'Jank and really, really bad': Linus Tech Tips calls out Starfield's PC optimization

Popular tech YouTuber Linus Sebastian, aka Linus Tech Tips, recently called out Starfield's PC port. The new space explorer RPG from Bethesda hit shelves on September 1, the same day the WAN Show aired. Linus Sebastian and his co-host Luke Lafreniere talked about issues that have plagued the PC experience of the game during the live show.

Linus commented on certain aspects like render scaling and graphics settings but didn't spend much time commenting on the RPG's gameplay aspects. He said:

"And the whole only working in Windowed fullscreen and having to use like resolution scaling...The implementation is jank, it's bad and I hate it...Halo Infinite has the same thing too. You can't just run an exclusive full screen mode. But the implementation in Starfield and the way that the presets interact with it is really, really bad."

Do note that most of these problems are on the technical side of the title and related to performance. Starfield pushes the boundaries of visual fidelity, which also means it's particularly difficult to run. However, the title isn't optimized the best to make the most of the underlying hardware. It is currently accessible to gamers who had pre-ordered the Premium edition.

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Linus Tech Tips points out multiple issues in Starfield

(Timestamp: 17:49)

As Linus Tech Tips and Luke Lafreniere mentioned in the livestream, Starfield lacks some of the most necessary graphics options that ship with most PC games. The game doesn't have a texture quality, FOV, or draw-distance slider. This took the Canadian tech reviewer by shock as he commented:

“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? How is that even remotely acceptable?

Moreover, the Linus Tech Tips live show focused on other outrageous oddities that completely destroy the experience for gamers with modest hardware. Essentially, the new game doesn't allow players to switch to a resolution other than what the monitor supports natively.

If you want to switch resolutions in the game, you need to manually adjust the resolution of the monitor to push the title to accept it as native. Other than this, if you try adjusting the render scale, it brings the remaining settings down along with it, which makes no sense. Luke commented on this in the Linus Tech Tips live show:

“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."

Besides this, the duo also chatted about navigation and gameplay. One of the highlighted issues was how dead enemies would remain standing upright with their hands up. This has affected both of their gaming experiences, as Luke explained:

"You are looking around and keep getting jumpscared by this thing. I wasted a ton of ammo on these."

The Linus Tech Tips channel is generally known for its hardware analysis and reviews where the team goes into detail testing each aspect of the latest video games and gaming components like graphics cards and CPUs. Therefore, Linus is currently working on an in-depth video that will test the game extensively on multiple hardware configurations.

All of the information shared in the live show are observations recorded as part of testing for this video. Commenting on it, Linus commented:

"It's a good video. It's worth watching. We encountered a lot of interesting behavior, both in terms of graphical anomalies and things we can discuss and just like general game behavior."

Linus Tech Tips and other channels under LMG recently resumed uploads following a massive controversy when the content creator was called out for factual inaccuracies and poor quality control in his videos.