Classic Bethesda bug sees Starfield crew members riding on the outside of your ship in deep space

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.

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.

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.

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.

"[The Elder Scrolls 6] is in development," Bethesda Softworks vice president Pete Hines said when asked about whether the long-awaited sequel was still in the concept phase. "But it's in early development."

What's the first derelict and/or abandoned (but is it really abandoned???) spaceship you ever visited in a videogame? I'm struggling to pin it down through the growing white noise of early middle age - as with much else in my life, everything blends into a gritty soup of Metroid and DOOM beyond the turn of the millennium - but I suspect it might have been a level from Rebellion's amazing 1999 Giger 'em up Aliens versus Predator, which I now recall only as screenfuls of fangs illuminated by Smartgun fire.

«Boundary reached,» reads an in-game Starfield text box that circulated online over the weekend. «Open the map to explore another region, or return to your ship.»