Starfield is the sport everybody’s speaking about proper now. However except you might have an Xbox or a gaming PC with some fairly first rate specs, you’re disregarded of the dialog. Or are you? If you wish to run Bethesda’s newest sprawling RPG on an older machine or a laptop computer with built-in graphics, you would possibly wish to try the “Potato Mode” recreation mod. It squishes the sport’s pretty textures right down to as little as 16 bits, making it appear to be one thing that could be extra at dwelling on a PlayStation 2 than an RGB-laden PC from this decade.
“Potato” is gamer slang for a pc missing in graphical oomph, or at the least, one which hasn’t been upgraded to play the most recent high-end PC video games. Whereas there are many new video games popping out that may run even on the lightest of laptops, titles like Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 do assume a quite greater stage of number-crunching energy than they used to. The Starfield Potato Mod comes from NexusMods writer BulwarkHD, and it requires solely a small file obtain and some replacements.
Potato mods, designed to strip among the fashionable graphical constancy from the most recent video games have gotten a preferred means for gamers to expertise them on older or less-expensive PCs, have gotten a preferred pattern. (Even when they make an Epic software program engineer cry each time one will get put in.) You’ll find potato modded video games throughout YouTube exhibiting off AAA titles chugging alongside on finances {hardware}. They give the impression of being horrible, however they run!
As PCGamer notes, simply eliminating high-res textures most likely isn’t sufficient to run Starfield on a cow-patterned Gateway tower from 2005. The sport’s big maps, physics engine, and numerous different behind-the-scenes programs will nonetheless require a superb little bit of juice from each the CPU and GPU. However if you happen to’re determined to get the sport enjoying in some type of state with out upgrading or shopping for a brand new machine, it could be price a glance — particularly in case your graphics card is working a modest quantity of VRAM.
