If you're a gamer eagerly awaiting Starfield, this game has the potential to fulfill our long-held dreams of exploring the vastness of the galaxy. We've learned not to get our hopes up from past experiences like No Man's Sky and Star Citizen, where release issues (or the lack of release, ahem, Star Citizen) and bugs plagued the games. But Starfield has the chance to break that pattern and deliver an extraordinary gaming experience.
As someone who has primarily engaged in competitive esports games rather than RPGs for the past 14 years, I initially felt skeptical when I discovered that consoles would be limited to 30 FPS. In certain corners of the PC community, anything below 120 FPS is sometimes dismissed as barely playable. But this focus on high frame rate caused some of us to lose sight of what truly matters in a gaming experience. For me it was the Steam Deck that helped ground me and remind me that a great gaming experience is not just about high performance. Playing Spiderman and Fallen Order on the Steam Deck provided me with some of my most cherished gaming moments.
Fallen Order was a real turning point for me, and helped me appreciate Starfield's decision to cap the FPS at 30 on consoles. Fallen Order did not run smoothly, and even with minimum graphics it had hiccups, but capping my FPS did help significantly. It's evident that maintaining stability, without screen tearing and stutters, is more important than high framerate when it comes to preserving the immersion and narrative of a game. I’m not about to go console for all my gaming, but I have a little less patience for people who get all worked up over frame rate.
On the other hand, Starfield is positioning itself to be a generational game (or so the subreddit would have you believe) and it’s going to mark my first real immersion in a Bethesda RPG. This might sound crazy to some of you but gaming has become such a huge universe of potential that, yes, even someone like me can be new to Bethesda. And if I’m going in hot, I want to see the world the team has envisioned at the highest possible fidelity. So while 30FPS is better than an unstable 40-60FPS if you’re on console, I still think Starfield is going to be a game you want to play on a high-performance PC to get the most out of it, if you can. It’s certainly what I’m going to do.
The PC Setup
AMD's recommended setup for a high end PC for Starfield includes the Ryzen 7 7800x3d and the RX 7900 XT promises to deliver a 4K gaming experience, hopefully reaching close to or above 60 FPS, especially with the assistance of FSR upscaling for improved performance. Hopefully this game will live up to the hype that the similar games before could not.While we must remain cautious (don’t preorder!) due to past letdowns, the prospects of exploring the galaxy and engaging in a captivating storyline are truly exhilarating. Let us prepare ourselves for this upcoming adventure, Starfield may very well become one of the defining games of our time.
