At this point we really shouldn’t be surprised, but Bethesda somehow managed to release a borderline broken game on PS5, over two full years removed from its initial launch on other platforms.
Now, to be clear, Starfield’s crashing issues have not impacted every player — but reports have been so widespread and so numerous that the developer couldn’t just sit back and ignore them.
And to Bethesda’s credit, it’s issued two separate ‘hotfix’ updates at the time of writing this article. Granted, it took an entire week for the first patch to drop, and the second only arrived last week, but it’s progress.
However, the wording on the second update made it sound as though the studio is done with targeting PS5-specific crashes. And so with that in mind, we wanted to put Starfield to the test all over again.
Having experienced far too many of these game-freezing errors ourselves — post-review period, we should stress — we’ve returned to Starfield to continue our intergalactic adventures with the latest patch installed.
The good news is that with our playtime now fast approaching 50 hours, we’re mostly convinced that Bethesda’s corrected the sci-fi RPG’s most prominent crash-causing problems on PS5.
The bad news is that the experience is still far from perfect. Classic Bethesda, etc.
So, as far as we could tell, there were four or five key crashing issues that had to be addressed:
- Crashing when approaching a busy area with lots of NPC activity
- Crashing when exploring a planet’s surface
- Crashing when building an outpost
- Crashing when building or modifying ship
- Random crashes when talking to NPCs
Some of these crashes could be replicated — and we know that from personal experience. For example, when driving around the planet of Akila in our buggy, we literally couldn’t approach Akila City — one of the game’s major hubs — without triggering a hard crash.
Outpost building was a consistent source of crashes as well, with the game simply freezing up as soon as we opened specific menus, or placed certain assets.
Other crashes were much more random in nature. The longer we spent exploring a planet, the higher the chance of the whole thing crashing — or so it seemed.
Thankfully, the majority of these crashes appear to have been addressed. We can no longer force the game to crash like we could in the aforementioned instances.
Having said that, we have still stumbled upon two or three crashes in our last 20 hours of play — or thereabouts. One came when entering orbit after completing a main faction quest, but we couldn’t get it to happen again; the others were similarly random and unrepeatable.
We should note that for most of our post-patch playtime, we’ve been utilising the title’s 60 frames-per-second performance mode. We’ve spent a few hours in the other graphical modes as well, and haven’t ran into any obvious issues.
Some players had suggested that different graphical settings — particularly on PS5 Pro — could influence the frequency of crashes, but it was always difficult to properly validate these suggestions.
In conclusion, Starfield seems to be way more stable on PS5 than it did when it launched earlier in the month, on the 7th April. It’s taken almost three weeks to get here, but, at least in our experience, the game’s no longer crapping its pants at set intervals.
If you’re still on the fence, we should mention that the game’s technical performance remains rather sloppy. Frame rate drops are a fairly common occurrence regardless of your chosen graphical mode.
The hope is that Bethesda will continue to optimise the title on PS5 now that it’s tackled the crashing — but given the developer’s track record… well, we’re not setting our expectations too high.
Have you been playing Starfield on PS5? Have you ran into any crashes up until now? Keep your fingers crossed in the comments section below.
