Good news for The Elder Scrolls 6: Bethesda tried a new testing process with Starfield and Todd Howard says it worked so well that it's the new standard

gamesradar.com:

Starfield was extensively playtested by Bethesda devs often working from home, and Todd Howard says this approach worked so well that the studio's going to apply the method to its future games, with the studio's next confirmed, albeit far-off project obviously being The Elder Scrolls 6.

Speaking with Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price in a recent interview, Howard reveals that a version of Starfield that was "basically done" was shared with the team in late 2022, with the general message being, "this should be the game you're playing over the holiday." This kicked off a wave of team-wide playtesting, and Howard reckons that, on top of the obvious benefits of having a huge chunk of time dedicated to polish, the work-from-home environment added a special little something.

Price asks if this style of take-home QA is normal for Bethesda, and Howard says that it isn't, but "that will be now." 

"I think it was sort of a pandemic thing too, where people were at home, so how do we get builds at home?" Howard says. "But even if you're working at home you're usually on your PC. We knew given the scale of the game that's where we wanted to be, so we made it a goal for this project to have that much time to be playing it and polishing it. 

"The 'go home' part I think is very interesting," he continues. "The things you notice. Even if you're working from home, you're on a PC, you're on a dev kit. When you say 'I'm gonna put it on your retail Xbox,' you're in your usual environment, you're on your sofa, your speaker setup is a certain way, you just came off playing Ratchet & Clank or Spider-Man or whatever. You're instantly comparing to the last thing you were playing, and the way you see even your own game changes. 

"There's some delta