PlayStation owners have spent the last three years watching from the sidelines while Xbox players roamed the Settled Systems. After what felt like endless rumors, leaks, and a painfully slow confirmation, Starfield finally hit the PS5 on April 7, 2026. I'm not here to debate if the game is actually good, as you can check out our original review on PC (spoiler alert: yes it was). The real question is whether this long overdue port actually runs well on Sony's hardware or if it should have just stayed an Xbox exclusive.
The game gives you two graphical options on the base PS5, but it's a bit different than what you're probably used to. You set a frame rate target AND a priority. There's Visuals and Performance priority with 30, 40, 60, and uncapped frame rate targets. Visuals prioritization runs at a 1440p resolution and works best at 40fps while Performance prioritization works best with 60fps at 1080p. If you have a 120hz TV with VRR support then you can uncap the frame rate in Performance prioritization, which is a massive plus if you have the hardware for it.
In practice, Performance prioritization holds its own pretty well. Whether you're in deep space, wandering through an abandoned outpost, or exploring an empty moon, it hits that 60fps pretty spot on, with dips to the 50s but you probably wouldn't even notice. But then you go to New Atlantis. The game’s flagship city absolutely throttles the PS5’s hardware. Walking through the crowded commercial districts, my frame rate regularly dropped into the 40s and sometimes even the 30s. It’s not totally unplayable, but it’s definitely not the best. Considering Bethesda had years to optimize this, it’s a bit of a bad look.
Visuals Mode, on the other hand, is solid at 30fps, and even 40fps. If you’re used to the PS3 days of open world gaming, a stable 30fps isn't the worst way to play. Personally, I found myself switching to Performance for combat and Visuals for screenshots, but juggling back and forth does get annoying. There’s a robust photo mode that you can use to take tons of stunning photographs.
To no one’s surprise, Starfield takes up a substantial amount of space (no pun intended) on your hard drive. The game, with both expansions installed, sits at 140GB on the PlayStation 5. And load times are quite long, taking 17 seconds to load into the game from the main menu. What totally kills the immersion, though, are the unskippable loading animations for taking off, landing, and certain gravitational jumps. It’s a shame that Bethesda didn't change them for the PS5 version.
I didn’t get access until a couple days after launch, but I’ve heard others complain about hard crashes on the PS5. I thought they might’ve been patched already, but sadly they are still there. Patch 1.000.003 (released April 16, 2026) only addresses PS5 Pro crashes in Enhanced mode with the base PS5 hotfix still to come. If you play for a long session or sprint through a busy zone, you'll likely catch a hard crash, so save often!
If there’s one reason to play on PS5, it’s the DualSense controller integration. The port team actually put in the work to make this feel like a native PlayStation title rather than a copy-paste job. The adaptive triggers are fantastic with different guns actually having unique tension profiles, and the ship weapons have a distinct resistance that makes dogfights feel satisfying. The haptic feedback kicks in nicely during gunplay and mining as well.
But the real stroke of genius is the touchpad. Tapping the left side toggles your camera between first and third person perspective, while the right side opens the map. Swiping in the four directions instantly pulls up your inventory, missions, skills, or data menus. The light bar also shifts color based on your health and ship status. Finally, routing radio communications and audio logs through the controller speaker genuinely adds to the immersion. I always say more games need to take advantage of the DualSense features.
Bethesda's Creations platform also makes the jump to PS5, and for the unaware, yes, these are mods. You access the Creations menu from inside the game itself, which is a cleaner setup than the hoops console players used to jump through for Skyrim and Fallout 4 modding. The catch is that Sony's platform rules mean the PS5 library is more restricted. What you do get is a mix of free community content and paid quest packs like Tracker's Alliance, At Hell's Gate, and The Perfect Recipe, which function more or less as mini DLC.
Launching alongside the PS5 version is Free Lanes, a free update available to everyone on every platform. The headline feature is manual interplanetary travel, meaning you can now physically fly between planets within a star system instead of just warping straight to your destination. Encounters and activities pop up during those flights, and you can chat with your crew during the downtime, which goes some way toward addressing the long-running complaint that Starfield's space felt more like a menu than an actual frontier. Then there’s the Starborn tweak. You can bring a limited selection of items through the Unity into New Game Plus runs, which changes how much your individual playthroughs can carry forward. Check out our editor David's review of Terran Armada and Free Lanes if you haven't already.
At the end of the day, it’s still a Bethesda game. NPCs stand where they shouldn't, items clip through tables, and random ragdoll physics launch enemies across the room when you least expect it. Take that as you will.
For $49.99 (down from the original $69.99), the pricing is fair for the base game itself. You get the fully patched base game, the massive Free Lanes update built in as the day one patch, and the Shattered Space and Terran Armada expansions if you bought the Premium edition. That being said, if you were on the fence about the core design back in 2023, the PS5 version doesn't fix any of those deeper issues.
Starfield on PS5 is a competent port with excellent DualSense support, undermined by some technical problems that should have been caught before launch. It is, however, the definitive console experience, without a doubt.
