During an appearance on Kinda Funny Xcast, Starfield director Todd Howard was asked whether the upcoming interstellar ball-pit RPG would support the Steam Deck. “We’ll talk about that later down the road,” said Howard.
During a brief conversation about accessibility 10m 25s into the conversation, Howard said that Starfield would have a “large font mode, which really is important in an RPG where there’s a lot of stuff to read, so it comes into play with obviously accessibility, but also various monitor sizes.
“I’m noticing that that’s really helpful when I play,” Howard continued. “There’s a lot more handheld devices coming out, where you can stream these games or sometimes even play them natively, and it really helps us there as well.”
This prompted host Mike Howard to ask about the possibility of Starfield supporting the Steam Deck.
Todd Howard’s response isn’t a yes or a no, but I’d wager that launching a vast RPG with over a thousand planets is hard enough without the complication of simultaneously trying to optimise its performance, UI and controls for a recently-launched handheld device with a relatively small playerbase. I also wonder whether Microsoft would be keen to further incentivise folks to pick up Starfield via Steam rather than their own Xbox ecosystem.
That said, Skyrim eventually released on more or less every platform, and often several times. I’m sure there will be a Starfield HD Anniversary Handheld Edition on Steam Deck sometime before Elder Scrolls VI finally comes out.