Starfield preload date leak is great news – but day-one patch could spoil it

07 August 2023 , 13:00

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Players will have plenty of time to preload Starfield if a recent leak is correct (Image: Bethesda)

You'll be able to preload Starfield very soon according to a recent leak, and that's great news, considering the game's file size is likely to be pretty hefty.

Starfield is going to be a big game in every sense of the word, with Bethesda promising that their mammoth RPG will feature a huge open world that features over 1000 planets, with the game's main city, New Atlantis, being the biggest city the developer has ever created. And we haven't even mentioned the Xbox-exclusive game's 250,000 lines of dialogue, comfortably double that of Fallout 4, which by comparison, had a frankly meagre 110,000.

And that's why, according to the game's Steam page, Starfield will require at least 125GB of storage, with players on PC requiring an SSD to even play the game. Luckily for Xbox Series X|S players, the console features a rapid internal SSD, so the only thing you'll need to worry about is which games you need to delete to make room.

Thankfully, players will have plenty of time to preload Starfield because, according to an Amazon listing, Starfield preload begins on Wednesday, August 9, giving you about a month to get it downloaded before release day.

Another one?

If Starfield is really going to be around 125GB, giving players almost a month to preload the game is a pretty solid move by Bethesda, giving the community ample time to reorganise their console's storage ahead of the big launch. In saying that, however, previous Bethesda game launches have featured staggeringly big day-one patches, which was a real pain for players who just want to jump straight in.

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Considering Starfield has already been delayed significantly, I really hope that the developers have had enough time to do as much QA testing as possible, to really polish the game ahead of launch, leaving players free to enjoy the experience and not worry about game-breaking bugs. And, hopefully, this also means the absence of the dreaded day-one patch, or at the very least, just a really small one.

There's so much pressure on Starfield to be great, particularly after the spellbinding Starfield Direct event, which has led to expectations being sky-high. The last big release from Bethesda, Redfall, has left many Xbox fans wondering whether or not the ecosystem is even worth investing in anymore, leaving it all up to Starfield.

Players having to wait hours on launch day for a patch to download would be a real kick in the teeth. Xbox and Bethesda cannot afford the launch of this game to be anything other than perfect, and a day-one patch would be a negative experience for all players, particularly as we've waited so long for this game to come out.

Nathan Bliss