Starfield has found an unexpected defender yesterday, against claims from gamers that the game is ‘unfinished’ for targeting 30 FPS.
That defender is Dannie Carlone, who works at Sony’s Santa Monica Studio as a senior staff environment artist.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, a YouTuber started getting attention online by accusing Bethesda of shipping an unfinished game in Starfield, because the game is shipping with 30 FPS framerate.
We ourselves reported yesterday that Todd Howard himself explained the reason for targeting 30 FPS. They made the call to aim for the lower framerate deliberately, so that Starfield could have ‘that fidelity’ that Bethesda wants to bring with the game.
That fidelity is to the encompassing vision of the game. As we have seen in the Starfield Direct, Bethesda is aiming to build a world far bigger than they have made before conceptually, with dynamically changing elements that are also fully detailed when they reach the gamer’s POV.
Bethesda humorously (and brilliantly) pointed to the example of a sandwich thief. While the idea of a player who goes all around space pirating and pillaging other ships just to collect their sandwiches is absurd on its face, the idea that players can collect sandwiches is radical. That means that Bethesda came up with systems so that Starfield will remember those sandwiches are in a room in your very own spaceship, and that it will remember to render them every time your character enters that room.
But let’s get back to Carlone’s defense of Starfield. On Twitter, he shared this response to the spurious claim that Starfield is unfinished:
“Game dev here, big fan btw. Wanted to clarify It’s not a sign of an unfinished game. It’s a choice. 60fps on this scale would be a large hit to the visual fidelity. My guess is they want to go for a seamless look and less ” pop in”. And of course your right to dislike the choice.”
Carlone also shared a follow up response to another tweet asking if Starfield needed to hit 4K on the Xbox Series X, since it’s 1440p on the Xbox Series S:
“It doesn’t need to be 4k (which is expensive) it could be 1080p at 60 or another variable resolution at 60. They want to keep it locked at 30 4k and push the visuals to a high level on this scale.”
It seems some fans still don’t understand the perspective of game developers when it comes to this sort of thing. We’re well past the point of Katsuhiro Harada and Tomonobu Itagaki bragging about their Tekken and Dead or Alive, or DICE and Infinity Ward making snarky references to each other in their promotions for Call of Duty and Activision.
Game developers nowadays see themselves competing with each other less, compared to the feeling of having to protect each other from gamers. It’s ironic, but we cannot pretend that the past few years of toxicity and bad behavior from the industry’s own customers haven’t changed the industry itself.
You can rest assured developers from Sony, Nintendo, Valve, and others are looking forward to Starfield as much as Bethesda fans themselves. Some of them might even be part of that Bethesda fandom all along.
