I know that's the narrative we hear often, but release dates don't need to be set in stone a year out. Baldur's Gate 3 has shown that you can create a AAA quality title without the massive bug load.

It's just a shame that such good games are tarnished by buggy releases. You can see what they want to do, but it's just not quite there

@sortius At a certain corporate video game publisher level, release dates definitely have to be set in stone because of the multiple third parties involved in the marketing campaigns. It doesn't mean all video games must have buggy initial releases, but it does at least partly explain the ones that do.

Not all games are the same either. You can't really compare the complexities of a first/third-person real time open world game with a top down RPG game. It is possible that Larian Studios have better software quality practices than Bethesda, but you can't know it just by comparing the release of Baldur's Gate 3 versus Starfield.

I can't say I agree with any of this. AAA companies are the worst offenders when it comes to buggy games at release. I don't buy that the complexity of the game means it must inherently be buggy, that's a cop out when you compare to other indie devs that release FPS games all the time that aren't buggy messes at release.

The poor performance, the bugs, all that detracts from a good game. Indie devs get this, why can't AAA devs?

@sortius Because you keep comparing apples to oranges and wondering why they are different. Sure, both are fruits, why don't they taste the same then?

What do you know about software engineering and specifically video game programming that makes you so sure wildly different games from wildly different publishing structures can actually be compared on performance and bug count at release?