Linus and Luke discussed Starfield’s PC port on the WAN show, revealing that they had many issues with the state in which the game has launched on PC and were puzzled by Bethesda’s decision-making with options for the game.
As players have discovered since taking to the stars upon release day, Starfield has that signature Bethesda jank the studio is known for. Some players even like that part of their games and see bugs as more of a feature when they don’t disrupt gameplay too much.
Starfield has been a bit more polished than prior Bethesda titles in most areas, but it’s got some clear issues with its PC port that Linus has gone out of his way to point out on the WAN show.
While he’s got a video in the works that’ll have more information about what exactly is happening with the PC version, Linus spoke with co-host Luke about some of the technical oddities present in highly-anticipated RPG’s “bad” PC port.
Linus calls out Starfield for lacking essential PC options
LinusTechTips is back following their brief hiatus in the wake of recent controversy, and Linus himself is right back to hosting the WAN show alongside co-host Luke.
In one of their first episodes since coming back, Linus and Luke talked extensively about the good and bad aspects of Starfield, a game many have been looking forward to. While both were largely positive about the game itself, they had their fair share of gripes with its technical aspects on PC.
It’s a laundry list, but one that’s headlined by the fact that the game doesn’t work for most users with Intel GPUs. Those who were able to boot the game were met with… something terrifying.
Linus shouted out HueSplat on the show, a user with an Intel GPU that ran into this problem and recorded his findings.
Additionally, Linus slammed the game for wholly lacking options to adjust specific resource-intensive options like texture quality. He referred to the game’s graphical options as a “black box” and explained how the game automatically changes settings around – whether the player wants those settings to change or not.
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“The minimum config and the recommended config just, out of the box, ran at almost the same FPS. However, it was very noticeable to the eye that one looked better than the other.” This was despite both games having the same settings.
“The reason for that is there’s so much automatic fidelity tuning going on in the game that you can’t tell exactly what you’re running at.” He then expressed his disbelief at the lack of settings. “It doesn’t have a drop-down for texture quality… What?”
“When’s the last time that we should see a PC game that shouldn’t have a texture quality slider?” Luke chimed in, saying that it was a “weird” decision. Linus concluded by asking, “How is that even remotely acceptable?”
Additionally, they pointed out that the game doesn’t have an FOV slider, no draw distance slider, and an omission Luke brought up as something the two of them were “enraged” by: You can’t set your game to a non-native resolution. Luke elaborated on why this was an issue.
“So, if you have a 4k monitor – this is a very hard to run game – if you have a 4k monitor and go, ‘Ah, I can run this game in 1440p’, you have to do [resolution scaling in-game]. But, when you do that, the other settings are gonna interact different. So we actually got a very different experience by – instead of doing resolution scaling – changing our monitor’s resolution by setting it to [non-native], cranking resolution scaling to 100%, and then interacting with other options.”
In other words, to get the most out of Starfield and crank graphical fidelity at the cost of their resolution, players have to go into their computer’s display settings and manually set their monitor to a non-native resolution. So, if you’re on a 4k monitor, you’d have to change your entire monitor’s resolution to 2560×1440 (aka 1440P) rather than just changing the game’s resolution.
This is a glaring omission and something most modern games have.
All of this culminated in the two of them being visibly frustrated at the decisions made by Bethesda with this port, ultimately saying that the way these performance features were implemented is “jank” and that the PC version could definitely use some work.
