Starfield PS5 Crashing

Update []: There are now numerous reports across the likes of Reddit and social media that Sony is refunding Starfield on PS5.

Players are being met with a successful refund upon getting in touch with PlayStation support — but it's not a guarantee. Some users' requests simply aren't being pushed through — for whatever reason — so it's not like when Sony was dishing out Cyberpunk 2077 refunds en masse.

Still, it just goes to show how widespread Starfield's issues actually are. As mentioned in our original story below, plenty of players will have been hit with these crashing problems over the game's opening weekend, when they've had the chance to put a good chunk of time into the sci-fi adventure.

Just quickly jumping back to the topic of Cyberpunk 2077, it's highly likely that the PS5's own crashing report system played a key role in the entire refund process; continuous error reports act as proof that something's fundamentally wrong with the product.

You'd think that it'll be a similar story with Starfield — hell, we've submitted at least 20 reports over the course of about 15 hours of playtime.

All eyes are on Bethesda, then. While not everyone is encountering these crashes, it's abundantly clear that something needs to be done. Starfield will have been out for a full week this Thursday, and the developer's yet to comment on the situation.

Original Story: Something is causing Starfield to repeatedly crash on both PS5 and PS5 Pro — and no one's quite sure why.

Before we go into the details, we should note that this doesn't appear to be a universal issue. When we played the game for the sake of our Starfield PS5 review, we didn't encounter any serious problems.

However, across sites like Reddit, reports of regular or even frequent crashes are becoming more and more common as the title enters its first weekend on Sony's console.

It's worrying stuff, because we're now experiencing these crashes ourselves. This particular author started the game for the first time on Friday night, and was met with repeatable crashes upon exploring one of the title's major cities.

Naturally, we ran some tests, and as far as we can tell, the crashing is at least influenced by the graphics settings that you're using. On PS5 Pro, we went through every mode — Visuals, Enhanced, and Performance — with the frame rate uncapped, and we very quickly hit crashes across all of them.

It was only when we capped the frame rate at 60 frames-per-second that we could advance through the city without the game freezing up on us. However, we then stumbled into consistent crashes when traversing the wilderness.

We got around that by disabling PSSR 2 — the PS5 Pro's upgraded, AI-driven upscaler — through the system's display menu. Starfield hasn't crashed in the several hours that we've played since.

But this is just our own experience; users in the aforementioned Reddit thread have been toying with all sorts of "fixes", and nothing seems to work.

And obviously, disabling PSSR 2 doesn't apply to playing the sci-fi RPG on base hardware, where crashes also occur.

In short, there's something very wrong with Starfield right now.

Even Digital Foundry's fallen afoul of the dreaded crashes. In their technical review for Starfield, they write: "Unfortunately, both PS5 and PS5 Pro crashed somewhat regularly during testing, a phenomenon that didn't affect the Xbox Series release on launch. When crashing, the game locks up and becomes unresponsive, requiring a forced restart at the system level. We observed this behaviour across multiple modes and configurations, so there's no obvious suggestion on how to avoid these issues."

The hope, then, is that Bethesda gets this sorted sooner rather than later. Starfield launched on the 7th April for PS5, and it hasn't yet received any additional updates.

Of course, Bethesda has a frankly shocking track record when it comes to shipping borderline broken video games — but Starfield's arrived on PS5 nearing three years after its debut on Xbox and PC. The fact that it's crippled by crashing simply beggars belief.

Have you ran into any crashing issues with Starfield on PS5, or PS5 Pro? Let out a long sigh in the comments section below.

[source reddit.com, via digitalfoundry.net]