With the approach of September we're rapidly reaching the stage where people are groping at anything they can to try and talk about Starfield because the information is so sparse. Yet in all this time something we've heard next to nothing about, to my utmost surprise, is the fact that Starfield is going to only be 30 frames per second on consoles. Of course, it was announced and there was a little bit of discourse in that moment, but the conversation really died down and I can't help but wonder why that is. In the modern age of gaming where we've gotten used to choice in the way that we play our games, having that choice made for us in the name of some sort of unwavering artistic dogma feels wrong, in a way. As though the very ideal of a collaborative way to experience art, that the interactive medium implies, has drawn up against the very rigid beliefs of the Bethesda team, and this isn't even the first time this has happened. Also, thirty frames really sucks.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no 'visuals master-race' zealot- I've enjoyed janky looking modern games for years at this point; the gameplay is all that matters to me and I mean that. But in a situation where I have splurged on high end equipment to play a game in as tight fidelity as I can afford, I expect the basics of my hardware capabilities. The Series X apparently seriously cannot manage a stable 60 Frames per second whilst maintaining it's visuals, which seems almost damning for a console that Microsoft seems to have taken so much financial loss simply to produce and sell. And it really does feel excessively 'old gen' to stick with the '30 Frames' world space. Take it from someone who regularly experiences both from my PC to my console, the difference is off-putting a lot of time, especially when every other game on the console is hitting that industry standard 60 benchmark. I feel like this is the sort of topic that gets a lot more scrutiny elsewhere in the gaming world too.
When Redfall got announced as 30 frames per second at launch that somehow earned misgiving looks across the commentary world as people assumed that was indicative of a rush-job to put that game out as quickly as possible. I think Gollum might have suffered something similar, but everything about Gollum looked awful so I honestly can't remember if the frames were a problem too. But Starfield suffered barely a raised brow under a similar announcement, and I wonder if there's a sense of internal bias entering into the conversation here. Redfall always seemed to rub people wrong from the moment it was introduced. I'm no different, I wrote it off the second we saw that reveal trailer and I knew it wasn't an Arkane game as I liked them to be. Starfield, on the otherhand, has people excited and hopeful for Bethesda's newest unabashed hit since Skyrim. (Hopefully with less re-releases.) All I'm saying it that the scrutinising eye should be a little more universal.
And as for the idea that Bethesda wants to be in control of the experience we have, that really does relate back to the very old school way in which that company maintains it's fan interactions. They're super hands off when it comes to modding, which I appreciate endlessly, but when it comes to the core experience itself they've never opened up to modern trends and have even come across as surprisingly regressive. They want consistent 4k for Starfield on consoles, probably because console gamers are the core audience they want to wow firstly and PC gamers have a better grasp that their own system is responsible for lower graphical fidelity at points. But then Bethesda also made Fallout 76's server list invisible... just so that "Players don't have to think about stuff like that." Uh... thinking about how to get the best connection or play with my friends is kind of an important part about online play, you'd think. But not in Bethesda's world, it would seem. Not in the house of nuclear proliferation.
Now to play devil's advocate, and to feed into a lot of the hope-ium that is being pumped around this game, I'm think this isn't evidence of a rushed development cycle. As much as that has become something to fear in modern game design, and Bethesda themselves have fallen victim before, we know that Microsoft took control of the development time around this project and gave Bethesda another year to work on what they had, and we can hope that was time enough to make the game as good as it could be. Maybe the fact of the matter is simply that the Xbox series X lacks the power to run Starfield at it's best and that no modern console can stand up to the heft of a beefy computer system. I've heard that the game is said to be quite CPU intensive, so perhaps that's the issue here?
The real question I suppose we should be asking is whether or not 30 frames is going to ruin the experience of Starfield, which does seem to primarily favour exploration compared to it's contemporaries. I'm sure there'll still be a lot of action scenes, that is Bethesda's usual go-to when dreaming up general world interaction, but if we're not going to be spending all of our time blasting holes in each other than there's nothing inherently wrong with 30 Frames per second. Provided, of course, that we're talking a stable thirty! No dropping below whenever 'Neon' or 'New Atlantis' gets busy- in the current age 30 should be the absolute bare minimum. Any lower and we have ourselves a problem up in here! I don't think that's catering towards being a 'graphics snob', that's just asking for the most out of this painfully priced product. ($70 makes my heart ache.)
I think that many Xbox players are just happy to not be denied of a game they've waited so very long for, which could be why expectations are being relaxed. Playstation players are just trying to pretend the game doesn't exist and are getting excited about other products within their ecosystem and PC players have nothing to complain about at all. It's a delicate ecosystem of balance that no one really wants to upset and that is a stalemate everybody seems relatively happy to keep. As for performance chasers who purchased the more expensive Series X in order to take advantage of the hardware? Well... I guess they can stick to less demanding games in the future for their kicks. More the fools we, I guess is what we should take away from all this.
It just seems so very strange to think of a Bethesda game as 'high performance'. Their games have never really been standouts for the way that they bend and burn our systems to crumbs, it seems totally bizarre to think they're at that stage now! Back when there were performance issues walking around Boston in Fallout 4 that was largely looked on as a failure on the developer's end, but now it's just the sheer scale of what they're planning riding up against the systems they're working with- isn't that a trip? I guess all of us have trouble getting used to realities we aren't used to. Of course, I'm sure this just makes the anticipation of what ultimately awaits us all that stronger! And to be honest this entire blog was pretty much Devil's Advocate, I'm a 'Quality mode' stan anyway.
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