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Ice is going to win this bet methinks. FF16 is sitting on an 88, the same score that Fallout 4 got, Bethesda's lowest reviewed singleplayer RPG ever. Fallout 4 was rushed out with just 4 years of development, only 2.5 years of which was full development (the full size dev team working on the game), full development began in mid 2013, with release in November 2015. If it hadn't have been rushed out, if Bethesda had instead delayed it into 2016, the game likely would have reviewed 90+ and quite possibly would have taken GOTY from Overwatch and Uncharted 4, but instead they released it before it was ready in 2015 and lost GOTY to Witcher 3 as a result. By comparison, Starfield began active development in late 2015 according to Bethesda, after Fallout 4 released, with full development beginning in late 2018 after Fallout 76 released. That means more than 7.5 years of total development time on Starfield, and nearly 5 years of development with the full size dev team.

On top of that, the size of the dev team increased substantially. Fallout 4 was made by a core dev team of around 120 developers, with some assistance by about 30 developers from Behaviour Interactive (now famous for being the developer of popular multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight). By comparison, Starfield's core dev team is believed to be somewhere between 200-250 people. We also know they have been assisted by other Zenimax studios throughout development, including id Software, who worked on implenting their own motion blur solution from the idTech 7 engine into Starfield's Creation Engine 2.0. An ex-Bethesda developer has stated that the overall number of devs who have worked on Starfield (core team plus assistance devs) is around 500 people, substantially more than the 150 or so who made Fallout 4.

If you take the increased number of developers, and the increased number of years spent in development, Starfield has more than 6x as many man hours that went into it's development than Fallout 4 had. 

Lastly, we have a much larger QA team on Starfield. Bethesda has stated that Zenimax's entire 100+ person QA team at the time (2015) worked on stomping bugs in Fallout 4. In spite of that, the game still launched fairly buggy (though less buggy than previous Bethesda games on launch), because they rushed it too early in order to make Holiday 2015. With Starfield, not only is the full Zenimax QA team (which is a bigger team now than it was in 2015) working to stomp out bugs in Starfield leading up to launch, but it has been stated that the Xbox QA team is working to stomp out bugs too, so that is about another 90 people on the Xbox QA team, in addition to the 100+ from Zenimax's QA team. They have also been stomping out bugs for months longer than any past Bethesda game, supposedly Starfield was already content complete before the first delay from Holiday 2022-Spring 2023, so they'll basically have been polishing the game's graphics and stomping bugs for about 10-11 months when the game launches in September.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 05 July 2023