A game with that much scale and that much variance has bugs. They’re part and parcel of developing at that scale with a world that responds to user actions.
It’s a 100-200 hour game with heavily branching story telling and world states, plus massively varied combat options. Testing enough to be “bug free” isn’t possible. Cleaning up most of the heavy hitters and relying on user reports to catch edge cases is the only way to do it. If you release a “bug free” large scale open world game, there’s no way it’s ambitious enough.
Me and my friends had an horrendous experience, with bugs and issues you couldn’t possibly miss. There was a whole bunch of QoL needed and the fact the immediate follow up patches were fucking huge just shows. Sure it’s a big game, but it was dysfunctional in places and QA is more important in a game where you can invest 100 hours just for a quest to be softlocked in the final act and effectively kill the whole playthrough.
It could have sat in the oven for another year and released in a much more respectable state with more of their intended content. I would recommend anyone the game now (or maybe I’d tell them to wait a bit more while they add more story). It was absolutely released too early. If they didn’t want to pay for testing, they could have dropped more of the game in early access first before officially releasing it.
And I and many others didn’t experience anything of substance really ever. That’s the nature of wide variety in play. It’s literally not possible for QA to test it all. There isn’t enough budget in the world.
It should definitely not have been delayed a year. Ignoring that the first 24 hours after launch provides more testing than a decade of a massive QA budget, it was very obviously ready and the vast majority of people had a great time. (Which is why the hype went immediately through the roof effectively as soon as it launched.)
Of course, if you got lucky you missed bugs but there were still a lot of poorly made systems that bled over from DOS2 that they didn’t bother to update. With the size of the patch notes following release, some having a good experience isn’t really a counter-point.
As I said though, they could have used early access better because it definitely wasn’t ready, it was passable (well ignoring game-breaking bugs a lot of people ran into to). And why would you be opposed to a game being developed a bit longer if it means a better experience for all?