Former Bethesda designer Bruce Nesmith left Bethesda midway through development of Starfield, and he was as surprised as we were when the massive space RPG launched in such good shape. Recently, Bruce Nesmith was interviewed by MinnMax and was asked why "Starry Sky" surprised him. He said: "People at B Club may not like what I say: it's because of the stability and sophistication of "Starry Sky"."
"Betweeners has a history of releasing games that are riddled with bugs, and deservedly so. We always talk about the fact that we bite off more than we can chew, and our fans actually like that our games are a little weird. But we give them a lot, and we give them a whole world to explore in exchange for a little bit of weirdness."
"When I started playing Starfield, it felt silky smooth from the get-go, and it was like, 'Wow guys, they're going to have to take some back,' and of course they didn't. Because players remember nothing and forgive nothing."
Before the release of "Starry Sky", Microsoft executives said that the game would be the game with the fewest bugs in Bethesda's history. To the surprise of anyone who's played The Elder Scrolls 5 or Fallout 4, this is actually true, and Starfield only has some minor performance and technical issues, as well as a few of the usual "quirks" that Nesmith mentioned, but no major gameplay-breaking issues.
Nesmith asserts that a perfect game isn't going to get perfect reviews anyway, so you might as well take the lesson and make a game as ambitious as you want it to be. He said: "You can make a game with zero defects, but it doesn't exist and they will still complain. But the game can also be praised for being relatively bug-free at launch, and many people give Bethesda high marks for this."