Rockstar Games takes a very long time to develop its games. The best comparison is with the developers of The Last of Us. They released the first game in 2013 and the second installment in 2020. Between those, they released four games, of which three were original titles. Rockstar Games, on the other hand, launched Red Dead Redemption in 2018, but there has not been a single new original title since then.

There’s a reason for this too; they believe in setting a new industry standard every time they launch a new title. They did it with GTA San Andreas, GTA 4, Red Dead Redemption, GTA 5, and Red Dead 2. And if an ex-developer is to be believed, all of them were riddled with bugs before launch.

Rockstar Games developers shed light on how they kept their games bug-free.

GTA San Andreas is a very popular game, no doubt. People play it to this day as they cannot get enough of its world. Rockstar Games faced a huge challenge when they decided to step up from GTA 3 and Vice City to San Andreas. It was more than four times larger than GTA 3. It makes sense that they had to put a lot of work into that game to make sure it came out bug-free.

An ex-Rockstar North developer explains that from the very start of 3D GTA games, there were troubles. As Rockstar shifted to RenderWare as their basis for these games. They discovered the engine itself was as new as their own knowledge of it. That’s how the game ended up having a bunch of problems to be fixed by the developers.

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The biggest is the inability to correctly calculate the collision polygons in it. He says that a building with 10,000 polygons has a chance of having just 1000 collision polygons. This was happening with the whole map. They were facing the same problem with GTA 4 too. To fix that, the testers requested a rag doll gun—yes, a literal gun that fired human models and literally every vehicle and object—to make sure collision detection worked on every object at every location.

He goes on to say that San Andreas was larger than any of these games and had around 70,000 bugs as a result. GTA 4 was built on a new Rage engine, and it had double the bugs. As fans might remember, collision detection played a larger part in that game thanks to its realistic damage physics.

It goes to show the amount of creativity it takes for a game tester to come up with ways to find more and more bugs. And the amount of dedication it takes for a developer to make sure those thousands of bugs are actually fixed

Maybe Bethesda Games needs to do something similar.

One developer that often has trouble maintaining high quality with their games is Bethesda Games. They release massive RPGs; they spend a very long time adding very little detail to them. But when it comes to making sure it’s a flawless title, they always fail. There are two supposed reasons for this: too much focus on developing a game and not polishing it, and too much reliance on moderators to fix their games.

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Maybe they should put in some effort and fix their games on their own. It would be a nice thing to do, given the fact that they charge $70 for them. Maybe Starfield would not have dropped in reviews and in player count if they had put some more effort into it.

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