Graham, another HDD user, has been seeing these issues too.īefore the extent of all this misery became apparent, I’d planned a straightforward loading time comparison using my test rig’s SSD (a 2TB Crucial P3 Plus) and a typical HDD (a 1TB WD Caviar Blue).

After reinstalling on his SSD, normal Starfield service resumed. In the RPS treehouse, Liam reported that he was getting the same seconds-long hangs as early as the tutorial, having somehow installed Starfield on his hard drive 'by accident' (sure, sure). These breakdowns in communication do not, as far as I can tell, occur on SSDs. NPC dialogue is hit particularly hard by Starfield’s lack of HDD compatibility: in my experience, conversations typically began with a big stutter, followed by silence, followed by desynced dialogue floating from unmoving lips. Often, they become literally quieter, as diagetic sound effects like wind, footsteps, or booster back blasts cut out or play out of sync. Here's one I suffered earlier: Do not adjust your set. Temporary freezes are even more common, and while they might not send you to back to desktop in a defeated heap, they do render gunfights utterly unplayable. By contrast, on an HDD it crashed twice during a single five-minute attempt at recording some footage for Liam. I played for hours on both my test PC’s SSD and the stock SSD of a Steam Deck before trying an HDD, and in both cases, Starfield didn't crash once. The collapse in stability is the most naturally game-ruining of these behaviours. Also, it has rubbish load times and texture pop-in. In addition to the largely benign, often hilarious bugs you get on an SSD, HDD!Starfield is riddled with skipping audio, animation failures, stuttering, hanging, crashing, the lot.

On a hard drive, it’s a completely different game, which is to say its structual integrity is snapped to bits like the chocolate on a freshly bitten Magnum.

Not Starfield per se, which is mostly good – when it’s running off an SSD. Manage cookie settings Was Starfield worth the wait? Liam and Alice B discuss this question - and more - in the video above. To see this content please enable targeting cookies.

Starfield for ipod instal