Are you able to run Starfield on an HDD? No

On as we speak’s installment of Dangerous Calls I Have Made, I’ll cop to by no means actually shopping for the thought of Starfield needing an SSD. Even amongst its astronomical system necessities, an rigid demand for strong state storage appeared like a stretch; in spite of everything, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Aside runs principally superb on a tough drive, and in a earlier life that recreation was employed as a cheerleader for the PS5’s SSD. Starfield would in all probability simply have garbage load instances or texture pop-in or one thing, and all could be revealed as soon as I might attempt it on mechanical storage. Which I now have.

So, are you able to play Starfield on an HDD? No. It’s bloody terrible.

Not Starfield per se, which is generally good – when it’s working off an SSD. On a tough drive, it’s a totally completely different recreation, which is to say its structual integrity is snapped to bits just like the chocolate on a freshly bitten Magnum. Along with the largely benign, typically hilarious bugs you get on an SSD, HDD!Starfield is riddled with skipping audio, animation failures, stuttering, hanging, crashing, the lot. Additionally, it has garbage load instances and texture pop-in.

The collapse in stability is essentially the most naturally game-ruining of those behaviours. I performed for hours on each my take a look at PC’s SSD and the inventory SSD of a Steam Deck earlier than making an attempt an HDD, and in each instances, Starfield did not crash as soon as. In contrast, on an HDD it crashed twice throughout a single five-minute try at recording some footage for Liam. Short-term freezes are much more frequent, and whereas they won’t ship you to again to desktop in a defeated heap, they do render gunfights totally unplayable. Here is one I suffered earlier:

Quieter moments aren’t spared both. Usually, they turn out to be actually quieter, as diagetic sound results like wind, footsteps, or booster again blasts minimize out or play out of sync. NPC dialogue is hit notably laborious by Starfield’s lack of HDD compatibility: in my expertise, conversations sometimes started with a giant stutter, adopted by silence, adopted by desynced dialogue floating from unmoving lips. These breakdowns in communication don’t, so far as I can inform, happen on SSDs.

It is not simply me, both. Within the RPS treehouse, Liam reported that he was getting the identical seconds-long hangs as early because the tutorial, having in some way put in Starfield on his laborious drive “accidentally” (positive, positive). After reinstalling on his SSD, regular Starfield service resumed. Graham, one other HDD consumer, has been seeing these points too.

Earlier than the extent of all this distress grew to become obvious, I’d deliberate an easy loading time comparability utilizing my take a look at rig’s SSD (a 2TB Essential P3 Plus) and a typical HDD (a 1TB WD Caviar Blue). I do know that given the opposite issues, this should now appear as helpful as measuring the blood stress on Anne Boleyn’s cadaver, however these outcomes nonetheless replicate the totality of how Starfield rejects non-SSD storage. In a single case, the laborious drive was a full ten instances slower.

If all this feels like I’m outragedly flag-waving for mechanical storage’s good outdated days, once we frolicked by way of the sunlit uplands of spinning platters and didn’t have to fret about woke NAND flash, I’m not. For gaming particularly, I’m extra of the thoughts that HDDs have had their time; SSDs are each sooner and cheaper than ever, and we’d all be a bit happier with our PCs if we totally switched.

You could possibly say Starfield is just reflecting these altering instances. You could possibly additionally level out that onerous drives are mere instruments, and don’t must bow out gracefully like a beloved veteran footballer getting his testimonial. Nonetheless, if Starfield being irreparably wrecked on HDD represents some sort of ending… I dunno, I suppose I simply didn’t think about it being such a violent one.