We got a lengthy look at Bethesda’s upcoming Starfield during the Xbox Games Showcase. During the 45-minute gameplay presentation, Bethesda gave us a pretty solid understanding of what their new sci-fi RPG is all about, and it’s quite promising.

However, there were still some questions about performance. While this generation of consoles initially seemed to be pushing for 60fps as standard, we’ve seen a number of games running at 30fps without any options to increase it. The recently released Xbox exclusive Redfall only runs at 30fps on consoles, triggering a lot of discussion about whether Starfield would be the same.

Speaking to IGN, Bethesda’s own Todd Howard tackled the subject of performance and confirmed that Starfield will indeed be locked to 30fps on consoles.

He proceeded to break it down, stating that the Xbox Series X will be outputting at 4k, while the Series S will push 1440p to your screen.

Elaborating further, Howard told IGN that the game actually runs at a higher framerate. “we’ve got it running great. It’s often running way above that.” said Todd Howard. “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.”

Consistency is certainly important – I’ll take a rock-solid 30fps over a heavily fluctuating one any day – but people are understandably upset by the lack of a performance mode. Given the option, I turn on Performance mode 9 times out of 10 because 60fps feels so much nicer than 30fps and I find the graphical trade-off to be worth it.

If there’s any consolation it’s that the gameplay doesn’t look very fast, so the loss of those extra 30 frames won’t impact the game as badly as something like DOOM Eternal being stuck at 30fps.

Does Starfield being locked to 30fps on console change how you feel about the game?

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