If you’ve been having trouble running Starfield on your PC, game director Todd Howard thinks “you may need to upgrade”, as the title has already been optimized.
As GamesRadar+ reports, in an interview with Bloomberg Technology, Howard and Xbox boss Phil Spencer were asked a number of audience questions, one of which was simply: “Why did you not optimize this game for PC?”
“We did, it’s running great,” Howard responded, as Spencer laughed in the background. “It is a next-gen PC game. We really do push the technology, so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game, but it’s got a lot of great stuff going on in it, and the fans are responding awesomely.”
Howard’s response may come as a surprise to some, since over the last week, while gamers have been getting stuck into the space-exploration RPG, a number of posts have surfaced online of players flagging PC performance issues. In a thread on Starfield’s Steam Community, one player alleged: “If I set the graphics settings to low, for every setting at 1080p resolution, I still get constant stuttering, screen tearing, and my frame rate is all over the place, between 40 and 55 FPS. My computer is above [the] recommended specs for this game. There is something very wrong with the performance of this game.”
At the time of writing, however, Starfield has a ‘very positive’ rating on Steam, as 83% of its reviews have been positive. Yesterday (September 6), the game managed to accumulate over one million concurrent players across PC, Xbox Series X|S and cloud streaming – while the exact number per platform hasn’t been revealed, data shows that Steam saw a peak of 269,177.
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