Starfield 30fps Debate Has People Talking About Virtual Sandwiches

ign.com:

As IGN exclusively revealed during Summer of Gaming, hotly-anticipated space epic Starfield runs at 30 frames per second on Xbox Series X and S. The news sparked a vociferous debate about the performance of Bethesda Game Studios’ next big title, and challenged the expectation from some that big first-party games should run at 60fps on Xbox Series X no matter what.

But why does Starfield run at 30fps? In an interview with IGN, BGS boss Todd Howard said the development team decided to lock Starfield at 30fps on console to ensure “consistency” of performance.

“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.”

Anything can happen? What about hoarding a basketful of sandwiches in your spaceship? Well, that’s exactly what we saw is possible in Starfield’s extended video preview, continuing the rich tradition of BGS games letting players collect all manner of nonsense, pile it high in their home, then counting down the seconds before a crash.

Now, as the