Todd Howard: Starfield Runs at 30FPS on Both Xbox Series X and S to Favor Consistency

Game director Todd Howard has confirmed that Bethesda’s Starfield will run at a locked 30FPS on both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

Yesterday during Microsoft’s Xbox and Bethesda showcase, fans were presented with an excellent Starfield deep-dive showing off the game’s combat, exploration, and diverse worlds. In addition, Bethesda updated the game’s PC system requirements on Steam, and while the minimum and recommended specifications didn’t provide details about the game’s target resolution and frame rate, Todd Howard did talk about performance and video resolution on Xbox consoles during an interview with IGN yesterday.

According to Howard, while Starfield often runs well above 30FPS on Series X and S, the team preferred consistency due to the game’s fully-dynamic huge open worlds with incredible amounts of detail and all of the visual splendor (4K resolution on the Series X, and 1440p on the Series S).

“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for,” the game director told IGN. “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.”

He added,”Fortunately in this one, we’ve got it running great. It’s often running way above that. Sometimes it’s 60. But on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer consistency, where you’re not even thinking about it.”

Howard then reiterated that really anything can happen in the game and the team needed the additional margin.

“And we don’t ever want to sacrifice that experience that makes our games feel really, really special. So it feels great. We’re really happy with how it feels even in the heat of battle. And we need that headroom because in our games, really anything can happen.”

Seeing the scope of Starfield, locking the game to 30FPS on consoles does make sense, although we’re pretty sure that some Xbox Series X players will be disappointed by this decision. What are your thoughts about Starfield lacking different graphical modes on Xbox? Would you have preferred a 60FPS mode on Series X, albeit with a lower resolution? Is it the right call, and what do you expect from Starfield’s PC performance? Hit the comments below.

Starfield releases globally on September 6 for Xbox Series X|S and PC.