Todd Howard Defends Starfield’s Poor Optimization, Says Players Need to Upgrade Their PCs
Since the review embargo for Starfield was lifted, and the game entered early access, a plethora of reports surfaced online talking about performance issues with the game. Now, this is no 2020 Cyberpunk launch, but the situation is still pretty bad. The game is occasionally experiencing crashes and is failing to keep up with the performance expectations.
To be clear, Starfield isn’t the only release that is struggling to keep up on PC. We’ve seen horrible optimizations with the likes of Hogwarts Legacy, Jedi Survivor, Atomic Heart, Kerbal Space Program 2, Redfall and Final Fantasy 16. However, most of these developers quickly addressed the performance issues with their games. Unfortunately, it seems like Bethesda is taking a more apathetic approach to Starfield’s problems.
Xbox CEO Phil Spencer and Starfield director, Todd Howard recently sat down in conversation with Bloomberg during a special interview. Right out of the gate, Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow didn’t beat around the bush; he swiftly fired off a question to Todd about the poor optimization of Starfield.
Todd, in his characteristic candid style, didn’t try to sugarcoat it. He confidently said that the game had been optimized really well and that if players were facing performance problems, it might be a good idea for them to consider upgrading their PCs.
Uh… we did. It’s running great. 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 awesome.
Todd Howard on the reason why Bethesda didn’t optimize Starfield for PC
Keep in mind that even the mighty 4090 has encountered its fair share of performance hiccups. However, even if not, is it still entirely fair to blame gamers themselves for the optimization problems that they are facing?
Let’s hope that Bethesda will soon release a patch to address the issues, despite the ignorant comments. The game has amassed a huge fanbase in just a week, with over a million concurrent players earlier this week. It would be a shame for Bethesda to let all this excitement go to waste.
This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.
