Expectations are enormous for Bethesda’s latest title, Starfield. It promises a galaxy-spanning adventure with a wealth of content and hundreds of planets to explore. Few games come anywhere near this kind of scope – and fewer still come with the high level of content quality and gameplay flexibility that Bethesda typically offers. But that’s not to say there haven’t been concerns. Top of mind are technical worries, with prospective players perturbed by the potential for bugs and frame-rate hiccups. Bethesda’s prior console efforts haven’t always arrived in stable form, and those games were orders of magnitude smaller than Starfield. The key question for many is this: is Starfield good to go at launch, or should you wait for performance issues and bugs to be resolved?
There are other key concerns too. For example, what’s the story with Xbox Series S? Microsoft’s junior machine has been a centre of controversy for some time, with some titles struggling to accommodate the system’s reductions in memory, bandwidth and GPU performance. To the best of our knowledge, no footage of the game has been seen pre-launch on Series S, though BGS’s Todd Howard has been known to have spent a lot of time playing the Series S rendition of the game.
Right out of the gate, the good news is that Starfield is actually a very consistent and stable experience on both consoles. Across about 20 hours of play so far, I’ve encountered no obvious bugs or other glaring issues, which is something I certainly couldn’t have said for the launch versions of Fallout 4 or Skyrim. Starfield has been delayed several times, but you get the sense that those delays have probably been for the best, as the final article is a smooth experience that’s worth diving into right on release. I can’t speak for the entire game of course, but I really didn’t see anything that would give me pause.
