orgEnglish
    15·
    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!”

    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      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??

      • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        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.

        • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          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
            1·
            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.

            • saucyloggins@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              They’ve probably never heard of a Sprint either. For those that don’t know they call it that because it’s the process where the project lead runs from all the bugs by shoving them all away from everyone’s purview.

            • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              1·
              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.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      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.

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    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
      1·
      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?

  • Klinkertinlegs@beehaw.orgEnglish
    8·
    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.

    • e l f @lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Idk why but this comment obliterated me. Thank you lol…

      Windows ME was my first OS. Never again.

  • P1r4nha@feddit.deEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    Oh really? The famous and trustworthy reviewer of games ‘Microsoft’ is saying this? Are they competing with IGN next?

  • bcoffy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    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

  • GaryPonderosa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    I’m not great at high-level maths like that, but can infinities be sized different in a way that makes a comparison of quantity valid?

    • MikeHfuhruhurr@beehaw.orgEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      Yes! There’s actually two facets to consider:

      1. Infinities can be countable or uncountable:

        • The set of integers is a countable infinity. This is pretty obvious, since you can easily count from one member to the next.

        • The set of irrational numbers is an uncountable infinity. This is because if I give you one member, you can’t give me an objectively “next” one. There’s infinitely many choices.

          Example: I say what’s the next member of the set of irrational numbers after 1.05? Well, there’s 1.050001, 1.056, etc.

      2. Can a member of an infinite set be mapped to a corresponding member of another infinite set? And if so, how?

        Spoiler, there are three different ways: surjective, injective, and bijective.

      In this situation, the sets are both countable. QA can open bug #1, bug #2, etc. It’s also - for now - at least a surjective mapping of Starfield bugs -> Skyrim bugs. Because they’re both countable, for each bug in Starfield you can find at least one bug in Skyrim (because it’s a known bigger set at the moment).

      But we don’t know more than that right now.

      • Malgas@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        This is pretty obvious, since you can easily count from one member to the next.

        I’d just like to chip in that it isn’t necessary for a countably infinite set to have an obvious method of counting. Listing all of the rationals in numerical order isn’t possible (what’s the smallest fraction above 0?) but it is nevertheless possible to create a bijection with the naturals.

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    But did you see the sheer number of bugs on launch in previous Bethesda games? This is like saying “lighters are the least dangerous fire yet.” Shit’s still gonna burn your house down, yo.

    • dreadedchalupacabra@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Fallout 4 wasn’t bad at launch. A whole LOT better than New Vegas, I’ll say that much.

      I’ll never understand why Bethesda catches these accusations so much harder than other devs that are just as bad. Hell KOTOR 2 was so broken at launch an entire mod needed to be made to finish the game. Not unofficially patch it, literally add so much that we just saw a company have to give out refunds because they couldn’t include it in official console releases.

      Obsidian has a long history of this, yet they’re somehow beloved even though their entire rep is “we make well thought out games, and then don’t finish them because we’re awful at time management”. I mean look at the full list. Neverwinter Nights 2: Buggy at launch, busted, toolset was messed up so nobody came over from part 1. Kotor 2: Buggy at launch, missing a ton of content, never got fixed. Alpha Protocol: demolished for having awful AI. Again, largely unpolished and taken to task for it. Dungeon Siege 3: literally killed the franchise.

      It’s hard to be a Bethesda fan on the internet, so many developers lean on fans to come in with patches and fix their games and ONLY THEY get heat for it. Heck, V:TM Bloodlines is one of the most popular games of all time, and it’s NOTORIOUSLY glitchy without the unofficial patch.

      And none of this was ever a problem whatsoever until Bethesda rescued Fallout.

      I half wonder if people remember that Van Buren was canceled, and the last canonical Fallout in production was the sequel to the Slipknot soundtrack having bawls guarana shilling dumpster fire that was Brotherhood of Steel.