It’s sad that this is necessary. And given that it took less than a week for modders to get actual performance gains means that bethesda could’ve easily done it themselves.
Starfield is a shit game that should not need the level of detailed gfx to run. Anything from 2000 will trash Starfield today. The devs know this.
Don’t think Bethesda is focused on making their gaming look specifically bad just to make it run on older hardware. Similar to all other companies there is a minimum spec. I do think that having such great mod support allows for this to happen which is great.
They are sabotaging their own sales by not doing it. Starfield is such a hyped game that many people who don’t usually game much will want to play it and those people tend to not have the most up-to-date hardware. The PC I built in 2018 for about 1100€ is pretty much exactly the minimum spec for starfield. And given that minimum specs usually target 30fps for some reason, I’d need this mod if I wanted to play it at a reasonable framerate.
I’m running starfield medium graphics on a 1660 super and getting 60fps at 1440p.
It honestly runs fairly good on just a decent graphics card.
This seems like pure speculation. The relative number of people below this spec is probably not worth it for them to focus on this. Besides their explicit support for modding allows them to improved sales value. Consider for example Skyrim. It was re-released so many times and people kept buying it and mods allowed it to look great even years after its release. I think by narrowing their scope they can focus on development of a good core and by leveraging their mod community it can run on older or higher hardware. Win win in my opinion.
I’m surprised that the mod is even necessary given that the game can run on the Xbox S or whatever the hell it’s called.