I'm gonna quote an article I read ages ago that really changed my mind on Bethesda when it comes to bugs. And how trying to "polish" their games is actually ruining them.

But what if you’re a gamer who doesn’t care about Bethesda’s staff turnover or work environment? What if you don’t care how the sausage is made and you simply want a tasty, bug-free sausage? It turns out how the sausage is made has great bearing on what you end up eating.

Bethesda’s games allow for absurd levels of player freedom in a huge playground of quests, characters, and systems. You can create your own character, equipment, and, in Fallout 4, town. You can spend hundreds of hours exploring aimlessly. You can join factions and guilds, be good or evil. Many games do these things, but Bethesda’s brilliance is that it places minimal restrictions on how players interact with, or overlap, these systems.

Want to kill some major quest givers, locking yourself out of a ton of content? Sure! Want to skip hours searching for your father in Fallout 3 by stumbling on his hidden location? Why not? Feel like putting so many cabbages into your house in Oblivion that the game barely functions? Knock yourself, and your framerate, out!

Meanwhile, every Assassin’s Creed protagonist will “de-sync” if he kills too many civilians. Solid Snake’s missions are aborted if he leaves the area. You can’t pull out a gun in Mass Effect unless the game decides it is Designated Gun Time.

This isn’t to say these games are bad. They’re quite good, actually. They’re just trying to avoid messy edge cases that make the fiction, the world, the tech, or the gameplay look bad. Such restrictions are like the berms encircling Disneyland, ensuring you don’t see anything less than perfect or see what’s happening backstage.

Bethesda games don’t care. They excel at what I’d call the “minimally-supported edge case.” They let you do what the systems and the world imply you can do. Even if it’s not well supported. Even if it’s going to look bad. Because that freedom is what’s important and special.

“Polish” is all about smoothing these rough edges. There is no cost-effective way of polishing most goofy edge cases. In fact, it’s often harder than building the core system. If you’re focused on making a polished, bug-free game, the smart move is to remove them, or make them impossible to reproduce. Bethesda’s games don’t do this. They often do the absolute minimum needed to make these edge cases work, but they keep them in.

There are smart ways to develop and polish games with huge scope and scale. The most reliable is to make the core design more predictable and repeatable, and less interdependent. Create a set number of formalized game play primitives or mission types, and repeat them over the game with a few mechanical twists and scaling difficulty. Make each “story mission” self-contained and separate them from the “free roaming systems.” Keep friendly “story spaces” from overlapping with combat. Mete out major upgrades on a tight schedule in line with story progression, but have less important or cosmetic upgrades be something you can grind for.

Does this sound like a game you’ve played recently? It isn’t a coincidence. These are some of the most reliable solutions for reducing edge cases and making implementation (and results) as predictable as possible in a large, open-world game. This also is exactly opposite of what makes Bethesda’s games magical. They’re sloppy, sprawling, surprising messes that show the sticky fingerprints of the people who made them. Polish says “no” a lot more than it says “yes,” and you can hear a lot of yes in Bethesda’s games.

Polish says you probably shouldn’t do a quest with a talking dog, because it’s going to look terrible with the lip sync system. Polish says you shouldn’t do a one-off Rube Goldberg trap using hundreds of physics objects in the game’s “creaky engine.” Polish says you probably shouldn’t put a “flying” spell that will kill the player 20 minutes into the game because it will playtest badly.

I simply don’t think it’s feasible to make a Bethesda game that’s polished in the same way other AAA games are. That requires focus and formalization, and Bethesda excels at the opposite. So why try to fix this at all? If you’ve built a studio that works, making games your audience loves, why not slowly grow that success in a truly sustainable way, instead of risking it to keep pace with the rest of the industry? As developers, they’re in an enviable place—making epic games at a human scale.

Of course, none of this means squat when a save bug wipes out hours of progress, or you get locked in an elevator. I’ve been there with Bethesda games myself. These are things I do wish they could fix, and I’m sure they do, too. I can’t even fault the gamers who can’t get past less severe bugs, the lack of polish, or the general jankiness. Who can really blame them for not wanting a gristly sausage when we’ve got all this smooth, delicious gaming foie gras, stuffed full of the blood, sweat and tears of hundreds and hundreds of developers?

Yes, video games, like Soylent Green, are made out of people. Knowing this, and experiencing it from the other side, I really value playing games that still feel like they were made by actual humans; vast, complex, and sloppy games where you can feel the specific personalities, creative passions, and playfulness of the people who made them because these things haven’t been ground out into one uniform standard of quality. As a developer, I love working on games that actually allow every person involved to contribute and own something that feels like unique creative expression, and have it survive to the end of the development cycle.

But as AAA scales to $100 million-plus budgets and four-digit team sizes in search of a smooth, unbreakable surface of polish, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find these things, for players or developers. But I still see it in the quirks and glitches of Bethesda’s edge cases, and I see it in a development team that is small enough that you can still see each expression in a single photo.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/fallout-4-bugs/