Bethesda’s Todd Howard has confirmed that the console version of Starfield will be locked at 30fps.
Starfield is arguably Microsoft’s biggest game of the year – in more ways than one. As showcased in a 45 minute-long gameplay overview stream in yesterday’s Starfield Direct, it’s a sprawling action-RPG from the makers of Elder Scrolls and Fallout that takes place over an entire simulated galaxy featuring “thousands” of explorable planets.
All that scale does come at some sort of technical cost, though – at least on console. Speaking to IGN ahead of that showcase, game director Todd Howard confirmed that Starfield will be locked at 30fps on Xbox Series X/S. Inevitably, resolution will take a bit of a hit on Xbox Series S; while the Series X will run at 4K resolution, the less powerful Series S will run at 1440p.
That 30fps lock on consoles is, Howard says, designed to ensure “consistency”.
“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for,” he told IGN. “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… on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer the consistency, where you’re not even thinking about it.”
Howard’s announcement has echoes of Arkane’s April revelation that Redfall would be locked at 30fps at launch. The sheer scale of Starfield’s gameplay reveal, meanwhile, which showed off the detail of its ships, its character creation, and its interplanetary exploration, should hopefully mean there’s more to pick over than exhausting debates about its framerate. Though predictably, ’30fps’ is currently trending on Twitter at the time of writing.
Starfield releases on 6 September for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
