Anyone who wants to play Starfield on one of the current Xbox consoles will of course ask themselves: How does the game actually work on these? Microsoft also had an answer ready for this after the Starfield Direct!
In the wake of yesterday’s Starfield Direct, Bethesda Todd Howard revealed himself in an interview with the English speaking colleagues at IGN further commented on the upcoming sci-fi epic Starfield and also went into the concrete technical implementation on the Xbox consoles.
So Starfield will come in 4K resolution on the more powerful Xbox Series X, but you’ll have to live with a framerate locked at 30 fps. This step is necessary to ensure consistency in game performance, Howard said. The less powerful Xbox Series S, meanwhile, will display the game at 1440p at 30 fps.
“I don’t think it’s a big surprise what we’re targeting if you look at our previous games. It’s always these huge, open worlds, fully dynamic, absolutely detailed and anything can happen. That’s what we want to do. It It’s 4K on the X and 1440 on the S. We lock it at 30 fps because we want to be true to all of that, we want all of those things. We don’t want to sacrifice any of that,” Howard said.
For those who have concerns about the immense size of Starfield that it might be a bit of a flop in terms of performance, Howard continues: “Fortunately in this case we managed to make it go great. It often goes much better , sometimes even 60 fps, but on consoles we lock that down because we prefer consistency.”
In this respect, Microsoft and Bethesda are rowing back a bit with Starfield compared to the flopped Redfall. The vampire shooter had been shown in advance at 60 fps, but a month before the release, the Bethesda studio Arkane had to admit that the title would have to be locked at 30 fps and a 60 fps performance mode only later via an update will follow. Starfield has communicated from the outset that the sci-fi game will initially only be displayed at 30 fps on consoles.