This is a little unusual. Most games never explicitly say you need an SSD or a HDD - but Starfield does! This likely isn’t a hard limit, as recommendations are often just that, but I cannot help but wonder what would happen if the game is run on an HDD?
It’s likely not only for loading times, but faster loading/streaming of assets and textures. May reduce pop-in with a SSD compared to a HDD.
Indeed but it’s also a matter of how you design your game. If you’re assuming that a game is running off a hard drive, then you’ll likely design it so that it loads everything in at load time because the assumption is that storage will be too slow to provide assets on an “as-needed” basis.
On the other hand, if you can rely on there being an SSD you can just assume that you’ll be able to grab everything and as when needed.
This actually has an added benefit in that you can design more ‘ambitious’ games because you don’t have to worry about needing to fit all of your assets for a given ‘level’ into system memory. You can rely on the fact that you can just load and unload things as and when needed.