Starfield Director Comments on Optimization: "You May Need to Upgrade Your PC"

If you're having trouble making Starfield run to your liking on the PC platform, it may be that your system is the problem and not the game itself. That's according to Bethesda's Todd Howard, the game director on Starfield who talked about optimization briefly this week during an interview in response to a question from a fan that asked something typically thrown at game developers: why did they not optimize the game correctly? Howard's response was far from the usual PR answer that people get about doublechecking their setups to make sure everything's up to date, but from our experience with Starfield, it's not far off.

Howard faced the question about optimization during a Bloomberg Technology interview he participated in alongside Xbox boss Phil Spencer. The video below opened with the optimization answer and went on to talk more about Starfield such as how Xbox Game Pass has affected the game so far.

Todd Howard on Starfield's Optimization

The question technically came from Bloomberg Technology , but it came from the Starfield community first which was asked by the outlet what questions they'd have for Howard and Spencer, and the first of those that was asked dealt with optimization. 

"We did. It's running great," said Howard when asked why Bethesda didn't optimize the PC version of Starfield. "It is a next-gen PC game. We really pushed 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 awesome[ly]."

Spencer was then asked how they could tell if the game was successful or not and if people were actually playing it via Xbox Game Pass since playing it that way meant that there wasn't a purchase to be tallied. Spencer informed Bloomberg Technology that Xbox can see who's playing the game via Xbox Game Pass and said that the team is already seeing "huge success" across the PC and Xbox platforms.

Starfield Bugs and Optimization

Plenty of people have praised Starfield as being bug-free or close to it, but that's of course all anecdotal as are our frustrations from our review process that included several pronounced bugs in Starfield that impacted the experience more than the occasional game crash. However, it's true that the game does seem to be optimized better than many other competitors of its scale given that the bugs in question didn't deal with performance, graphics, or anything of that nature. 

That optimization doesn't appear to be limited to the PC platform either. Those who've been playing the game on the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles have praised its performance there even if those consoles do lock the game to 30FPS due to its size. Based on reports on the game's performance on those consoles, they're solid options for playing the game which is exactly what Xbox Game Pass subscribers were hoping for.