When it comes to console gaming, flagship games often prefer to lock the framerate at 30 FPS, to maintain consistency. This is despite consoles like high-end Xbox Series X having enough processing power to run the new gen games at 60 FPS on a 4K resolution. The upcoming Forza Motorsport is also touted to run at 4K 60 FPS in performance mode. Bethesda is looking at consistency and for a smooth launch of their upcoming masterpiece.
To ensure a launch day without too many glitches, given Bethesda’s history of having buggy releses, the Starfield team planned to lock the game’s framerate. This was confirmed by Starfield Director Todd Howard in an interview with IGN.
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Starfield Set to Run at 30 FPS On Consoles, For a Consistent Experience
As the release date gets closer to Bethesda’s masterpiece, more details have now become clear and with that, the interstellar game’s requirements are also now confirmed. While the desktop edition requires a lot of processing power to run at 4K 60 FPS, the console editions seem to be locked at 30 FPS for the sake of consistency.
Starfield is also touted to be one of the biggest games of the year, and in an interview with IGN, Director for the highly anticipated game, Todd Howard explained the reasoning behind the decision to lock the framerate. Todd discussed the approach taken towards the game’s smooth operation with emphasis on maintaining a consistently high quality and performance. He went on to confirm that the game will run at 4K on the Xbox Series X and 1440p on the Xbox Series S, both locked at 30 FPS.
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Consistency and Smooth Experience, the Reasoning Behind Starfield’s Framerate Lock
Todd discussed how they never wanted to sacrifice the overall gaming experience and the final decision was to have the “headroom because in our games, really anything can happen”. Back in May this year, another game, Redfall, was quite heavily criticized when the game was teased with 60 FPS footage only for it to release, locked in 30 FPS for consoles. Xbox Boss Phil Spencer had to personally apologize for Redfall‘s failure as the game got panned heavily post launch.
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Todd also went on to discuss how the extra time taken for the final release of the game has given the entire team, the much-needed time to ensure the game launches with minimum bugs and making the grand scale of the game as fun as possible for gamers to explore and experience. With a game as massive as Starfield, there were bound to be risks involved as well, but Todd confirms the initial vision for the game never changed even if it’s taken over eight years.
Disk Space Requirements For Starfield On Desktop And Xbox
Starfield‘s disk requirements is expected to leave many gamers with a lot of cleaning up to do. The desktop edition of the game requires at least 125 GB while the Xbox Series X edition requires close to 140 GB of space. The minimum specs required for PC for the game isn’t for the light-hearted either as the game requires at least 16 GB of RAM and using either the AMD Radeon RX 5700 or NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti. Recommended specs mention using either the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT or an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080.
Starfield is a much bigger game, however, and a smooth, glitch-free experience will win over the hearts of gamers and critics, regardless of the framerate lock. With Starfield release getting quite close, confirmation on the framerate details could at least appease most gamers and critics on what to expect from the final game. Starfield releases in the US on the 6th of September, later this year.
Source: IGN
