A former Fallout 4 QA dev has explained why they think that artificial intelligence won’t hold up against human testers in the future, claiming that the potential for humans to be “professionally stupid” will prove to be a difference-maker long-term. The Fallout 4 tester also explained some ways in which they broke the game during development, leading to some awkward emails to former ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman.
Fallout 4 was released in 2015 to critical acclaim. To this day, it remains the latest mainline game in the Fallout series, and has since been re-released on current-gen consoles such as the Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. Despite being over a decade old, the game still enjoys a high player count, especially on PC, where talented modders have greatly contributed to its longevity.
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Fallout 4 QA Dev Explains Why Humans Will Beat AI in Testing
In an interview with GamesRadar+ at GDC 2026, former Bethesda QA tester and Pedalboard Games co-founder Colin McInerney spoke about the importance of human involvement in game development, specifically quality assurance, while sharing stories about his time breaking Fallout 4 for Bethesda. “At one point, I just decided to play hot and cold with the RAM because we were on Xbox One. The Xbox One has 8GB of RAM, so if you get above that, the game’s going to crash. So I brought up a RAM readout and was just like, how can I break this? That thought occurring to me, no one else was doing that. That isn’t a standard testing practice of, ‘How can I leak memory from the game?'”
McInerney continued, “What I ended up doing was: I went into the console and gave myself a billion experience, which put me at, like, level 247. And I walked around with the unique nuke launcher that launched two, and then gave it the add-on that made each nuke launch 10 nukes. So I was running around super-nuking the entire wasteland and found four crashes in a single morning. Back in those days, that would send out an email blast to the entire ZeniMax Media company. So, like, Robert Altman was getting emails that somebody found four crashes in a single morning. I would love to see an AI do my job. I am professionally stupid in a way that a machine could not even dream of.”
I am professionally stupid in a way that a machine could not even dream of.
Where AI might conform to existing lines of thinking, human involvement in areas like quality assurance ensures a degree of thinking outside the box. QA is all about testing as many variables as possible, finding solutions in ways that seem like they might not make sense, especially to a machine, where logic is everything. It’s difficult to disagree with McInerney’s assessment of the human value in QA. It’s particularly important in huge games like Fallout 4, as the scale ensures there will be tons of random bugs appearing in ways that people wouldn’t think are possible. Even after tons of QA, Fallout 4 still had its fair share of glitches, and there’s no guarantee that AI would have been able to help had the technology existed back then, either.
AI is an increasingly contentious topic in the video game industry. Some companies seem to be pushing towards it as inevitable, while others (including many consumers) are pushing back against the technology. Bethesda’s stance is that AI is a tool, but human creative intention remains at the forefront. The issue is that what constitutes “AI” is fairly wide-ranging. For example, using generative AI to produce in-game assets is not the same as AI-driven solutions to improve resolution and frame rate. The next few years are going to be interesting to see play out, given the prevalence of the rapidly-improving technology.
- Released
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November 10, 2015
- ESRB
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M FOR MATURE: BLOOD AND GORE, INTENSE VIOLENCE, STRONG LANGUAGE, USE OF DRUGS
