Starfield

Bethesda Game Studios · Bethesda Softworks

Released: Sep 5, 2023

Wait

Current Recommendation

Best value: $35 or less (30% off or deeper)

10-Second Reality Check

Biggest win
Bethesda's most striking art direction to date, with hand-built cities and ship interiors that are genuinely worth staring at.
Biggest issue
A mile wide and an inch deep — copy-paste facilities, radiant fetch quests and nested load screens bury what the curated content does well.
Value
The systems are broad but shallow and the asking price has not moved; this is a wait-for-a-sale decision, not a full-price one.

Overall: Wait

Performance
GPU-limited on every rig measured. An RTX 3070 managed only about 30-40 fps at 1440p Ultra with upscaling off in Hardware Unboxed's dense New Atlantis and forest benchmarks; the HUB Performance preset lifted the forest average 64% over Ultra, so the fix is settings, not hardware.
Stability
The most-upvoted negative reviews, at 681h, 590h and 235h of playtime, complain about design and content — none of them about crashes or save corruption.
Monetization
PCGamingWiki taxonomy records One-time game purchase, DLC and Subscription gaming service; it lists no microtransactions entry, so this is paid content and a Game Pass option rather than a cash shop.
DRM
PCGamingWiki's availability table gives every storefront the Steam DRM column, and a keyword sweep for Denuvo, EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye returned false across 34k characters of wikitext.
Controller Support
The settings menu captured in the Hardware Unboxed footage renders Xbox face-button glyphs on its own prompts — DEFAULTS (B) and BACK (TAB) — confirming a shipped controller layer rather than a mouse-only UI.
Steam Deck
ProtonDB rates it GOLD from 747 reports, but the same GPU-limited profile that leaves an RTX 3070 near 30 fps at 1440p Ultra means handheld play depends on dropping render scale and leaning on FSR 2.
Value
85,930 Steam reviews sit at 57.9% positive. PCGamingWiki's subscription row means Game Pass is the low-risk way to find out whether the loop lands for you.

See how it actually runs on your rig.

High-End PC

Playable

Key Notes

On an RTX 3070 the Ultra preset at 1440p with no upscaling only reached about 30-40 fps in the densest measured areas
The presenter states the HUB Performance preset holds frame rates 'well over 60' at 1440p

01
Repetitive generated content layered over the curated content
The world is assembled from repeating facilities and radiant quests, and the handcrafted faction questlines are buried between them, so the strongest material is the hardest to reach. One reviewer who still recommends the game puts it plainly: outposts, the economy and the generated content are what would have to go first.
Evidence: Steam review, 235h played at posting, 7 upvotes (highest-ranked reviews by real votes_up)
02
Shallow systems where the game sells width
Base building, outposts and space piracy all resolve into a handful of repeated parts and missions. A 117h reviewer calls it a set of fundamental issues they doubt mods can fix; the top-voted negative review at 590h reduces the whole thing to copy-paste buildings and interchangeable NPCs.
Evidence: Steam reviews, 117h and 590h played at posting, 23 and 68 upvotes
03
Nested load screens between every pocket of the world
Travel is split into separate loads for space, ship, planet and interior rather than one continuous world, so routine activities carry several interruptions each. A 235h reviewer counts the loading screens as double or triple those of Skyrim or Fallout, which makes even short fetch quests feel long.
Evidence: Steam review, 235h played at posting, 7 upvotes

Buy if

You want a long Bethesda-style RPG and are happy to spend it in ship building and curated faction questlines
You have a GPU that can absorb upscaling, or you are willing to drop the render scale to hold a stable frame rate
You are happy to sample it through Game Pass before committing to a purchase

Think twice if

You bounce off repeated generated content and radiant fetch quests
You expect exploration to be continuous rather than a chain of load screens
You play on a 16 GB machine, where measured system memory use already reaches roughly 14.4 GB

Recommended settings for Starfield
Setting	Recommended	FPS gain	Visual loss
Upscaling	FSR 2 at 60-67% render scale (not the FSR 2 100% default)	+23% avg / +22% 1% low at 67% scale; +30% avg / +26% at 60%, vs no upscaling	FSR 2 100% measures 6% slower than native TAA with softer output, so the default is the worst of both; below 70% scale, straight lines and ship interiors show shimmer and stability problems
Preset baseline	HUB Performance preset instead of Ultra or Low	+64% avg / +71% 1% low over Ultra in the forest benchmark; +43% avg / +52% for Medium without upscaling	Sits between the High and Medium presets on image quality, and still looks better than Low according to the presenter
Shadow Quality	High (leave Ultra)	Part of the HUB Performance preset, which the presenter attributes mostly to shadow quality and volumetric lighting together rather than to a single setting	Ultra is only slightly sharper; at Medium shadow pop becomes visible in normal play
Dynamic Resolution	ON	No percentage claimed; shown enabled in the verified display menu at 3840x2160	None claimed by the presenter
V-Sync	ON	No percentage claimed; shown enabled in the verified display menu	None claimed by the presenter

Test Date: Sep 15, 2023
Game Build: 1.7.23.0
Platform: PC (Windows, Direct3D 12)
GPU: RTX 3070 (benchmark) / RTX 4060 Laptop (telemetry) / RTX 4090 (gameplay capture)
CPU: Ryzen 7 7800X3D / Intel Core i9-13900HX
RAM: 32 GB DDR5-6000 CL30 / 16 GB (14,360-14,400 MB in use)
Driver: Not recorded in source video
Test Duration: Not recorded in source video
Copy: Retail purchase (Steam)