Bethesda lead shrugs off Starfield bugs: “Of course there are bugs, but does it take away from your experience?"

«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.

Bethesda's head of publishing, Pete Hines, has said that game bugs are inevitable and they ultimately allow the studio to lean into player freedom. 

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.

One Starfield bug was apparently so much fun that Bethesda's studio head asked the game's developers not to fix it.

Pete Hines, publishing head at Bethesda Softworks, has stated that the company has no plans to give up on Redfall, and that the game will become good down the line with updates bringing in improvements. The company hopes to raise the quality of the game to the same extent as it has other titles like The Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76.

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.

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.

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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When it comes to the gaming space, there are nowadays very few titles that you can point at and go, “Oh, that’s something totally different.” Or something that’ll make you go, “I haven’t played anything like that before!” Part of the reason for that is simply that video games have existed for a long time, and thus, developers/publishers have had the ability to make numerous kinds of titles. The other reason is that repetition and familiarity are something that those same companies prefer to employ versus making unique titles. However, Hi-Fi Rush from Tango Gameworks and Bethesda was a change of pace that the gaming industry needed.

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

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