The purpose of this article is to discuss Starfield’s system requirements, which have not been published yet. This article is meant merely as a guide to what you may expect them to be in order to help you plan for any potential upgrades.
Topics Discussed:
- About Starfield
- Starfield Plot
- Starfield Release
- Speculating Starfield’s System Requirements
- Previous Bethesda Games and Their System Requirements
- Starfield System Requirements Speculation
About Starfield
Starfield is an epic role-playing and first-person shooter game based in space being developed by game producer Bethesda. Bethesda is known for other games, like Elder Scrolls, and Ghostwire: Tokyo. Starfield will not be running on Unreal Engine 5, but rather its own Creation Engine 2. Creation Engine 2 has been used in other games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim.
In Starfield, you get to create your own character and decide how they should look and what character attributes they have. Some attributes will give strengths in some areas and weaknesses in other areas. You also will be able to create your own weapons modifications and build outposts. The outposts you build are pretty much your own personal base. You will be able to regenerate resources and choose a team to take care of it.
Starfield also provides you the ability to create your own starships. What would a sci-fi space game be without that? You can decide your own crew, how your spaceship looks, its engine, shields, and its weapons systems. You will explore Starfield in this spaceship and battle other starships.
How much do you get to explore in Starfield? You can explore each planet in a solar system. And there are lots of solar systems – over one hundred in fact. That means there are over 1,000 planets you can explore in Starfield.
Starfield Plot
Starfield begins by landing on a mysterious moon called Kreet. You get off your spaceship and head towards a research lab that has gone silent. You find that it has been taken over by pirates. Once you defeat the pirates, you are invited back to New Atlantis, the capital city, where you are invited to join an elite team of explorers. Your mission is to explore space and find ancient artifacts. The artifacts are not ordinary; they are special artifacts that give you visions.
Starfield Release
Starfield is going to be released on PC (Steam and Cloud) and Xbox. According to Steam, Starfield will be released in sometime in 2023. Bethesda is taking noticeably taking its time with the release to avoid gameplay problems like those experienced with Fallout: 76, CyberPunk: 2077 and Elden Ring. Starfield is expected to be a massive hit at the box office once it is finally released. The official game reveal can be found here.
Starfield System Requirements Speculation
Gamers need to know system requirements for games because it helps them plan for system upgrades. Bethesda has not released system requirements for Starfield. Those who wish to play Starfield may be a little in the dark if they need to perform system upgrades. Therefore, we need to think critically in order to speculate what the system requirements will be. We can look at other games produced by Bethesda and their respective system requirements to help us plan for Starfield.
An Analysis of Ghostwire: Tokyo System Requirements
Ghostwire: Tokyo was released on Steam in March of 2022. It, like Starfield has rich graphics and provides the gamer an immersive experience. It is no surprise then that it demands a lot of system resources. Ghostwire: Tokyo’s system requirements are listed below:
Recommended:
- Processor: CORE I7 6700 @ 3.4GHZ OR AMD RYZEN 5 2600
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1080 OR AMD RX 5600 XT (VRAM 6 GB OR HIGHER)
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 20 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Storage
Minimum:
- Processor: CORE I7 4770K @ 3.5GHZ OR AMD RYZEN 5 2600
- Memory: 12 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1060 OR AMD RX 5500 XT (VRAM 6 GB OR HIGHER)
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 20 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Storage Recommended
We can see based on these system requirements that Ghostwire: Tokyo requires a lot of VRAM (6GB) from the graphics card. zWORMz Gaming produced a benchmark showing the NVIDIA GTX 1060 on 1080P resolution with high graphics settings. We can see that the benchmark reached an average of 61 FPS. 61 FPS provides a playable experience with minimal stuttering. But the GTX 1060 could not handle some parts well and dropped to around 30 FPS.
The other minimum requirements include a 4-core 8-thread 3.9Ghz processor, 12GB of RAM, DirectX 12 and SSD storage. Bethesda seems to be telling us that if you want to play its games on PC, you better have a gaming rig. Their games are not just for any PC, but PC’s built for gaming.
Starfield System Requirements
Starfield has some similarities to Ghostwire: Tokyo terms of the immersive experience provided to gamers. In fact, a rich graphical experience seems to be a trend with Bethesda games. Starfield also has a lot of other worlds, deep space battles, and intense action. All of these game attributes spell out a narrative for a beefy list of system requirements.
We cannot say for sure what the system requirements will be until Bethesda publishes them. But if you’re stuck in a spot where you need to upgrade your PC and are looking for guidance, then the list below is a speculative guide for our own Starfield’s system requirements.
Our Recommended:
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-10700K Processor or AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 3080 Ti OR AMD RX 6950 XT (VRAM 12 GB OR HIGHER)
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: NVMe M.2 SSD with 60 GB of available capacity.
Our Minimum:
- Processor: CORE I7 7700K or AMD RYZEN 5 3600
- Memory: 12 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 2080 SUPER OR AMD RX 5700 XT (VRAM 8 GB OR HIGHER)
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: NVMe M.2 SSD with 60 GB of available capacity
Understandably, these recommendations are our own and we are being cautious. The last thing you want would be to upgrade your system to find out it would not meet the minimum or recommended requirements of an upcoming game you would like to play. You must remember that this is merely a guide and not published requirements.