Starfield Studio Prioritizes Player Freedom Over Making a “Less Buggy, Less Risky Game,” Says Bethesda’s Pete Hines

Bethesda’s Todd Howard has discussed the benefits of Starfield being an Xbox console exclusive.

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 said that game bugs are inevitable and they ultimately allow the studio to lean into player freedom. 

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

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.

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".

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

Planetary exploration has been the subject of much debate among Starfield fans in the lead-up to the game’s launch and early access period this Friday. Most want to be able to explore the entirety of all 1,000 planets, walking in a straight line around their circumferences, but some would prefer it if that weren’t the case.

Starfield is just days away from launch and ahead of that the Bethesda RPG has seen several leaks. Copies of the game are currently in the hands of select reviewers and even some players who obtained it illegally, before sharing a plethora of screenshots and gameplay videos online. One such clip that's now causing concern for fans about Starfield's scope was first leaked on a Chinese forum, over the weekend, which suggested that a player could run non-stop in one direction for 40 minutes, before being met with a ‘Boundary Reached' message. The videos have since been removed, though players are now questioning the legitimacy of developer Bethesda's claims.

Bethesda’s ambitious space-exploration RPG Starfield is right around the corner, and it’s now been explained why the title features an unvoiced protagonist, despite having over 200,000 lines of voiced dialogue.

Bethesda Game Studios’ titles have a long and stories tradition of being heaven for the modding community, and titles put out by the studio has enjoyed incredibly long lives as a result of what the community has created using their modding tools. Unsurprisingly, Starfield looks set to continue that tradition.

How long we spend in video games is dependent on several factors. First, the type of game it is. Second, how long the game’s story is, should it have a campaign mode. Third, if a title has a long gameplay loop, you can keep diving into it endlessly, such as with several FPS franchises. Finally, how big the world or universe of the game is, which is always determined by the developers. In the case of Starfield, Bethesda has promised a massive universe for gamers to dive into and seek out whatever they want. One person who has felt this “experience” for many hours is Pete Hines.