Starfield will be locked at 30fps on Xbox Series X and Series S for “consistency”

Starfield, the long-awaited space exploration game from Bethesda, shone brightly during the recent Xbox Games Showcase 2023 event, flaunting an extensive gameplay deep dive in which we finally learned about all that it has to offer. However, many still remember the controversy of Redfall and its 30fps-locked launch on Xbox consoles, and wondered if Starfield would also suffer a similar performance cut. Well, the worst forecasts have been confirmed: Starfield will stay at a maximum of 30 fps on both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S with the purpose of ensuring “consistency”, as pointed out by Todd Howard himself to IGN.

Starfield locked at 30 fps on Xbox Series X|S

This was confirmed by Todd Howard of Bethesda, who revealed that the framerate of Starfield had to be locked 30 fps on consoles so as to not sacrifice the visual aspect of the title, with a 4K resolution on Xbox Series X and 1440p on Xbox Series S. This measure applies only to consoles, not to PC, where it will depend on the hardware the game is running on.

“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for,” said Howard. “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.”

Despite acknowledging that on certain occasions they have reached 60 fps, the dev team chose to block the performance on consoles to not sacrifice the visual aspect of the game: “Sometimes it’s 60. But on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer the consistency, And we don’t ever want to sacrifice that experience that makes our games feel really, really special.”

Starfield will be available on PC andXbox Series X|S on September 6, 2023.

Source | IGN