Bethesda Exec Defends Starfield's Bugs: 'We Embrace Chaos'

Starfield players have already made some incredibly useful mods, like a fix for the frustrating inventory system or the addition of DLSS support, but they've also added some very silly things like hairy chests, colourful juice boxes, and the lasagne loving cat Garfield.

Starfield players are a creative bunch, and when they're not filling spaceships full of potatoes or building New Atlantis in Lego, they're using the robust character creator to recreate a bunch of famous faces.

Starfield players have found a cheeky, sneaky method of getting a killer spacesuit very early on in the game.

«We could make a safer, less buggy, less risky game if we wanted to» harrumphed Pete Hines last week, talking about Starfield while claiming Bethesda's reputation for buggy games is undeserved. But, you see, that reputation is deserved and that's why we love them. A wise friend once observed to me that everyone talks about Skyrim in terms of grand adventure and epic storytelling, whereas for him it was a game about fly-tipping cows down mountains and watching the physics scramble to cope.

Not one of Starfield's 1,000 planets contains a labrador retriever. Why? Because Bethesda killed them all off.

Bethesda‘s head of publishing Pete Hines says the company will make Redfall “a good game”, despite an underwhelming reception at launch.

Bethesda Game Studios’ titles have always had a reputation for being technically rough, buggy games, and though Starfield is very clearly the most polished a BGS game has been at launch in a long, long time, it still has its fair share of technical hiccups.

Bethesda Softworks publishing head Pete Hines has reassured players that Arkane isn't giving up on Redfall, despite its lukewarm reception on launch earlier this year. In fact, he's confident it will be a good game people want to play on Game Pass ten years from now.

With Starfield's long-awaited launch upon us, Bethesda has been doing the media rounds to chat about the upcoming RPG. The studio has released a few buggy games in its history, so a question was eventually raised about the bug in the room – a timely subject with Starfield already releasing via pre-order early access. 

A quick heads-up for those you hopping aboard the Starfield interstellar express today: there is a non-zero possibility that one of the game's elevators has a shark in it. That's according to Bethesda's head of publishing Pete Hines, who encountered the displaced piscine trouble-maker while playing the game before release. He's "almost positive" the shark isn't there any more - and just like that, my understanding of Starfield has been transformed. This isn't a 150 hour RPG treadmill of resource extraction, artefact investigation and base-building, wherein you give spaceship tours and put +5% on your accuracy, or what-have-you. It's an extremely slowburn horror game, with every innocent elevator potentially housing a Great White jumpscare. All of which, Hines feels, is true to how Bethesda "embraces chaos" in their games, though he does feel the company's popular association with jank and bugs isn't "particularly fair".

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The Elder Scrolls 6 is seemingly in active development, right as Starfield launches.