Starfield is the sport everyone’s talking about right now. But except you’ve gotten an Xbox or a gaming PC with some pretty decent specs, you’re omitted 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 beautiful textures all the way down to as little as 16 bits, making it seem like 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 no less than, one which hasn’t been upgraded to play the newest high-end PC video games. While there are plenty of new games popping out that may run even on the lightest of laptops, titles like Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 do assume a fairly increased stage of number-crunching energy than they used to. The Starfield Potato Mod comes from NexusMods publisher BulwarkHD, and it requires solely a small file obtain and some replacements.

Potato mods, designed to strip a number of the fashionable graphical constancy from the newest video games have gotten a preferred approach for gamers to expertise them on older or less-expensive PCs, have gotten a preferred development. (Even in the event that they make an Epic software program engineer cry each time one will get put in.) You can discover potato modded video games throughout YouTube exhibiting off AAA titles chugging alongside on finances {hardware}. They look horrible, however they run!

As PCGamer notes, simply eliminating high-res textures in all probability isn’t sufficient to run Starfield on a cow-patterned Gateway tower from 2005. The recreation’s enormous maps, physics engine, and varied different behind-the-scenes methods will nonetheless require an excellent little bit of juice from each the CPU and GPU. But in case you’re determined to get the sport taking part in in some sort of state with out upgrading or shopping for a brand new machine, it could be value a glance — particularly in case your graphics card is operating a modest quantity of VRAM.