According to Matt Booty, head of Microsoft Game Studios, who probably doesn't mind being haunted by his own words, "Starfield" currently has fewer bugs at launch than any Bethesda game to date.

"A great many people in the company are playing [Starfield]," Booty said in a Giant Bomb stream this week (via VGC).

"We're working with Todd and the team to see how many bugs we have, but just by the numbers, if it shipped today, it would ship with the fewest bugs of any Bethesda game.

I love statements like this, Booty is just talking about "numbers" so even if turning the spaceship to the left will erase the C: drive, it may technically be true. But even if this statement is true in spirit and Starfield had a relatively bug-free launch, Booty has set himself up to be quoted every time even one inch of an object passes another object.

The courage to be the person who stated that "Starfield" was not as buggy as other Bethesda games deserves respect. Perhaps he is collecting bug reports to tell Todd Howard and his team.

Speaking of which, has anyone sent Booty the gif still from Starfield's Steam page of the character's left hand completely off the foregrip of the gun?

This statement also makes me wonder: does Bethesda really keep track of the number of known bugs at launch for each game? (I assume Booty is referring to Bethesda Game Studios around "Morrowind" and not Bethesda games in general dating back to the 80s.)

I appreciate the unpredictability of Bethesda's buggy open worlds at launch (remember the Skyrim giant plunging into the stratosphere?

From what we've heard, we'd like to believe it will be at least better than that; Xbox head Phil Spencer was also on the Giant Bomb stream, and since buying Bethesda and delaying Starfield's release date, Microsoft has been working on the game has lent serious QA muscle to the game (though he may be exaggerating just a bit).

"To tell you the truth, when the acquisition was completed, the ship date for this game was much earlier than the actual release date.

"I think Matt [Booty] is saying that we now have every QA person in the entire company playing Starfield and looking at the number of bugs and looking at the quality of where we are now.

If you want to see the full discussion, here's a quote from Giant Bomb at Nite around 2:40:00: Night 3 This RPG, coming out on September 6, apparently has fewer bugs than usual. (It also seems to have fewer bugs than usual.