Bethesda games often have a strange pattern: they receive heavy criticism at launch, yet many people end up playing them for a long time. Around the 200-hour mark, players might say, "It gets better later on." By 1,000 hours, that statement is no longer just a joke: the player has spent over forty days in the same game world.
A PS5 player has already logged 1,000 hours in Starfield. The game launched on PC and Xbox Series in September 2023, but didn't arrive on PS5 until April 2026. This means the PS5 player racked up those 1,000 hours in roughly six months, averaging more than five hours per day.
He even jokingly wrote an "Oscar acceptance speech," thanking Bethesda Game Studios, the fans who never gave up on the game, and the authors who ported mods to PS5. Due to Sony's 15 GB capacity limit for mods, he deliberately excluded them from his list of thanks.
He was able to play for so long thanks to "New Game+." After passing through "Unity," the Captain enters a parallel universe. Players can swap out mods before entering each new universe, experiencing the game differently with each run. Narrative mods like The Veil and Farseer can even be saved for installation in the fourth playthrough.
Nevertheless, new players to Starfield often encounter the same issue. In Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, traveling from one explorable location to another involves plenty of events along the way. In Starfield, this process mostly consists of switching between the ship interior, the starmap menu, and loading screens, leading some players to lose interest after 10 to 15 hours. Veteran players disagree with this view. They point out that in The Elder Scrolls V, players are also constantly moving around on the same planet; in their opinion, exploring planets is more interesting than picking snowberries to make potions, and it's easy to spend a long time unintentionally in the ship editor. If space travel still feels tedious, they recommend installing mods that enable seamless takeoffs and landings, or trying Starsim Beyond Space.
However, using mods on PS5 comes with its own troubles. Besides the 15 GB capacity limit, the engine's limit on how many objects can exist in the world also restricts mod usage. Crashes are so frequent that some players counted around 70 crashes within their first 20 hours. Switching to Performance Mode, keeping fewer save files, passing through "Unity" again, and clearing the cache or reinstalling as a last resort may all help.
There's another thing that makes players uncomfortable: mod authors have already added features that Bethesda didn't have time to include in the game, such as removing armor from corpses, seamless takeoffs, and scaling quest experience rewards with level. One player put it bluntly:
"The more you engage with mods, the more you realize how much content this game could have had, and how much would be missing without the mod authors."
Starfield's galaxy is vast, but the 15 GB of space allocated for mods is not.