Starfield’s system requirements put my gaming PC to the test, and it barely survived

There I was thinking that I owned a killer gaming PC—a beast of a machine that had effortlessly conquered every competitive title I’d thrown at it, from Dota 2 to VALORANT. When I first built my gaming rig in 2016, with an NVIDIA GTX 1070, it was a point of pride, a testament to my dedication to my craft: Competitive gaming.

Then came Sept. 1, which brought Starfield’s early access launch to millions of players. I was ready to embark on this interstellar journey with modest expectations. Even though I thought highly of my gaming PC, I knew it would be an uphill battle, and I was fine with whatever frame rate it could muster. After all, my PC satisfied the minimum requirements of Starfield, so what could go wrong?

I left my PC on overnight to pre-load Starfield and woke up feeling excited—only to be immediately humbled in the most devastating way. As I tried to launch Starfield for the first time, error messages flooded my screen, mocking my system’s meager capabilities. I began testing all the potential fixes I could find on the internet, and every failed attempt cast a shadow of doubt in my mind.

“Has it really been seven years since 2016?” I thought. Was I not worthy of playing Starfield because I allowed so much time to pass by me and my gaming PC? As I dealt with existential crises about my gaming habits, I finally cracked my way into Starfield as a fix finally came through.

My excitement was short-lived, however, as Starfield’s audio started cutting out, and my frames per second tanked to practically zero. You see, my trusty SSD, a relic from 2016 when 250 GB was all I could afford, only had 20GB available while I was installing Starfield. That’s why I installed it on my HDD, which unfortunately couldn’t keep up with Starfield’s massive universe.

A painful sacrifice followed my storage problems: I had to bid farewell to some of my favorite games on my SSD, consigning them to the digital void as I couldn’t be bothered to move them to my HDD. After all this was said and done, I moved Starfield to my SSD and was finally ready for a new beginning.

When I finally loaded into Starfield, it had already been five hours since I woke up. My once-mighty gaming rig, now burdened by Starfield’s demands, could barely muster 10 to 15 frames per second. I’m used to playing games above 144 fps, so my first hour in Starfield made my brain hurt.

Ever since that day, I’ve been slowly chipping away at Starfield, making peace with the fact that I weaved the very web that I got stuck in. But despite everything, I still never expected Todd Howard to drop the truth bomb on me. In a recent interview, Howard said that Starfield was optimized for PC, and for those who think otherwise, it’s time for an upgrade.

If rig-shaming isn’t a term yet, I would like to coin it now, as I didn’t expect my gaming PC’s flaws to be thrown in my face like this. You might be wondering what’s next for me: Will I upgrade my PC to keep up with the times? For now, I will keep my head up and try to finish this game while trying to avoid ship fights at all costs, and hope that someone creates a potato PC mode for Starfield.

They will never catch my rig alive.