It is safe to assume that there is no game out there that has not launched without any bugs. This is because sometimes bugs are discovered when you have tens of thousands of players playing at once, something which is hard for beta testing to simulate. There are also more eyes on deck and different permutations in actions that could lead to new bugs being discovered.
However Bethesda is hoping that with Fallout 4, the game will have less bugs, or at least have bugs that are more manageable compared to those of Skyrim when it first launched. Speaking to Game Informer, Bethesda’s Todd Howard was quoted as saying that they are hoping that the experience they gained for working on Skyrim’s bugs can be applied to Fallout 4.
According to Howard, “It probably took us a month or two before we really had a handle on it. All of the updates we did on Skyrim, and all of the DLC – once we sorted [the bugs out] we had a different process for how we checked the content out.” Howard adds that bugs that might delete a player’s saved progress is also a top priority.
“For us, [the player’s] saved game is the number one thing. If the game crashes that’s bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as someone’s saved game being hosed. That’s our scenario that we will do anything and everything to avoid.” In any case here’s hoping that Fallout 4 will launch with as little issue as possible. In the meantime the game has been pegged for an official release on the 10th of November later this year.