Starfield finally arrived on PlayStation 5 on April 7, 2026, nearly three years after its original launch on Xbox and PC, and the reception has been rocky. While the port came bundled with significant new content, a wave of technical issues has overshadowed the release.
Players flooded the r/Starfield subreddit with reports of hard freezes, repeated crashes, corrupted saves, and progression-breaking bugs that made basic exploration impossible. One Reddit thread titled “Base PS5 crashing getting out of hand, its unplayable” collected dozens of comments within hours. The problems are not limited to one hardware tier: both standard PS5 and PS5 Pro owners have reported similar experiences.
The most common failure modes include hard freezes requiring a full console restart and crash-to-dashboard errors occurring most frequently when attempting to land on planets. One player described getting crashes every two minutes despite trying every workaround – deleting saves, switching between performance and quality modes, even fully reinstalling the game.
On April 13, Bethesda Game Studios responded publicly on social media: “We’re aware of some reported PS5 crashing issues and have narrowed them down to a small number of causes. We’re addressing these in a hotfix we’re aiming to release this week.”
There are now numerous reports that Sony is refunding Starfield on PS5 for affected players, though it is not guaranteed.
Digital Foundry’s verdict was blunt: while the game remains atmospheric and enjoyable, the PS5 version suffers from a range of performance and stability problems, and the PS5 Pro version additionally encounters PSSR-related issues and a confusingly large number of graphics modes.
On the base PS5, performance is roughly comparable to Xbox Series X in most situations, though Xbox holds a small advantage in demanding areas like New Atlantis, where the PS5 can drop to around 30 fps in performance mode. The PS5 Pro improves frame rate consistency and gains an edge over Xbox in performance mode, but achieves this partly by reducing the internal resolution to 900p, compared to 1080p on base hardware.
At least one industry analyst has labeled the PS5 version a commercial disappointment, pointing to the technical issues as a serious undermining of its launch window. Bethesda, however, has signaled that development is ongoing: lead creative producer Timothy Lamb stated, “There’s a lot more in the lore, things the team is excited about, things we still want to pursue. We’re still working on Starfield.”
For now, if you’ve purchased the PS5 version and are experiencing crashes, it may be worth waiting for the incoming hotfix before diving deeper into the game.