Is Starfield crashing constantly? Your PC’s processor could be why

3 weeks ago

Image: Bethesda

The long-awaited space role-playing game Starfield from Bethesda has been available for download since Tuesday. Many players immediately plunged into the game’s 1,000 explorable planets. Now, however, reports of sudden crashes are piling up. The only fix is to restart the computer. And these Starfield crashes seem to be affecting some PC configurations more than others.

Ryzen CPUs in focus

Although some owners of Intel processors also complain about sudden crashes, the majority of those affected have a Ryzen CPU installed. Certain moments in the game seem especially crash-prone, such as getting the watch from Barret or talking to certain NPCs. Unfortunately, the crashes are reproducible — so the next time you try to start the conversation, the computer crashes again.

This is particularly annoying because AMD is the “exclusive PC partner” of Starfield. The company worked hand in hand to optimize the game as best they could on the Xbox Series X/S as well as on modern Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs.

Further reading: Starfield review: The best game Bethesda ever created?

Bethesda support told one Reddit user to try temporarily disabling all non-Microsoft programs. Third-party antivirus programs should also be turned off. Only the Steam client, which is necessary to use the game, should remain active.

That said, a true fix will likely come via a patch for Starfield at some point in the future.

Crashes aside, Starfield already exceeded Bethesda’s expectations. Only a few days after launch, there were over one million concurrent players across the supported platforms PC and Xbox Series X/S. And compared to other Bethesda games like the Fallout or Elder Scrolls games, Starfield seems relatively bug-free… which makes this crashing problem all the more annoying.

This article was translated from German to English and originally appeared on pcwelt.de.