So Starfield’s still going to be really buggy, right?
Starfield’s getting some extra development time, but will that be enough to avoid a typical Bethesda launch?
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If there’s two things I know to be true in this world, it’s that you can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Gregs, and you can’t launch a Bethesda RPG without some pretty big bugs. That’s just science. But I’ve seen a bit of hopeful speculation thatStarfield’s new release date, September 6, could point to a precedent-breaker. Starfield was meant to be out last year, then pushed to the nebulous first half of 2023. September misses that window by three months, so some optimistic folks have reasoned that perhaps Microsoft’s influence is at work here. With its new deep-pocketed publisher, could Bethesda be polishing Starfield far past the point of its previous games?
Starfield factions: Find a cause to quest forStarfield cities: See the big spaces in spaceStarfield companions: Collect cosmic comradesStarfield traits: Give your hero some historyStarfield ship customization: Make your spaceship special
That’s one interpretation. The other is that Starfield is still in rough shape and needs all the time it can get. That seems like a plausible outcome of Bethesda’s ambition with Starfield: it’s the first game to be made with its new “Creation Engine 2.” It includes companions, outpost building, ship combat and customization, and more than 1,000 planets. That’s a whole lot to pull off well, and it’s not everything Bethesda’s planning.
So the stakes are high, and our first look at a planet during Starfield’sgrand gameplay debutwas pretty drab, and the framerate regularly dipped below a steady 30 fps. It’s also the first RPG Bethesda has delayed since Oblivion in 2006.
Is another year of development since that initial delay likely to result in stable performance at launch? Could the Creation Engine 2 have been built to squash decades-old bugs? Maybe! But a look back at Bethesda’s last 15+ years of games makes me think the pattern is too strong: Starfield’s still going to be a Bethesda game through and through. Would we even recognize it without some bugs?
Fallout 76
Announced:May 30, 2018 |Released:November 14, 2018 |Delayed:No
What went wrong?
The trouble started with the beta in October, which was so broken many playerscouldn’t even get inand spent so much time re-downloading the build that they missed the window entirely. But that’s a beta, and problems are expected. Surely the full launch went more smoothly, right?
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Not really. There were plenty of bugs at launch, like missing quest markers, bad enemy pathfinding, broken animations, AI misfires, and more. Beyond bugs there were lots of basic options missing, like toggles to turn off motion blur or Vsync and the ability to completely remap keyboard controls. Also missing: an FOV slider, a push-to-talk option, and text chat. There wasn’t even a brightness slider! And the game was locked to 63 fps due to framerates being tied to physics speed, though this was finally patched (along with almost everything else listed above) and the fps cap was removed.
You couldn’t carry much loot or store much in your cache, which was frustrating in a game where you spent most of your time collecting scrap. Plus, sharing the world with other players sometimes caused other problems, like when a quest-related ghoul you’d be looking for would be dead when you found him, killed by someone else on the server. Meaning you had to hop to another server until you found a version of the ghoul that was still alive so you could kill him yourself. Fallout 76 was probably the roughest shape a Bethesda game has been in at launch.
Fallout 4
Announced:June 3, 2015 |Released:November 10, 2015 |Delayed:No
What went wrong?
Bethesda pulled off an impressive move with Fallout 4, announcing it just five five months before release. It worked out better for Fallout 4 than the online Fallout 76, but Fallout 4 certainly wasn’t bug-free. In April, five months after launch, modders put out the first version of theUnofficial Fallout 4 patch, but even itcouldn’t solve everything. Bethesda was quick to put out bug-squashing patches of its own, but the bigger conversation around Fallout 4 was about the overall fit and finish of Bethesda’s engine. It looked and felt pretty rickety, with performance issues that players may not tolerate in Starfield in 2023.
Skyrim
Announced:December 11, 2010 |Released:November 11, 2011 |Delayed:No
What went wrong?
Skyrim was the game that broke Bethesda out of “popular RPG” territory and moved the studio into “worldwide event” territory. It was a massive hit. Still, one reason it became such a successful platform for mods was because there were so many things modders could improve. An early one was the UI that was clearly designed for consoles rather than PC.
“We got a review copy of Skyrim the day the game was officially finished, but it’s curiously buggy,” we wrote inour 2011 review. “Among a lot of minor problems such as issues reassigning controls, there’s glitchy character behaviour that can break quests, and AI flipouts that can turn a whole town against you. […] There’s a hell of a lot to patch here.” Ah, more innocent times.
Fallout 3
Announced:July 12, 2004 |Released:October 28, 2008 |Delayed:No
What went wrong?
The first Bethesda RPG to let you throw mini-nukes around introduced us to a new physics glitch: the one where dead bodies spin around with their limbs stretched thin and bent at weird angles. Sometimes it’ll even happen to living NPCs. A separate glitch related to the physics engine occasionally launches a deathclaw or protectron into the sky. If you’ve ever seen a mammoth flying in Skyrim, that’s the same bug persisting.
Via theFallout wiki, here is a short list of circumstances in which Fallout 3 may crash or freeze:
Oblivion
Announced:May 18, 2005 |Released:March 20, 2006 |Delayed:Yes, by four months
What went wrong?
The NetImmerse Engine used on Morrowind evolved into Gamebryo in time for Oblivion, and brought with it bugs that would persist even into Bethesda’s own Creation Engine, which was built on it. The most notable is its hatred of autosaves and quicksaves, which could easily become corrupted.
(In a savage bit of irony, Morrowind would crash if you saved too often or not enough. Due to a bug in the way it sorted data, if you didn’t save for a while sometimes a buffer would overflow, the engine wouldn’t find whatever data it was looking for, and it would crash. Meanwhile, if you kept too many savegames you’d start to get fatal load errors. The way around that was to keep a relatively small number of save files and keep saving over them. While hoping they don’t get corrupted, of course.)
Oblivion launched with plenty of other bugs, including an animation bug so bad players nicknamed it the “Abomb.” It only affected saves once you’d racked up around 200 hours of playtime, though that’s not too hard for the dedicated Oblivion player. Abomb made animated objects slow or freeze, including doors, which then couldn’t be opened. It’s still a problem today, and you’ll need to download amod from 2006to fix it.
There was also the issue of stuttering, which many put down to the size of the game’s open world and its need to load in new assets as you crossed it. And while that’s definitely part of the problem, even on a modern rig you may still experience stuttering in Oblivion. Turns out that Oblivion uses codecs when it’s playing both Bink videos, like its intro, as well as music and background sounds in-game. If you’ve got a codec installed it doesn’t like, it’ll stutter.
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites likeThe WirecutterandTestedbefore joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he’ll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he’s not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it’s really becoming a problem), he’s probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
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