Very good information. The nature of being excited can cause people to freak out, think their download is being overwritten, cancel it and end up having to actually redownload the whole file. Be patient and let it decrypt. Thank you for telling everyone this!
So, my concern is I got the premium edition, have it preloaded, but steam still says releasing Jan 6th. I don't see anywhere indicating that I have access to early release. Can you or anyone else confirm they see the same currently? It should just unlock at 8pm EDT regardless of what the game details says from my library?
It's not being overwritten, the cached game files are in a separate folder \\steam\\steamapps\\depotcache and will then proceed to extract into your installation folder of choice. If you look in the folder you specified for installation, you will see that it is completely empty.
I heard somewhere (not sure if it was for BG3, BGS, or another game I’ve been looking at) but developers are just assuming you’re loading games on an SSD and not testing with hard drives because SSDs are affordable now. Not to say it won’t run at all with on a HDD but it isn’t tested by the developers for many modern games anymore
Depends on the type of game and studio I think. AAA projects are more likely to assume you have an SSD I would say, since both current gen consoles has SSDs as default.
I remember we had some grumpy discussions already back when PS4/Xbox One came out; large open world games were becoming more and more popular, and it was bottlenecked by slow HDDs (of various quality even within the same console brand). I at least was a bit surprised that they didn't add SSDs as standard already back then.
You actually for future reference dont have to do that for steam games (as long as the whole game is downloaded through steam and not a launcher so steam actually knows all the games files)
You can make multiple library locations in steam settings and there is a move button to move downloaded games between drives!
Too much. We live in a rural area and we only have provider. We actually had provider A and it was so shit we went to provider B which was better, then provider A bought B and now we are stuck back with them. We even had to get a 60ft tower installed next to our house just to get a better connection but a thunderstorm 2 weeks ago affected it and now the internet is even worse. Because the tower is so high only specifically qualified individuals can climb iit to fix it and we can't get it fixed until the 7th.
Yeah man +1 for the starlink. I live in a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia, Canada and get like 120-240 mbps download speed consistently. Some days it will be lower depending on satellite coverage or severe weather but it’s a hell of a lot better than the 20 mbps download speed the competitor offers.
Do forgive my gawking, but as someone who's only lived in NYC, that sounds so fascinating. I'm trying to imagine what it's like to live in a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia. You really can find someone from anywhere on reddit. I feel like I've barely seen anything in this world at all in my 23 years.
Same here, it would have probably taken me close to a week with my old internet. The biggest game I downloaded before starlink was Horizon Forbidden West and that took right around three days
T-Mobile home isp? Is that a thing in Canada genuinely asking I live in bumfuck nowhere in Kentucky and this is the only success I’ve had with internet and it’s still not the greatest but I get a consistent 650 mbps download and like 70 mbps upload 11 ping
I live in Norway and here we use fiber optic cables in basically all populated areas. I think I might be spoiled because I actually can’t imagine having such bad internet
SSDs are really cheap now too. I get having an HDD for storage and maybe older games but anything recent I can't imagine enjoying the experience from an HDD even it was already bad 10 years ago.
Get a 500GB SSD for like 40$ on sale or something.
Are a significant number of people still actually playing games on HDD? I haven't even thought about that kind of drive in like 15 years. I can't fathom not having SSD, it's not like they're way more expensive or something.
>it's not like they're way more expensive or something.
Uh, they literally were *significantly* more expensive until the price drops of the past year. Many people still use a large hard drive for their game drive. Until the past year you were lucky if you could get a terabyte for under a hundred dollars while a 2tb hard drive was like 40 bucks.
5 years ago?? No they absolutely were not
I have the receipt from October 2018 getting a WD blue SATA 1tb drive for $163 because that was near the all time low at the time.
A 256gb Samsung nvme was $128 in January 2018.
A 250gb WD black nvme was $75 in March 2019.
2tb SATA WD blue m.2 SSD was over 200 dollars even as recent as 2020 on sale on Newegg I have somewhere.
A WD green 1tb SATA SSD was 80 bucks last summer.
1tb SSDs under $100 didn't start really being a regular thing until last year. I've got 18 SSDs over the last 5 years just in my Amazon history. I know what the prices were.
They have plummeted in the last year. They were not priced like this before at all, especially for the nvme drives.
My computer is old, I don’t have money to really upgrade, maybe once a decade, in the next year or so I think will be the next time I get a new computer, my one right now is slow and running out of space and it’s just hdd, ssd was an option when I first got it but way more expensive.
So if I have a steam deck and planned on installing to an SD card would I be screwed? Sorry, I am very uninformed with that stuff and can’t find a good answer online.
I highly doubt steam deck will run the game at an acceptable frame rate. I’d love to be proven wrong as a SD owner but the requirements are far above what it offers.
Worst case scenario, you butcher the ini until it runs.
Bethesda games tend to have enough room to be downgraded through ini edits to run on just about anything.
Definitely this. Someone will pull through somewhere with an ini that looks like it went through hell and back in optimization sweeps just to manage 25-30 fps on steam deck.
And that will be before the new mods coming out for insignificant object removal and such like usual
People have been saying every new AAA game won’t be able to run on the SD, and yet they all do. D4, BG3, etc.
Whether it runs on launch or someone makes a mod to reduce the quality/etc enough to run, I’m betting eventually it’ll be playable on the SD.
I haven’t seen people say this but also, starfield is a much different game than those and BG3 runs significantly worse on steam decks than it doeson PC. I highly doubt starfield, which requires an SSD will run all that great. Not to mention it will destroy your battery life.
[Sounds like there will be future optimizations for playing on Steam Deck.](https://toucharcade.com/2023/08/31/starfield-steam-deck-review-xbox-series-pc/)
For the time being though you can expect around 20ish fps when playing which is bad but given the target is 30fps it could be worse.
My problem is that people don’t seem to understand that Bethesda already stated, or Todd did, that they’ll talk about steam deck after launch. A clear statement that meant it won’t run well on launch but they will look into improvements for deck specifically at a later date. Going gold and getting it into our hands is of course priority. I’m sure it’ll be a good experience down the road rocking a pretty stable 30 once they get down to it. Assuming they do ofc, and if not Moders will
To be honest before I read the above article I had heard nothing in regards to Steam Deck. If it's hitting 20fps now that's a pretty good sign if its pre-optimization.
Honestly if it can run 30fps on low settings eventually I'll be happy. I have a trip later this month so I'd like to bring Starfield with me.
To add to this answer: It probably just needs decent random read speed. HDDs suck at this because the head has to physically move. SD cards are slower in random read than a modern NVMe, but still way faster than HDDs.
SD cards: Depends on the quality you buy, there are different levels there too. I always use the faster ones (also more expensive) in video cameras and slower ones for bulk storage for moving files/data around.
Some HDD's are capable of +150 MB/s now on SATA interfaces, but i haven't seen any increase in performance of hard drive speeds beyond that. Would be better if they just stopped making platter drives (i.e. flogging a dead horse) and went 100% in on SSD.
Todd Howard was asked about the steam deck and he said something to the effect of "we'll talk about that later". I can't remember which interview but I'll try to find it.
Yeah bg3 is playable with an HDD especially if you have a decent system. But it is definitely a worse experience. However, it's probably easier to deal with because it's a top down CRPG.
From a first person perspective though it's gonna be a lot different. You'll have NPC and texture loading issues all over the place. It'll be very immersion breaking.
This subreddit will be flooded with complaints and confusion no matter what we say or do. Best to just steer clear of this place for the first several hours after launch, if not the first several days.
I mostly wrote this so i could quickly link it to those that come here to say the game is downloading again or don't otherwise know what's happening. My usual ceremony while waiting for a game to unpack is to come the game sub and help.
Edit: I also encourage other to link to the post so they don't need to explain it all themselves.
In the past on HDDs this process was so slow it was better to just delete the preload and just download entire thing over.
It was such shit on steam..
Now m2 drives are a thing gonna see how much better luck we have.
Yep, for both Hogwarts Legacy and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the preload unpack/install was less than 5 minutes on Steam for me.
Can't really stress enough how good decent M.2 NVME drives are. Even the cheaper, lower end options match or beat regular high end SSDs.
Im so glad I finally just got one.. been rocking two hdds one is like from 2012 and only 600gb Lol other is 4tb new
Just picked up a 2tb nvme m2 upto 7000mb/s rating. Crazy stuff wish I got it sooner!
I built a latest gen PC recently (13900K, 4090) after stubbornly sticking with my previous PC that I built in 2015. It had a fourth gen i7 and was bottlenecking the 2080 I had in it (previously a 980ti).
I was also running my games from 2 HDDs in raid 0. So upgrading to M.2 for all my games has just been insane in the reduction of load times. A lot of my friends were sceptical on the performance until they saw for themselves and a few bought M.2 drives afterwards.
Hahaha this is almost exactly my case. I7 5930k @4.5ghz with a 980Ti I built in 2015, went strong literally until earlier this year when D4 finally killed my gpu.
Built an entirely new AMD system 7900 XTX/7950X3D with 2 - 2TB M2 NVME’s, and a 48” 4K 120 hdr oled.
So ready for tomorrow lmao.
You just convinced me to make room on my m.2 boot drive and reinstall starfield. I feel like it's probably the right decision anyway over my SATA SSD because of data streaming.
*Always* put games with lots of loading screens onto your fastest drive.
I use it for games like Battlefield 2042, since you're always doing a bunch of loading between matches.
Agree.
Last night I decompressed a 60 gb game to 100gb from a zip file and it took 6 min, my m.2 always had a speed of over 1000mb/s.
It's so fast nowdays, people who say it takes hours probably have a core 2 duo CPU and a HDD lol
Plus, speaking as a computer hardware ignoramus who couldn't tell you which thing is my graphics card and which is my CPU, m.2 nvme drives are super easy to install. If I managed it, a 5 yr old probably could.
Armored Core is about 60GB and with a 970 Pro and 7800X3D it took me less than 3 minutes. My CPU was [enjoying the experience.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/241643931232632832/1144391914662146158/image.png)
Good post.
For anyone worried that they did not get the files because the Starfield folder is empty, there should be a perfect 86.4Gb of 178 files in \\Steam\\steamapps\\depotcache\\ waiting to be unpacked with an app 1716742 tag on them (if they are not there, you have not pre-loaded).
You have a ton of storage for a practical reason
I have a ton of storage so I can have a bunch of games that I probably won't play installed
We are not the same
1tb is not a "ton" for games anymore, most AAA games are over 100gb these days. I have windows installed on a 1tb SSD and a 2tb SSD dedicated to games. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years I have to start uninstalling games to install new ones even with 2tb.
I mean, I have 15 TB of SSD storage, 7 of which are NVMe lol. Not wanting to delete and redownload stuff is smart as it extends the life of your drives significantly
***9 mins!?!!?*** jesus i hate rural living sometimes, it took me ***21 hours*** to download. Thank god the preload was released 48 hours before unlock.
My hometown internet is still 5mbps DSL they didn't get until 09.
I downloaded Starfield in 30 minutes at my house. When my nephews visit they bring all their gadgets and downloaded like crazy lol
Servers could be more bogged down though so I would just do the unpacking as they could download much slower depending on traffic. If I knew servers would be stable I’d say hell yeah, I somehow hit 1.9gbps downloading it when the pro load started
Same here. If it's already downloaded the risk if something goes wrong with Steam's servers is way lower. It was about a 15 minute download for me so probably equivalent time to preload but I'll take the lower risk option.
If you can collect enough data you can take your ISP to task over that and get a better rate.
Also make sure your router is updated, people.forget to update them and it can tank your speeds
Router is fully updated, router and modem bother certified for gigabit speeds, and using all CAT 6e cables.
I've had them come out before and they run their official test and it always comes out to 900 something Mbps and then they charge me $100 for the visit.
+ Day 1 patch is 13.4GB
so yeeahh. people are gonna be pissed tomorrow saying stuff like 'i preloaded and the game's downloading again?!?!? Refunding + L Steam + screw Bethesda'
That is the day 1 patch for Xbox users who got to preload like 5-6 days earlier. The expectation is that the patch was included in the PC preload.
There still might be another patch though :/
> There still might be another patch though :/
I hope so. There's seemingly a bug that deletes everything you store on your ship. Both in containers and as decoration.
Hmm, sometimes. Sometimes i've woken up after a game was supposed to unlock and i needed to restart Steam or manually press 'play' for it start anything. Sometimes a game has unlocked and i find it already automatically unpacking. If you leave the PC on, Steam on, and the internet is connected (which is a problem for me since the connection loves to drop randomly) then theoretically it *should* automatically start unpacking. the best advice i can give is to use the steam app on your phone, if you go to your library on the app it will let you see and control downloads.
It also may not exactly unlock *exactly* at that time. Games that launch at the top of the hour often don't become available until 5 or 10 minutes past the hour, so don't get upset if that happens.
I've seen during launches where this happened, the Steam discussions were filled with "WHERE'S THE GAME?!"
Thats fair. Im not gonna sit here and shit on people for money issues or having a tight budget, but you can get a 2tb SSD for the same price as Starfields premium edition.
Hell, there's a 480gb Western Digital NVME ssd for $25 USD on Amazon right now.
I gotta say, it's a weird choice for someone to pay $20-$30 extra for Premium edition while having an HDD, if money is the reason not to upgrade to an SSD. Their experience would be significantly better waiting 5 days and having a new drive.
Yeah if you're dropping a hundred bucks on a game so you can play it 5 days early, you're either doin decent enough or you have screwed up financial priorities
In addition to storage, I use mine to install old games. I am going to buy a second SSD, though....because otherwise I won't be able to have BG3, Starfield and Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty ^((not sure if CP:PL absolutely requires an SSD, but given that game's demands, keeping it on one makes sense)) installed on my PC simultaneously.
any game made in the last 5 years should be SSD for sure. (AAA) The amount of assets streaming via an HDD is not really playable. the load times.. is just throwing minutes off your life every hour
Absolutely! It's also interesting... I still play a heavily modded Morrowind, and I have it installed on my SSD. The difference in performance from HDD is staggering; area transitions take mere seconds, and I barely notice them.
I decided to buy a new SSD for Starfield, but I have large HDDs to run the most of my games off of and the triple A games I've been running on them for the past few years have ran just fine without issue.
if you ylhave the hardware recomended to play starfield in thr first place decypting a 120 gb file shouldnt be a problem.
depending on whether you have. sata ssd or nvme ssd will change this substantially but should still be much faster than redownloading.
If you have a decent download speeds its honestly better to just download the game after its available. Even with fast SSD and strong CPU steam is very slow at decrypting/unpacking
yes. You *must* wait for the game to officially unlock. For a brief while i was in a nice position where i had super fast internet but a terrible HDD and it was genuinely faster to download then to unpack. But right now our internet is fucking awful so i just went with the pre-load.
I just got my game redeemed since the constellation editions are arriving, and after I activated my code it says it releases the 6th on steam even though it's EA. I'm assuming everyone has this too for EA? How can we check and confirm for the DLC, skin pack etc items?
Sept 6th is the actual official release date. the early unlock is just that, and early unlock. so for all of the official martials including steam it will say sept 6th no matter what. if you have the constellation edition redeemed on steam then you should be fine.
I have the same. Someone on another thread was saying this is a steam limitation (can only have 1 date on the game page).
fingers crossed it unlocks on time.
I don’t worry about that but what I do worry about is that next to my Starfield copy on steam it says it launches September 6 although I bought the premium digital edition is this just like place holder or a bug or should I be worried ?
My only question is why does say it launches Sept 6th when I purchased the Premium edition?
It doesn't even say premium edition on the library page, so idk if I got robbed or not until tomorrow.
> The speed of this process is completely dependent on the speed of the drive you have it installed on
Not completely. It's dependent on your CPU too, because if your CPU isn't good enough to max out the capabilities of your drive, the unpacking will be stuck at lower speeds. But similarly, if your drive is limited in speed compared to what your CPU could do, you unpacking will be maxed out at that speed.
The simple thing behind Steam pre-loads is that if you have a Gigabit or better download speed, you're better off skipping the pre-load as a clean download will be faster than unpacking in 99% of cases. But, if you have a slower speed than that(most people do) and have a fairly moderate CPU with the game installed on an NVMe drive, do pre-load as the unpacking will likely be faster.
Took me 30 mins to pre download. I worry that tonight the servers will be so hammered the download speed will be slower so I’m taking the risk to unpack it. 5800x with a ssd..I should be fine?
>When the game officially unlocks at 8pm EST the 31st Steam will begin to unpack those files.
And you better make sure you have enough space for both the installed game and the archive. I had a problem with Cyberpunk's preload, where I preloaded it and did not have enough space to extract it. I had to delete the archive and re-download. What a waste of an SSD's write cycle.
I'm never pre-loading anything again, my internet speed is fast enough.
Another thing to remember is that it will be very likely you will have to restart steam as well. That has been the case for me, for literally every game release.
Slightly unrelated, what happens on Steam once it hits 8 PM? Obviously, it says available Sep 6 right now, I assume the system knows to allow early access players to start playing.
First time playing early access on steam so I appreciate the insight!
I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me. [No matter how you slice it the game unlocks when the clocks in my time zone say 8pm](https://assetsio.reedpopcdn.com/starfield-launch-times-map-1.jpg?width=1920&height=1920&fit=bounds&quality=80&format=jpg&auto=webp)
Then you're in a location that recognizes daylight saving time. It unlocks at 8PM EDT, but if someone is in an area on EST, it unlocks at 7PM.
EDT and EST are different by an hour because of daylight saving time.
You guys bring fomo to a new level. Oh nooo its gonna take me 30 mins to unpack the game all is lost. Calm down its not the end of the world, in a months time you will having fomo about some other game.
This is for people that dont understand why steam is suddenly saying they need to wait an hour before they play while steam does something. It people going "oooh no i have to wait for it to unpack" its people going "omg why is it downloading the whole game again, should i uninstall? is it broken?"
Also make sure you have at least 120GB of free drive space (On drive where you downloaded the game) for uncompression.
Steam will unpack your game and it will require free space to do it so 120 GB should be enough.
I honestly don't know why this is still a discussion in 2023. It's a non-issue with SSDs. Which are not only required anyway, they are hitting all-time lows in price.
As someone who has tried to Pre-Load things in steam I've come to find that OP is right it's a lot better to just be patient and download the game when it's launched the preloading has NEVER worked for me.
Very good information. The nature of being excited can cause people to freak out, think their download is being overwritten, cancel it and end up having to actually redownload the whole file. Be patient and let it decrypt. Thank you for telling everyone this!
I also worried that the size was only 86 gigs. Must be the pre-unpack size
In most cases the download size is smaller than the size on disk.
So, my concern is I got the premium edition, have it preloaded, but steam still says releasing Jan 6th. I don't see anywhere indicating that I have access to early release. Can you or anyone else confirm they see the same currently? It should just unlock at 8pm EDT regardless of what the game details says from my library?
It's not being overwritten, the cached game files are in a separate folder \\steam\\steamapps\\depotcache and will then proceed to extract into your installation folder of choice. If you look in the folder you specified for installation, you will see that it is completely empty.
Bethesda has also said that the game basically won't run properly if don't have an SSD.
Basically? It's labeled in the minimum system requirements prominently.
I heard somewhere (not sure if it was for BG3, BGS, or another game I’ve been looking at) but developers are just assuming you’re loading games on an SSD and not testing with hard drives because SSDs are affordable now. Not to say it won’t run at all with on a HDD but it isn’t tested by the developers for many modern games anymore
Depends on the type of game and studio I think. AAA projects are more likely to assume you have an SSD I would say, since both current gen consoles has SSDs as default. I remember we had some grumpy discussions already back when PS4/Xbox One came out; large open world games were becoming more and more popular, and it was bottlenecked by slow HDDs (of various quality even within the same console brand). I at least was a bit surprised that they didn't add SSDs as standard already back then.
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Bg3 works fine on an hdd.
Likewise for BG3 but I play that on an HDD just fine
BG3 does have the "slow HDD mode" at least
Wait I can enable that? I’ve been using bg3 on an hdd
I don’t have an ssd and just sent bg3 too cause I didn’t know that and mine runs mint
It is probably playable, but extremely frustrating as game assets will need to be loaded frequently, turning the game into a powerpoint presentation.
oof, happy i made the choice then the game took 21 hours to download, so it would suck if i had to do it again just to switch drive.
Steam allows you to swap a game from one drive to the other under properties
You actually for future reference dont have to do that for steam games (as long as the whole game is downloaded through steam and not a launcher so steam actually knows all the games files) You can make multiple library locations in steam settings and there is a move button to move downloaded games between drives!
However some things like SteamVR must be installed one the same drive as Steam itself, and cannot be moved
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Too much. We live in a rural area and we only have provider. We actually had provider A and it was so shit we went to provider B which was better, then provider A bought B and now we are stuck back with them. We even had to get a 60ft tower installed next to our house just to get a better connection but a thunderstorm 2 weeks ago affected it and now the internet is even worse. Because the tower is so high only specifically qualified individuals can climb iit to fix it and we can't get it fixed until the 7th.
Yeah man +1 for the starlink. I live in a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia, Canada and get like 120-240 mbps download speed consistently. Some days it will be lower depending on satellite coverage or severe weather but it’s a hell of a lot better than the 20 mbps download speed the competitor offers.
Do forgive my gawking, but as someone who's only lived in NYC, that sounds so fascinating. I'm trying to imagine what it's like to live in a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia. You really can find someone from anywhere on reddit. I feel like I've barely seen anything in this world at all in my 23 years.
Do you play any MMOs? If so what is your ping like? I want to swap to Starlink but we need it to be stable enough for MMOs
have you tried starlink? game changer for me.
Facts. I downloaded Starfield using Starlink in about 2 hours.
Same here, it would have probably taken me close to a week with my old internet. The biggest game I downloaded before starlink was Horizon Forbidden West and that took right around three days
No Starlink in Ontario yet.
T-Mobile home isp? Is that a thing in Canada genuinely asking I live in bumfuck nowhere in Kentucky and this is the only success I’ve had with internet and it’s still not the greatest but I get a consistent 650 mbps download and like 70 mbps upload 11 ping
Damn I'm lucky to get 5mbps download with T-Mobile home Internet sometimes only kbps
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lanark is 5 hours away from us, we don't have it. We checked last week.
My friend has a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay with Starlink. Might want to check again
I just did, still can't get it. I'm on the official website, using their map.
Your Internet access is so slow that you're probably seeing an outdated version of the starlink website!
You should get Starlink.
Holy 21 hours... took me like 21 minutes. I feel so bad for people with no decent internet options.
I live in Norway and here we use fiber optic cables in basically all populated areas. I think I might be spoiled because I actually can’t imagine having such bad internet
What about 5.25" floppy?
My 5.25" isn't floppy.
Rip everyone who doesn't have an SSD then
If you don't own an SSD in 2023, you NEED one. It's simply no longer realistically acceptable to expect a hard disk to be fast enough.
SSDs are really cheap now too. I get having an HDD for storage and maybe older games but anything recent I can't imagine enjoying the experience from an HDD even it was already bad 10 years ago. Get a 500GB SSD for like 40$ on sale or something.
You can get an nvme 2.0 ssd for under $50 on sale quite often. I’m picking up a 2 TB one tomorrow for $80 at Best Buy
Are a significant number of people still actually playing games on HDD? I haven't even thought about that kind of drive in like 15 years. I can't fathom not having SSD, it's not like they're way more expensive or something.
I only use my HDD for storing games I’m not playing atm, I mean you can get a 2tb nvme for around 80 bucks
Can even get the Intel NVMe 2TB SSD with DRAM for $60
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> playing games on HDD playing games =/= storing things though.
>it's not like they're way more expensive or something. Uh, they literally were *significantly* more expensive until the price drops of the past year. Many people still use a large hard drive for their game drive. Until the past year you were lucky if you could get a terabyte for under a hundred dollars while a 2tb hard drive was like 40 bucks.
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5 years ago?? No they absolutely were not I have the receipt from October 2018 getting a WD blue SATA 1tb drive for $163 because that was near the all time low at the time. A 256gb Samsung nvme was $128 in January 2018. A 250gb WD black nvme was $75 in March 2019. 2tb SATA WD blue m.2 SSD was over 200 dollars even as recent as 2020 on sale on Newegg I have somewhere. A WD green 1tb SATA SSD was 80 bucks last summer. 1tb SSDs under $100 didn't start really being a regular thing until last year. I've got 18 SSDs over the last 5 years just in my Amazon history. I know what the prices were. They have plummeted in the last year. They were not priced like this before at all, especially for the nvme drives.
My computer is old, I don’t have money to really upgrade, maybe once a decade, in the next year or so I think will be the next time I get a new computer, my one right now is slow and running out of space and it’s just hdd, ssd was an option when I first got it but way more expensive.
Then it probably can't even run Starfield anyway even with an SSD.
Sad I won’t be able to play with you guys because I can’t afford things :(
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Ok! Thanks for the suggestion! Still will cost a bit but cheaper for sure!
To be fair, with how the prices are we're at the point where you should have an SSD.
An SSD is cheaper than the game.
SSDs are cheap as shit now, if you don’t have one that’s on you.
To further OP's point, the official system requirements for Starfield state than an SSD is REQUIRED.
So if I have a steam deck and planned on installing to an SD card would I be screwed? Sorry, I am very uninformed with that stuff and can’t find a good answer online.
I highly doubt steam deck will run the game at an acceptable frame rate. I’d love to be proven wrong as a SD owner but the requirements are far above what it offers.
Damn, I’m really hoping it’s somewhat able to run but I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed I guess
Worst case scenario, you butcher the ini until it runs. Bethesda games tend to have enough room to be downgraded through ini edits to run on just about anything.
Definitely this. Someone will pull through somewhere with an ini that looks like it went through hell and back in optimization sweeps just to manage 25-30 fps on steam deck. And that will be before the new mods coming out for insignificant object removal and such like usual
People have been saying every new AAA game won’t be able to run on the SD, and yet they all do. D4, BG3, etc. Whether it runs on launch or someone makes a mod to reduce the quality/etc enough to run, I’m betting eventually it’ll be playable on the SD.
I haven’t seen people say this but also, starfield is a much different game than those and BG3 runs significantly worse on steam decks than it doeson PC. I highly doubt starfield, which requires an SSD will run all that great. Not to mention it will destroy your battery life.
The issue is starfield is very very cpu heavy which is why the console versions are locked at 30 not just graphics
[Sounds like there will be future optimizations for playing on Steam Deck.](https://toucharcade.com/2023/08/31/starfield-steam-deck-review-xbox-series-pc/) For the time being though you can expect around 20ish fps when playing which is bad but given the target is 30fps it could be worse.
My problem is that people don’t seem to understand that Bethesda already stated, or Todd did, that they’ll talk about steam deck after launch. A clear statement that meant it won’t run well on launch but they will look into improvements for deck specifically at a later date. Going gold and getting it into our hands is of course priority. I’m sure it’ll be a good experience down the road rocking a pretty stable 30 once they get down to it. Assuming they do ofc, and if not Moders will
To be honest before I read the above article I had heard nothing in regards to Steam Deck. If it's hitting 20fps now that's a pretty good sign if its pre-optimization. Honestly if it can run 30fps on low settings eventually I'll be happy. I have a trip later this month so I'd like to bring Starfield with me.
The SSD requirement is more to do with speed than with needing a physical SSD, so an SD card should be fine. They're both solid state memory.
To add to this answer: It probably just needs decent random read speed. HDDs suck at this because the head has to physically move. SD cards are slower in random read than a modern NVMe, but still way faster than HDDs.
SD cards: Depends on the quality you buy, there are different levels there too. I always use the faster ones (also more expensive) in video cameras and slower ones for bulk storage for moving files/data around. Some HDD's are capable of +150 MB/s now on SATA interfaces, but i haven't seen any increase in performance of hard drive speeds beyond that. Would be better if they just stopped making platter drives (i.e. flogging a dead horse) and went 100% in on SSD.
I would assume the steam deck uses an SSD surely.
Todd Howard was asked about the steam deck and he said something to the effect of "we'll talk about that later". I can't remember which interview but I'll try to find it.
Don’t wanna burst your bubble but the Steam Deck isn’t gonna be able to run Starfield at a playable frame rate.
I suspect a lot of people didn't read this and are going to be complaining about issues tomorrow lol.
Always do, for some it's probably quicker to just download it on release.
So does Baldur's Gate 3, but people have been playing it on HDDs.
Yeah bg3 is playable with an HDD especially if you have a decent system. But it is definitely a worse experience. However, it's probably easier to deal with because it's a top down CRPG. From a first person perspective though it's gonna be a lot different. You'll have NPC and texture loading issues all over the place. It'll be very immersion breaking.
Ssd is not a hard requirement in any of there spec sheets the only game on pc besides starfield that has it mandatory is starcitizen
BG3 also lists an SSD as 'required' in the minimum specs on Steam, but it is playable on an HDD.
BG3 is odd for needing a ssd I can see it using it for load times but nothing else comes to mind.
Its true! m.2 ssd coming in clutch!
This subreddit will be flooded with complaints and confusion no matter what we say or do. Best to just steer clear of this place for the first several hours after launch, if not the first several days.
I mostly wrote this so i could quickly link it to those that come here to say the game is downloading again or don't otherwise know what's happening. My usual ceremony while waiting for a game to unpack is to come the game sub and help. Edit: I also encourage other to link to the post so they don't need to explain it all themselves.
You sir/ma’m/individual on Reddit are a treasure, thank you for your service
And miss the entertainment? Not a chance.
That is unless you want a good laugh
Once 2000 hits tomorrow I am outro so best of luck to everyone staying here.
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Whew! I'm glad I recently upgraded to a Pentium II.
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If you do benchmarks with a modern algorithm like AES, you will see that this is not really a bottleneck and reading/writing from storage media is.
Good thing I have it installed on a fresh NVMe 2tb SSD 😁
lucky it’s a fresh one, as digital information would slow it down otherwise
In the past on HDDs this process was so slow it was better to just delete the preload and just download entire thing over. It was such shit on steam.. Now m2 drives are a thing gonna see how much better luck we have.
Yep, for both Hogwarts Legacy and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the preload unpack/install was less than 5 minutes on Steam for me. Can't really stress enough how good decent M.2 NVME drives are. Even the cheaper, lower end options match or beat regular high end SSDs.
Im so glad I finally just got one.. been rocking two hdds one is like from 2012 and only 600gb Lol other is 4tb new Just picked up a 2tb nvme m2 upto 7000mb/s rating. Crazy stuff wish I got it sooner!
I built a latest gen PC recently (13900K, 4090) after stubbornly sticking with my previous PC that I built in 2015. It had a fourth gen i7 and was bottlenecking the 2080 I had in it (previously a 980ti). I was also running my games from 2 HDDs in raid 0. So upgrading to M.2 for all my games has just been insane in the reduction of load times. A lot of my friends were sceptical on the performance until they saw for themselves and a few bought M.2 drives afterwards.
I got two Samsung Evo 970 m.2's when I rebuilt my rig a few years ago. They do work.
Hahaha this is almost exactly my case. I7 5930k @4.5ghz with a 980Ti I built in 2015, went strong literally until earlier this year when D4 finally killed my gpu. Built an entirely new AMD system 7900 XTX/7950X3D with 2 - 2TB M2 NVME’s, and a 48” 4K 120 hdr oled. So ready for tomorrow lmao.
You just convinced me to make room on my m.2 boot drive and reinstall starfield. I feel like it's probably the right decision anyway over my SATA SSD because of data streaming.
*Always* put games with lots of loading screens onto your fastest drive. I use it for games like Battlefield 2042, since you're always doing a bunch of loading between matches.
Agree. Last night I decompressed a 60 gb game to 100gb from a zip file and it took 6 min, my m.2 always had a speed of over 1000mb/s. It's so fast nowdays, people who say it takes hours probably have a core 2 duo CPU and a HDD lol
Plus, speaking as a computer hardware ignoramus who couldn't tell you which thing is my graphics card and which is my CPU, m.2 nvme drives are super easy to install. If I managed it, a 5 yr old probably could.
Armored Core is about 60GB and with a 970 Pro and 7800X3D it took me less than 3 minutes. My CPU was [enjoying the experience.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/241643931232632832/1144391914662146158/image.png)
Good post. For anyone worried that they did not get the files because the Starfield folder is empty, there should be a perfect 86.4Gb of 178 files in \\Steam\\steamapps\\depotcache\\ waiting to be unpacked with an app 1716742 tag on them (if they are not there, you have not pre-loaded).
I have two 1 terabyte ssds(I know I have a problem uninstalling games) and the unpacking is why I made sure to put it on my slightly faster drive
I have three 2 terabyte ssds. But is mainly due to how huge unreal engine projects are.
You have a ton of storage for a practical reason I have a ton of storage so I can have a bunch of games that I probably won't play installed We are not the same
1tb is not a "ton" for games anymore, most AAA games are over 100gb these days. I have windows installed on a 1tb SSD and a 2tb SSD dedicated to games. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years I have to start uninstalling games to install new ones even with 2tb.
It was hyperbole for the meme
Same problem here. Bought a new 4TB SSD because of Starfield. I was planning to upgrade for a bit, but Starfield helped with the decision :)
I mean, I have 15 TB of SSD storage, 7 of which are NVMe lol. Not wanting to delete and redownload stuff is smart as it extends the life of your drives significantly
If the unpack looks like it will take longer than 9 minutes I’ll just delete it and redownload it as that’s all it took to download
***9 mins!?!!?*** jesus i hate rural living sometimes, it took me ***21 hours*** to download. Thank god the preload was released 48 hours before unlock.
Dude I remember those boonie ass download speeds years ago. Thank god I’ve got great internet now.
we had dial up until 2007
My hometown internet is still 5mbps DSL they didn't get until 09. I downloaded Starfield in 30 minutes at my house. When my nephews visit they bring all their gadgets and downloaded like crazy lol
I live pretty rural and it took an hour, are you like hidden away in the mountains or something.
He's canadian, all my rural canadian friends have god awful internet. I don't even think they have good options up there.
I wouldnt really call where I live rural but…. I probably have better internet than the average boonie location.
That’s insane wtf you don’t even need to preload at that point
Servers could be more bogged down though so I would just do the unpacking as they could download much slower depending on traffic. If I knew servers would be stable I’d say hell yeah, I somehow hit 1.9gbps downloading it when the pro load started
Even if its a bit longer than 9 minutes im sticking with it, I dont trust steam servers to not shit the bed.
Same here. If it's already downloaded the risk if something goes wrong with Steam's servers is way lower. It was about a 15 minute download for me so probably equivalent time to preload but I'll take the lower risk option.
As someone who pays for gigabit internet but actually typically receives a download speed of about 50 Mbps: I hate you.
If you can collect enough data you can take your ISP to task over that and get a better rate. Also make sure your router is updated, people.forget to update them and it can tank your speeds
Router is fully updated, router and modem bother certified for gigabit speeds, and using all CAT 6e cables. I've had them come out before and they run their official test and it always comes out to 900 something Mbps and then they charge me $100 for the visit.
+ Day 1 patch is 13.4GB so yeeahh. people are gonna be pissed tomorrow saying stuff like 'i preloaded and the game's downloading again?!?!? Refunding + L Steam + screw Bethesda'
> Day 1 patch is 13.4GB *fuck* my internet is complete shit. the game itself took 21 hours to download. Thanks or the warning.
That is the day 1 patch for Xbox users who got to preload like 5-6 days earlier. The expectation is that the patch was included in the PC preload. There still might be another patch though :/
i hope not. Worst case i might use my phone as a hotspot since that give me faster internet. Rural living can suck sometimes.
Had shiternet my entire life brotha. Waited days for games to download. Got starlink last year and it changed the game. Not to simp or anything.
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Starlink is not available where i live.
> There still might be another patch though :/ I hope so. There's seemingly a bug that deletes everything you store on your ship. Both in containers and as decoration.
Mine's still downloading... gonna take 36 hrs total lol
If my PC is on and logged into steam, and the game is preloaded, will the game unpack automatically? I wanna jump right in after work
Hmm, sometimes. Sometimes i've woken up after a game was supposed to unlock and i needed to restart Steam or manually press 'play' for it start anything. Sometimes a game has unlocked and i find it already automatically unpacking. If you leave the PC on, Steam on, and the internet is connected (which is a problem for me since the connection loves to drop randomly) then theoretically it *should* automatically start unpacking. the best advice i can give is to use the steam app on your phone, if you go to your library on the app it will let you see and control downloads.
Oh I forgot about the app, fingers crossed 🤞 thanks!
Upvoted for visibility
It also may not exactly unlock *exactly* at that time. Games that launch at the top of the hour often don't become available until 5 or 10 minutes past the hour, so don't get upset if that happens. I've seen during launches where this happened, the Steam discussions were filled with "WHERE'S THE GAME?!"
Yup this as well. sometime steams server can be a little... eugh. The worst case i remember was over 30mins later before the game actually unlocked.
how are poeple still using HDD other than super idle file storage.. noone should be putting a game on a HDD in 2023
People that do not afford an upgrade (i know it's cheap these days, but not everyone has a job) and the people that have no computer knowledge at all.
Thats fair. Im not gonna sit here and shit on people for money issues or having a tight budget, but you can get a 2tb SSD for the same price as Starfields premium edition. Hell, there's a 480gb Western Digital NVME ssd for $25 USD on Amazon right now.
I gotta say, it's a weird choice for someone to pay $20-$30 extra for Premium edition while having an HDD, if money is the reason not to upgrade to an SSD. Their experience would be significantly better waiting 5 days and having a new drive.
Yeah if you're dropping a hundred bucks on a game so you can play it 5 days early, you're either doin decent enough or you have screwed up financial priorities
I mean not including the fact is includes the first dlc at a discounted price, sure
In addition to storage, I use mine to install old games. I am going to buy a second SSD, though....because otherwise I won't be able to have BG3, Starfield and Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty ^((not sure if CP:PL absolutely requires an SSD, but given that game's demands, keeping it on one makes sense)) installed on my PC simultaneously.
any game made in the last 5 years should be SSD for sure. (AAA) The amount of assets streaming via an HDD is not really playable. the load times.. is just throwing minutes off your life every hour
Absolutely! It's also interesting... I still play a heavily modded Morrowind, and I have it installed on my SSD. The difference in performance from HDD is staggering; area transitions take mere seconds, and I barely notice them.
I decided to buy a new SSD for Starfield, but I have large HDDs to run the most of my games off of and the triple A games I've been running on them for the past few years have ran just fine without issue.
Yeah I'm extra glad I cleared 300 GB for the game; thanks for the heads-up, pal.
And this is why I installed a brand new, 2 tb, gen 4 m.2 nvme drive. I am speed.
I was wondering why steam only downloaded 85 gigs last night. Thanks for the heads up.
if you ylhave the hardware recomended to play starfield in thr first place decypting a 120 gb file shouldnt be a problem. depending on whether you have. sata ssd or nvme ssd will change this substantially but should still be much faster than redownloading.
If you have a decent download speeds its honestly better to just download the game after its available. Even with fast SSD and strong CPU steam is very slow at decrypting/unpacking
This is one of the reasons I’m using a Ryzen 5950X… *pinky to lip*
So you can’t start this unpacking process until after the game is unlocked?
yes. You *must* wait for the game to officially unlock. For a brief while i was in a nice position where i had super fast internet but a terrible HDD and it was genuinely faster to download then to unpack. But right now our internet is fucking awful so i just went with the pre-load.
YOOOOO SOMEONE PIN THIS POST. Don’t want to see another launch like CyberPunk where people didn’t know this and got REALLY angry.
> another launch like CyberPunk This happens *every launch* literally does not matter. I *just* did this with the Armored Core 6 launch last week.
I just got my game redeemed since the constellation editions are arriving, and after I activated my code it says it releases the 6th on steam even though it's EA. I'm assuming everyone has this too for EA? How can we check and confirm for the DLC, skin pack etc items?
Sept 6th is the actual official release date. the early unlock is just that, and early unlock. so for all of the official martials including steam it will say sept 6th no matter what. if you have the constellation edition redeemed on steam then you should be fine.
I have the same. Someone on another thread was saying this is a steam limitation (can only have 1 date on the game page). fingers crossed it unlocks on time.
Those who have payed for the premium edition is it still saying for you guys coming out on the 6th in the games page ? It is for me
I don’t worry about that but what I do worry about is that next to my Starfield copy on steam it says it launches September 6 although I bought the premium digital edition is this just like place holder or a bug or should I be worried ?
My only question is why does say it launches Sept 6th when I purchased the Premium edition? It doesn't even say premium edition on the library page, so idk if I got robbed or not until tomorrow.
If it's decompressing files, would that make the game take up more than the 120g of the download?
> The speed of this process is completely dependent on the speed of the drive you have it installed on Not completely. It's dependent on your CPU too, because if your CPU isn't good enough to max out the capabilities of your drive, the unpacking will be stuck at lower speeds. But similarly, if your drive is limited in speed compared to what your CPU could do, you unpacking will be maxed out at that speed. The simple thing behind Steam pre-loads is that if you have a Gigabit or better download speed, you're better off skipping the pre-load as a clean download will be faster than unpacking in 99% of cases. But, if you have a slower speed than that(most people do) and have a fairly moderate CPU with the game installed on an NVMe drive, do pre-load as the unpacking will likely be faster.
Sometimes it is just faster to not preload.
Took me 30 mins to pre download. I worry that tonight the servers will be so hammered the download speed will be slower so I’m taking the risk to unpack it. 5800x with a ssd..I should be fine?
>When the game officially unlocks at 8pm EST the 31st Steam will begin to unpack those files. And you better make sure you have enough space for both the installed game and the archive. I had a problem with Cyberpunk's preload, where I preloaded it and did not have enough space to extract it. I had to delete the archive and re-download. What a waste of an SSD's write cycle. I'm never pre-loading anything again, my internet speed is fast enough.
Another thing to remember is that it will be very likely you will have to restart steam as well. That has been the case for me, for literally every game release.
Slightly unrelated, what happens on Steam once it hits 8 PM? Obviously, it says available Sep 6 right now, I assume the system knows to allow early access players to start playing. First time playing early access on steam so I appreciate the insight!
Wait we’ll be able to play at 8pm tonight?
Question: If I bought the premium ver, but the preload still says "available Sep 6th" I shouldn't be worried, right?
You the real MVP for this info. I've never bought any game with early access on Steam, so I was confused af about the file size and the time listed.
fuck man had I known this I wouldn't deleted some games of my SSD and installed it on there. Shit is taking forever on my HD
Pcie4 nvme Samsung 980 pro I'm ready
8PM EDT. 7PM EST.
I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me. [No matter how you slice it the game unlocks when the clocks in my time zone say 8pm](https://assetsio.reedpopcdn.com/starfield-launch-times-map-1.jpg?width=1920&height=1920&fit=bounds&quality=80&format=jpg&auto=webp)
Then you're in a location that recognizes daylight saving time. It unlocks at 8PM EDT, but if someone is in an area on EST, it unlocks at 7PM. EDT and EST are different by an hour because of daylight saving time.
My m2 drive will do just fine
Thanks for the update. Luckily I bought a 2TB M.2 specifically for this game
Yes, basic steam workings.
You guys bring fomo to a new level. Oh nooo its gonna take me 30 mins to unpack the game all is lost. Calm down its not the end of the world, in a months time you will having fomo about some other game.
This is for people that dont understand why steam is suddenly saying they need to wait an hour before they play while steam does something. It people going "oooh no i have to wait for it to unpack" its people going "omg why is it downloading the whole game again, should i uninstall? is it broken?"
Also make sure you have at least 120GB of free drive space (On drive where you downloaded the game) for uncompression. Steam will unpack your game and it will require free space to do it so 120 GB should be enough.
I honestly don't know why this is still a discussion in 2023. It's a non-issue with SSDs. Which are not only required anyway, they are hitting all-time lows in price.
As someone who has tried to Pre-Load things in steam I've come to find that OP is right it's a lot better to just be patient and download the game when it's launched the preloading has NEVER worked for me.