Bethesda game bugs are somewhat "intentional" as it lends to player freedom, says Pete Hines

«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.

While Bethesda may have hit a slam dunk with Starfield, the same can hardly be said about Arkane Studios’ Redfall. Having launched just a few months prior to Starfield, Redfall was met with a wall of well-warranted critique. Yet, according to Bethesda’s head of publishing, the book hasn’t yet closed on Redfall.

There’s been a bad trend in video games over the last several years that gamers are truly tired of. We’re speaking of developers launching titles that aren’t ready for release and then expecting gamers to play them, buy them, or stay with them despite their “buggy states.” An excellent example of this is Redfall. The game by Arkane Studios, who had an excellent track record before this title, was an unmitigated disaster due to how buggy and boring the game was at launch. The title was dead on arrival, and it’s stayed that way ever since.

Bethesda’s head of publishing, Pete Hines, has affirmed that Arkane’s co-op FPS Redfall won’t be abandoned, and that “we're going to get it to be a good game”. 

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. 

Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout are known for being epic open world RPGs and for being a bit buggy, but these smaller issues in Starfield also allowed the game to be so grand according to one developer.

Never has a Bethesda game been released without at least a few bugs. We all know how it goes… we either cease to play Skyrim because our AI companions won’t stop running into traps, or we embrace the wonderful weirdness and turn it into streaming content. And it’s not just us players who feel the need to cut Bethesda games some slack for their shortcomings.

Bethesda's Senior VP of Global Marketing and Communications, Pete Hines, wants people to skip sleep and stay up in order to play Starfield.

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Bethesda has warned Elder Scrolls fans not to expect a significant update on the next series entry anytime soon.