Developing it for PlayStation would assuredly mean a delay, or lots of bugs
16 times the detail
Oh Todd, “irresponsibly large” can mean anything when Bethesda is working on it. I’ll expect a bug ridden mess that has the potential to eventually turn into something great.
I really did not care for Starfield - and still don’t - but I’m open for it. I never got into Fallout’s setting and story. Something similar but hard sci fi might be more interesting? I’ll wait for what streamers show and then check it out on game pass.
This is the only unit of measurement I’ll be accepting going forward
I’m afraid my 2060 won’t enough to run this. I’ll still try anyway
If you’ve got an SSD, and can use some form of DLSS or FSR (provided that Starfield supports these or Intel’s XESS) you’ll probably be able to run it. Especially if you tweak the settings. I think it’s the 1060 / 580 generation’s that’s going to have issues. I finally upgraded from a 1060 to a Radeon 6600 because I was finally encountering games it couldn’t run at medium.
It’ll be fine. I’ll be playing it on a 6600XT and fully expect to tweak settings. That’s part of the fun.
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.
There’s going to be a lot of bugs. There should be a lot of bugs in a game advertised at this scope.
If you don’t have bugs, you don’t have real emergent behavior, and your “huge game” is shallow. Polish the gunplay, the stealth, the basic mechanics that people use every day absolutely, but you can’t conceivably test every inch of a massive world and all of the varied quest lines with all of dozens of combinations of perks, plus weapons and followers people will play with. If we pretend there are 3 archetypes and 3 levels players could be at when entering a given area*, with 5 different base weapons and 5 different mods per weapon, you already have 225 combinations to test that quest at to find every edge case. And testing a quest for a specific combination isn’t one play through. It’s several different ways to approach every potential interaction. A character not being a stealth archetype doesn’t mean that a real player won’t try to approach an encounter with stealth. Also, enemy behavior isn’t (or shouldn’t be) linear and predetermined, so doing the exact same thing should result in different outcomes, and you have to allow for that, too.
You can’t genuinely comprehensively test systems with the complexity a game of the scope Skyrim (and we’re hoping Starfield) has. Even with an unlimited budget it’s just not doable.
*obviously there are way more combinations of skills, but just for illustration.
Are you genuinely saying the buggier a game is the better it is?
That’s kinda weird. I’ve played tons of expansive games that don’t have the amount of bugs a Bethesda game has. Beth games are buggy because they know people will buy it and defend it. They have no incentive to put in working QAing their game when people will write 3 paragraphs on the internet white knighting about it
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.
Yeah, it’s easy to have a bug-free game if everything is hard-scripted to play out exactly in one way. COD SP campaign set pieces are bug-free because literally everything was hand crafted to play out exactly the way it does for every player, in every instance.
They’re not games so much as they’re movie sets, and the player is just the lead actor. Acting simulators.
Totk is a very complex and fairly expansive game and is relatively bug free imho
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.