Seriously this is a lot of fun. It is absolutely a Bethesda game through and through. Not sure what people were expecting. I'm glad it's not like No Man's Sky because that game bored the shit out of me almost immediately.
The fact that the game is unplayable on an HDD is really upsetting. That's it, I can't form an opinion on the rest because the stuttering is so bad that I cannot play it.
I've gotten a lot of replies to this and I don't really care to argue. I know SSDs are better for loading assets. Tech is my job. I understand that. I do not agree that HDDs are deprecated. Y'all are really angry about this and should take a few steps back.
Yeah physical spinning disks haven't been relevant on mondern systems outside of cold data storage since roughly 2016. Price difference between SSD and HDD are pretty much the same up to the 1-2tb range. Its also listed in the minium requirements for the game.
Think its time for a modern storage medium my dude.
Honestly, I would go as low as 2013. As someone who works in IT, that was about the year all the regular desktop stations basically came with an SSD standard or didn't really cost much to swap so it was a must. 2016 was more of the move to NVME with M.2 drives.
For myself I believe I made the switch in 2010, once you get a taste of that speed boost it was hard not to justify the extra cost! Wasn't to bad either if you got small storage to cut cost. I just wanted my OS to load quick.
That is simply not true. If hdds were outdated 7 years ago I would have had problems 7 years ago. This is the only game out of the hundreds I have that doesn't work on an HDD. Elden Ring, EFT, Baldurs Gate, Call of Duty, Hogwarts Legacy, hell even Star Citizen works fine on an HDD and that game is massively unoptimized. Having it on its minimum specs isn't an excuse. If it was just a case of load times being bad and assets loading in slowly then yeah sure, they did their best and it's a better experience on an ssd. That's not the case though, talking to anyone, fighting, opening an inventory, just walking, all of these cause a 5 to 30 seconds freeze and the audio is constantly cutting out. There's no excuse for that and this is unique to starfield. I am making room on my SSD to play it because I still want to try the game but claiming I'm the unreasonable one for voicing a problem is absurd.
I could also say that a 1-2 tb hard drive isn't relevant on modern systems anymore. The price difference between a 4tb SSD and HDD is 2-3x the price.
That they are still viable for some applications doesn't mean they aren't outdated. There will always be the thing that "starts" your issues, and pointing at it and saying that it isn't hardwares fault doesn't make it less true. Pointing at past years of non-problematic use doesn't make future incompatibility unacceptable.
This is literally the Simpsons meme of the principal standing outside the broken window, saying
"Is it my old HDDs fault I can't play a brand-new modern game?"
"No, it's the devs fault for not supporting my old hardware"
Brother, im not claiming you complaining about a point of contention is an issue at all. Get off your high horse. We all know the game has performance issues
Also those games you listed are bing impacted by slow access times of your HDD. They just are not impacted as much as the one you are currently complaining about.
Starfield has a SSD listed as a min req for the game. You not meeting the min req WIIL cause issues.
Intel 670p nvme drve is $0.035/gb a WD blue 7200rpm HDD is $0.030/gb. Its a roughly $3-5 difference per TB.
If you really need that $3-5 bro, i can send you it lol.
What about the rest of your specs? You got a pentium 2 in that thing and 512Mb of ram or somthing sheesh? The futures now old man.
Dude, SSDs are not expensive anymore like they were ten years ago. If there is any upgrade you need to make, replacing the hdd with an ssd is absolutely the first thing you should do.
An ssd is the best bang for the buck upgrade to a slow machine in my experience. Putting even a cheap $40 Kingston one in my grandmas old ass computer took it from unusable to decent speeds for web browsing/office applications/etc. I highly recommend you get one.