Starfield is a next-generation roleplaying game set in space, created by the acclaimed team behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout (Bethesda) (summary found on IGN.)
The game is rated M for mature due to violence, strong language and drug use, so it has been recommended that you are at least 17 to play the game.
Senior Zachary Moreland had heard about Starfield from his dad, so he watched a bunch of trailers and decided to start playing it. So far, Moreland has logged about 30 hours on the game and has spent much of that time playing the side quests.
Moreland stated that the side quests in Starfield follow a basic unlocking of an area or item and then going to another place to do something else; however, there are multiple types of side quests in Starfield, such as retrieving an item for an NPC (non-player character), collecting debts for different banks and carrying out assassination missions.
“Starfield is like no man’s sky, if it was properly made,” Moreland said.
Starfield is available on desktop services like Steam or Xbox app for Windows and the Xbox One S and X. Unfortunately, Starfield is not available on PlayStation due to Bethesda being owned by ZeniMax Media, which was bought by Microsoft on March 9, 2021.
Starfield on desktop does have running issues if you install the game onto an HDD (Hard Disk Drive) instead of an SSD (Solid State Drive). An HDD is a device inside a computer that stores information magnetically on a small disk and reads it back via a mechanical arm that scans the surface of the disk. Unfortunately, the older the HDD, the slower the mechanical arm moves, so over time the HDD degrades. SSD’s on the other hand are all digital and do not have any moving parts, using electronic circuits to store and retrieve data, so it is one, faster, and two, does not degrade as fast.
I started playing the game on Oct. 18, 2023. I can confirm that the game runs significantly better on SSD than on HDD, on HDD the audio tends to cut out and the game lags all of the time, even with a top-of-the-line GPU (Graphics processing unit) and CPU (Central processing unit). The game on SSD doesn’t lag nearly as much and does not have audio cut outs because of the faster speeds of a SSD.
Find out if your computer and console has the proper specs to run the game here.
