Phil Spencer and Todd Howard on Why Starfield is 30 FPS

It’s confirmed that Starfield will be 30FPS on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. This means that if you want 60 FPS you’ll need to upgrade that PC if it doesn’t have the required specs. As far as why Starfield is capped at 30 FPS, Phil Spencer said this during his interview with Giant Bomb:

“At some point, not to get all geeky about it, but there’s render time per frame and teams can either want to go horizontal or go kind of deep on a frame, and it’s a creative choice. We obviously have games that are running at 4K/60 on the platform. It’s not a platform issue, it’s a creative decision. I trust what decisions BGS (Bethesda Game Studios) makes, and I trust what I’m playing”.

“I don’t ever want us to turn playing games into a math exercise. I’m not saying that 60 resolution don’t impact what you play, but I don’t think we want that to turn into an Excel thing. I think you want to give the creatives the tools to make the best decisions, and the game will be what it is. I think Starfield’s going to be a great game and I love the reception today I don’t want to kind of force specs on every game before they start”.

Todd Howard IGN interview

Todd Howard said during an interview with IGN:

“I think it’ll come as no surprise given our previous games what we go for always. These huge open worlds. Fully dynamic. Hyper detail, where anything can happen. We do lock it at 30 (30FPS) because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff and we don’t want to sacrifice any of it.

We prefer consistency. We’re not even thinking about it. We don’t ever want to sacrifice that experience that makes our games feel really special. We need that headroom because in our games anything can happen”.

I believe they’re making the right call here. The game is massive. If they decided to go with 60 FPS on consoles, there will probably be a different set of issues that we would complain about.

Starfield’s release date is September 6, 2023. I will need to clone myself because Cyberpunk 2077 also releases in September. I plan to have Starfield content when it releases. Consider subscribing to get notifications on new posts!