The latest Starfield PC requirements have caused more than a little concern among fans, with many fearing they might not be able to play the game as intended.
Starfield launches for Xbox Series X/S and PC September 6 (although you can play earlier if you pre-order), but some PC gamers are only just discovering an unfortunate hardware requirement.
To catch you up, Bethesda recently published Starfield’s system requirements on Steam. As expected, you'll need a serious PC to run the game on its best settings. That in itself isn't surprising, though. What is, is that Starfield looks set to be the first PC game to require an SSD, not just hard-drive space.
This has, understandably, caused some concern among fans who weren't expecting this particular requirement. While the game will technically run well enough without an SSD, it's likely that you'll be faced with some lengthy loading screens and a myriad of other issues. In other words, it's definitely not advisable to try and play Starfield without one.
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"I think loading times would be the least of your worries if you try to run this game off a hard drive. It's most likely going to be a horrible stuttering mess due to the sheer amount of data that needs to be loaded on the fly while traversing the game world," one Reddit user observes on the Starfield subreddit. "Hard drives just aren't fast enough to handle the amount of data modern games utilize."
Another adds: "Sorry man it'll likely be a true requirement and an HDD will be a bad time."
Given that an SSD is listed under minimum specs for Starfield we'd be amazed if the game's performance was anything other than just about okay on an HDD, but we'll have to wait and see. For now, PC gamers without might want to start thinking about investing in an upgrade.