• If you target 60 fps you have to be more conservative woth poly counts, draw calls, shader complexity, rendering capabilities etc. You get have more you can play with on the rendering side and can technically have better visuals. It’s a dev decision. Devs will always need to make that decision until there are not hardware limitations.

      • and in this case rhey made the wrong decision imo

        games like minecraft, runescape or WoW are still popular, why the hell are studios spending this much of their performance on having 4k resolution on every rock, tree and dust mite

        • Beth has historically had to make serious gameplay concessions because of consoles. Console limitations killed open cities and levitation on their engine in Oblivion.

          I don’t mind if they play it safe with Starfield.

          • And the PlayStation ports of their games were always terrible. Like the further south you went in Oblivion the longer it would take to load a town. Sometimes Leyawin would take 5+ minutes to load.

            Skyrim had that stuff with data corruption and the upside down dragons.

            While I don’t remember, I’m sure the fallout PlayStation versions had their own issues. So I’m glad Bethesda is solely Xbox/pc now because the PS versions were a distant afterthought anyways.

            30fps is fine so long as it’s not a crutch. And since it’s on game pass day one, if it’s terrible all I’ve done is waste bandwidth downloading it, and not $70.

    • This right here. As a 40+ gamer, I don’t mind 30fps. Been dealing with lower fps for a long, long time and its fine for me. But that just seems like an unreasonably low expectation of a AAA video games these days.

    • It was new gen three years ago, and its kept up the 60fps dream for a lot of games over the last three years. However developers were always going to hit the point of diminishing returns when their visions got bigger, and now we’re there.

  • I’d rather see consoles be limited to what they can handle than a game to be limited for everyone because of what a single console can handle.

    I want this game to be huge and look beautiful. If my PC can handle 60fps I don’t want to locked to 30fps because that’s all an Xbox can handle. And if I want to play it on an Xbox I don’t want it to be a blurry mess to get 60fps, I want it to look as good as it possibly can. Especially in a game like this where the visuals do a great majority of the storytelling when it comes to exploration and finding new things.

  • This isn’t surprising. Todd Howard already stated that given the choice between fidelity or framerate they would choose fidelity every time. It’s disappointing that he thinks that’s still what people want in 2023, but it’s not surprising.

  • Not a deal breaker for this kind of game but a 60fps performance mode on series x at 1080p would’ve been a nice option.

    Playing TOTK right now on switch and it really proves how great games can overcome technical limitation. A masterpiece at 30fps is still a masterpiece. Here’s hoping Starfield can deliver as a great game first and foremost.

  • I think they should at least give console players the choice between 4k 30 fps or 1080p 60 fps Let’s be realistic here, 4k 60fps for a game of this size in this engine will require a BEEFY machine, nothing a current gen console can offer.

        • Idk, if they release a game in 2023 that is still CPU bound that would be a big L from them.

          This is Bethesda were talking here lmao. Starfield is still running on the Creation Engine, which they’ve been hacking together since the Morrowind days.

          • I feel that’s an unfair thing to say. Lets be real here, the Creation Engine that runs Starfield isn’t the same engine that runs Fallout 4 or Skyrim. It’s a new version of that engine. When Unity, Unreal or Anvil (just to name a few) release new versions of their engine everyone is like “wow, so much better, so much more possibilities” When Bethesda releases a new version of the CE, everyone is like “Yeah but it’s still the garbage CE” although the CE is a very powerful engine when you think what it really enables them to do (and how easy accessible it is for modders)

            My point is, of course we can end up with a CPU bound game again, but before we know for sure, we should give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt.

            • Idk, facial animation is still honest to god the worst in the industry. Worse than Gollum. Can’t blame people for saying it’s the same engine when the faces you spend 30% of the game staring at look as bad as they do.

  • Nothing wrong with that. They want stability instead of poor performance and I can appreciate that decision. Games are best played on a system you can actually upgrade anyways, if you play console this is something that you should expect, maybe not now but in the near future as gen (pick a number) comes out

  • I love how Microsoft said that with their exclusive titles they’ll only have to focus on one console and as such the performance will be better. Now here we are and seemingly all of these titles run at 30 FPS. I just hope they will offer a performance option if it is run on a lower resolution. Having these options is exactly what keeps me on the PC platform.

  • I’m curious about this kind of thing from an engine and console architecture perspective. Any gamedevs able to shed some light?

    I work in the industry, but not directly on low-level engine implementation details. Personally, my gut thinking is that the Creation Engine is falling behind in terms of modern asset streaming techniques.

    Similarly, I wonder if a lack of strong virtualized geometry / just-in-time LOD generation tech could be a huge bottleneck?

    From what I understand, efforts like Nanite in UE5 were an enormous engineering investment for Epic, and unless Bethesda has a massive engine team of their own (they don’t), they simply won’t be able to benefit from an in-house equivalent in tech.

    Ultimately, I do think the lack of innovation in the Creation Engine is due to internal technical targets being established as “30FPS is good enough”, with frame times below 33ms being viewed as “for those PC gamers with power to spare.”

    • My best guess would be that the engine just has vast amounts of technical debt. Skyrim (pre-LE at least) had a savegame corruption bug that has been around since Morrowind. And while I’m sure they have rewritten huge parts of the engine over the decades it’s not rare to see bugs persist over generations, and modders complaining loudly about it. The engine has never been great about asset streaming either so no surprise here.

    • I think that’s just the display resolution. I expect this game will use dynamic render resolution like most games these days. The render resolution will probably not hit 4K often (if at all).