Starfield will not be silky smooth on consoles, unfortunately. Xbox had a pretty rough go with the Xbox One as the console launched and wasn’t hitting 1080p for a lot of games in its early days. This changed over time as developers began to understand the hardware and Microsoft released more powerful versions of the console, such as the Xbox One X, but it was still a struggle. With that said, Xbox wanted to ensure that wouldn’t happen again and marketed Xbox Series X as the world’s most powerful console and pushed Xbox Series S as a more casual, less powerful option for players looking for a lower cost of entry.
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While we have seen a number of games running in 4K60FPS or even games running at good resolutions and 120FPS, there have been some weaker examples. Redfall and was targeting 30FPS, but would often fall below that while playing. Now, Starfield is confirmed to be locked to 30FPS on Xbox Series X and S. Obviously, on PC, you can run it as low or high as your heart desires, but consoles don’t have that luxury. Bethesda’s Todd Howard told IGN that they locked the game at 30FPS to keep it consistent, even though the game can go much higher and sometimes even touch 60FPS. Howard noted they were striving for fidelity and again, consistency, so they made the decision to lock it in at 30FPS instead of having a frame rate that fluctuates.
“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for,” Howard said. “Always these huge, open worlds, fully dynamic, hyper detail where anything can happen. And we do want to do that. It’s 4K in the X. It’s 1440 on the S. We do lock it at 30, because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff. We don’t want to sacrifice any of it. Fortunately in this one, we’ve got it running great. It’s often running way above that. Sometimes it’s 60. But on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer the consistency, where you’re not even thinking about it. And we don’t ever want to sacrifice that experience that makes our games feel really, really special. So it feels great. We’re really happy with how it feels even in the heat of battle. And we need that headroom because in our games, really anything can happen.”
Of course, perhaps there’s a chance this will change before launch. Fans are already getting a bit frustrated by this, so maybe they’ll have an option to lock it at 30, but also toggle it so it can fluctuate. However, that’s likely way easier said than done. Either way, so far, Bethesda seems confident in Starfield as it showed 45 minutes of gameplay from the game at the Xbox showcase.
Starfield will release on September 6th for Xbox Series X|S and PC. What do you think about the frame rate? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.
