The entire gaming world has been waiting in anticipation for Bethesda Game Studios to release Starfield, its first new single-player game since Fallout 4 in 2015, and its first new IP in 25 years. So far, the game looks and sounds hugely ambitious, but gamers have been burned one too many times in recent years, so naturally there’s a lot of wariness around it. Recently, Todd Howard announced that Starfield would be delayed for a second time, however, which is a massive change in tune for a company previously known to release games on time, yet in buggy states.
Where does this new approach stem from? Well, we can probably trace it back to the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 in December 2020.
Triple-A video games, it seems, are more buggy these days than ever. It feels like every other major title is to some extent incomplete at launch — from the recently released The Last of Us Part 1 PC port, to the infamous Cyberpunk 2077. There’s no doubt that games are far more complex and technical this era than ever before; quite often when a developer fixes one problem, they inadvertently break 10 other things. That, combined with crunch culture, digital distribution, and the general ease of post-launch patching has seemingly led many to believe publishers are just plain okay with launching games in a broken state.
There’s an argument to be made that complex games have always been this way, however, and gamers are just far more vocal today about their displeasure. 10 or 20 years ago the industry could launch games in broken states and still get a positive reception from fans and reviewers; World of Warcraft, Red Dead Redemption, Far Cry 2, and Bethesda’s own games, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim all launched with game-breaking bugs, but still received massive financial, critical, and cultural success despite their problems.
Shipping a game in that state just doesn’t fly these days, however. When gamers are displeased, they take to the internet in droves to voice their displeasure, and these complaints can get a lot of traction and attention. To say Cyberpunk 2077 was thoroughly mired in controversy would be a massive understatement. Not because it was a bad game, but because it was a buggy mess for a large percentage of players. Many gamers — especially those on older hardware — weren’t able to experience the game at its fullest potential due to a myriad of technical issues and immersion-breaking glitches.
Unsurprisingly, the game was torn apart on social media and review sites, and despite being a massive financial success for CD Projekt Red, its reputation quickly became one of a terrible game that players should avoid. It became the subject of class-action lawsuits and many outlets started issuing much-needed refunds. It’s estimated that CDPR issued around 30,000 refunds for the game, and while that’s a small number compared to the 13.7 million copies that were sold in its first three weeks, the refunds were widely publicized and further damaged the game’s reputation.
To CDPR’s credit, it continued to work on Cyberpunk over the next couple of years, and it's now finally in a state resembling what was originally promised. It even has a massive expansion on the way. But the whole mess could probably have been avoided had CDPR delayed Cyberpunk’s launch by a year, and released it in a proper state from the beginning.
Bethesda, clearly, has taken note of the Cyberpunk snafu. The open-world RPG developer, recently announced that it's delayed the launch of Starfield for a second time. The studio was never that big on delaying their games, and was arguably something of a trend-setter when it came to releasing their ambitious games in less-than-ideal states. The fact that they’re not doing the same thing again speaks to a larger shift in the industry that’s arguably been brought about by what happened with Cyberpunk.
After a minor delay, Oblivion launched in 2006, and had visual and quest-related bugs everywhere — Fallout 3 released a mere two years later in 2008 and had just as many problems as its predecessor. It was common to experience game crashes and broken questlines that prevented players from progressing. Both games had stellar reviews and sales, however, and a plethora of game of the year awards.
Skyrim took a bit longer to develop, and launched in 2011. Like Fallout 3, it stuck to its original release schedule, and just like with Bethesda’s previous games, it was buggy as hell. Game crashes, texture downgrading, framerate issues and general stability problems were common. But Skyrim still received immense praise and game of the year awards from just about every outlet on the internet.
Next up was Fallout 4 in 2015, a game infamous for being announced and then released a mere six months later. Everybody loved that they didn’t have to wait years after the announcement to get their hands on the next chapter in the Fallout saga, but once again, Bethesda shipped a massively buggy game. Like with Skyrim, framerate issues were a big problem, and unfortunately there were many questlines that simply couldn’t be completed for many players due to various physics-based issues. Similar problems persisted in 2018’s Fallout 76.
Bethesda hasn’t delayed a major release since 2006, and that was by only a few months, yet here in a post-Cyberpunk world they’ve delayed their next RPG epic twice. But after witnessing another prolific RPG developer getting dragged through the mud, who can really blame them? Maybe, just maybe, Bethesda took some lessons from CD Projekt Red and Cyberpunk 2077.
The games we play today are so massive, and so complex, that imperfections are inevitable. But a culture of crunching to meet unrealistic deadlines isn’t the way to get the most out of them. The fact that one of the industry’s historical culprits, Bethesda, is embracing a philosophy of delays rather than crunching to completion, is a sign that maybe publishers are finally turning a corner.
Will Starfield be the most complete, and least buggy game Bethesda has launched to date? We’ll soon find out. But if there are problems, you can be sure that Bethesda will hear about them from the community.