Microsoft Game Studios head Matt Booty has said Starfield, at present, has fewer bugs than any other Bethesda game at l…
  • magnetosphere @beehaw.orgEnglish
    14·
    2 years ago

    That’s one of the least reassuring statements I’ve ever seen a company make about their own product. They’re basically saying “it sucks less than the other stuff we’ve crapped out!”

    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      Yeah how can they say it has the “fewest bugs any Bethesda game has shipped with” when the game hasn’t shipped yet??

      • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Yeah how can they say it has the “fewest bugs any Bethesda game has shipped with” when the game hasn’t shipped yet??

        Issue tracking has been a part of software development since the beginning. They know and have always known roughly how many bugs they have shipped games with. Just like any company that releases a product knows roughly how many bugs they are shipping with. I pretty much guarantee you that any software that has ever been released has had a huge backlog of bugs of varying levels of importance sitting on some form of backlog.

        So, it’s pretty straightforward for them to know how this game is comparing against their previous releases. Not to say that there won’t be plenty of bugs that have been missed, but that’s not really the point.

        • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          But it hasn’t been shipped yet? Plenty of developers have shipped out a game they believed to be bug free only for the players to discover hundreds of missed bugs on launch day.

          • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Plenty of developers have shipped out a game they believed to be bug free only for the players to discover hundreds of missed bugs on launch day.

            You are mistaken if you believe that developers believe the games they ship are “bug free”, and I would bet that many of the bugs you think are “missed” are actually already known on an internal issue tracker somewhere. But those bugs were determined to be shippable. And again, that’s not specific to games, but software in general.

            • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              I speedrun games as a hobby :P we exploit a lot of bugs developers are unaware of lol. A lot of speed games are older though, so we’ve also had a long time to find some of the more obscure ones. Bug fixing is an ongoing process in modern games. I dont think it’s possible to have considered every single possible situation in a game engine, at least not for an average developer. But you sound more in the now about their internal processes, so you’re probably right and I misinterpreted what they meant by that quote.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      The bar to beat is not that high. If you don’t clip out on the starting cut scene 10% of the times it already beats Skyrim’s release.

      • ursakhiin@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I never clipped out during the cutscene of Skyrim, I don’t think.

        It’s hard to be totally sure though because I’ve definitely had the cart go for a tumble.

        • TinyPanda@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          If you play the game without capping at 60fps the cart goes tumbling down the mountain because bethesda are incompetent…

  • P1r4nha@feddit.deEnglish
    8·
    2 years ago

    Oh really? The famous and trustworthy reviewer of games ‘Microsoft’ is saying this? Are they competing with IGN next?

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    Most bugs don’t show themselves right away, once it releases the combined play hours of all the internal testing will be surpassed within the first day. That’s why there were 3 (so far) duplication glitches found in TOTK immediately when Nintendo had been looking for that sort of thing all throughout the development of the game.
    Let’s say 500,000 people download it on launch day and start playing it immediately and each play for an average of 6 hours, that’s 3,000,000 hours of combined playtime.
    Unless they have an enormous beta community they haven’t got anywhere near that amount of testing in on the game.
    I’m not saying there’s not going to be less bugs than previous games, I do believe them on that because it being a flagship game from Xbox game studios they’re going to put a lot of pressure on the team to get it right, but don’t take that to mean there’s no bugs at all and especially no game-breaking ones.
    Keep your expectations tempered and please don’t pre-order games.

    • psilves1@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I appreciate all the informed takes people have in this thread.

      Good QA/testing teams can make or break your product, but there’s only so many things they can cover in such a massive project

    • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I’m not saying there’s not going to be less bugs than previous games, I do believe them on that because it being a flagship game from Xbox game studios they’re going to put a lot of pressure on the team to get it right, but don’t take that to mean there’s no bugs at all and especially no game-breaking ones.

      Isn’t this almost exactly what Phil Spencer says from those quotes in the article?

  • Klinkertinlegs@beehaw.orgEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    …and they said Vista was better than XP… Win 8 was better than 7… Win 11 is better than Win 10. I’m not sure Microsoft is the best at compare/contrast.

  • GaryPonderosa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    I’m not great at high-level maths like that, but can infinities be sized different in a way that makes a comparison of quantity valid?

    • MikeHfuhruhurr@beehaw.orgEnglish
      17·
      2 years ago

      Yes! There’s actually two facets to consider:

      1. Infinities can be countable or uncountable:

        • The set of integers is a countable infinity. This is pretty obvious, since you can easily count from one member to the next.

        • The set of irrational numbers is an uncountable infinity. This is because if I give you one member, you can’t give me an objectively “next” one. There’s infinitely many choices.

          Example: I say what’s the next member of the set of irrational numbers after 1.05? Well, there’s 1.050001, 1.056, etc.

      2. Can a member of an infinite set be mapped to a corresponding member of another infinite set? And if so, how?

        Spoiler, there are three different ways: surjective, injective, and bijective.

      In this situation, the sets are both countable. QA can open bug #1, bug #2, etc. It’s also - for now - at least a surjective mapping of Starfield bugs -> Skyrim bugs. Because they’re both countable, for each bug in Starfield you can find at least one bug in Skyrim (because it’s a known bigger set at the moment).

      But we don’t know more than that right now.

      • Malgas@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        This is pretty obvious, since you can easily count from one member to the next.

        I’d just like to chip in that it isn’t necessary for a countably infinite set to have an obvious method of counting. Listing all of the rationals in numerical order isn’t possible (what’s the smallest fraction above 0?) but it is nevertheless possible to create a bijection with the naturals.