After a huge and exciting 45-minute deep dive into the game following today’s Xbox Games Showcase, Bethesda’s Todd Howard has begun fielding questions around Starfield and how incredibly vast, varied and detailed it looks to be.
Speaking to IGN, Howard has confirmed the resolution and frame rate that players can expect when exploring these deep, simulated galaxies full of a combination of handcrafted places and procedurally-generated planets. The game’s director confirmed with the outlet that, yes, Starfield will be locked to 30 FPS on both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. At those frame rates, the game will be running in 4K on the Series X and 1440p on the Series S.
Howard’s reasoning for the 30 FPS lock across the two console platforms the game will launch on, is to provide a “consistent” experience.
“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.”
It’s perhaps not overly surprising news given the ambitious nature of the game and all of the many, many moving parts required for it to even work at all, especially with Bethesda’s meme status as a producer of less-than-polished RPGs, but it comes after some fairly spicy backlash toward another Xbox exclusive, Redfall, launching with 30 FPS lock on consoles.
