CaptainArcherStarfield’s 30fps frame rate is “a choice,” God of War dev says
on Xbox
IronTwoI don't know, Bethesda's games have always been iffy when it comes to FPS. Skyrim for example breaks if you mod it to have over 60 fps if I remember correctly. Even on Fallout 76 movement speed was kinda tied to the FPS so players looking at the ground (so that less things render thus increasing FPS) would run faster than others.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they cap it to 60 FPS on PC as well.
The Skyrim FPS lock to 60 fps was due to the physics engine not working beyond that. Knowing Bethesda, and knowing the fact that in the 30 or so rereleases of Skyrim they've never fixed that, I wouldn't be surprised if that's still there
stephfinitelyOh it definitely has something to do with this. They have been dragging this engine with them since Morrowind. I really hope that now they are with Microsoft that money can be poured into a new engine build from the ground up for Bethesda type games.
tboyer96Funnily enough, despite Fallout 76 being completely (and IMO deservedly) derided, they actually did fix some aspects of the physics being tied to the frame rate. More specifically, the frame rate doesn't affect player speed. I'm not sure if frame rate is completely decoupled, but there has actually been work done on that front since Skyrim.
buffalosevenFallout 76 always seemed to me to be an engine modernization project that the needed a game attached to fund it. It's in an okay spot now, and it was properly derided when it was released, but I don't think most people understand the amount of work it's taken to update the low-level internals of how their engine works. It'll be very interesting to see how Starfield plays.
fujiwaraI honestly don't really mind if a console game runs at a steady 30 fps. I just know that it isn't going to be steady lol
Plume (She/Her)“Game dev here,” Carlone writes, adding that they are a “big fan” of Dreamcast Guy. “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, [it’s] your right to dislike the choice.”
Sure. Maybe. It could be this. Or...
Arm-chair babbling idiot who plays too much video games here, I am one hundred percent convinced that it has nothing to do with visual fidelity and everything to do with that asthmatic engine they've been dragging since Morrowind. Can't prove it but... you know. Just a hunch I get from playing their games.
ampersandrewNo, it's most definitely a choice. You can make any engine run at 60 FPS if you sacrifice something else for it. The RE engine runs beautiful games at 60 FPS, but they had to make all sorts of sacrifices to fidelity to get World Tour in Street Fighter 6 to run at all, let alone at 60 FPS on current gen consoles.
I mean sure but give us the choice, damn it! :(
The choice is playing on PC, because unless the game was designed by complete shitheads who decided they don't need a settings menu, you'll actually get a choice of what features you do or don't enable. Console games should have PC-style settings menus, but they don't. For me, buying a new PC game always involves chores: turning off chromatic aberration, depth of field, motion blur, and other nonsense so I can claw back like 45 additional FPS.
I no longer trust triple A games on PC and if the game is not ridiculously busted optimisation wise for PC at release I would be amazed.
It sure reads like they are saying "more fps makes game look bad", but my assumption is that they mean " if we want this to run at higher fps we will have to reduce fidelity or the engine cant handle it". At least thats what I hope they mean
hybrid havocYeah, reducing graphical fidelity is often one of the things needed in order to increase framerate. That is not unique to their engine, or any engine.
lemillionsocksPeople constantly complain about the engine that they use but no other game engine is as flexible when it comes to modding and no other game engine has the same level of complexity when it comes to being able to pick stuff up and move it around. You can take items off a shelf or desk in skyrim and fallout and stack them somewhere else. You can if you want decide to hoard a bunch of garbage you stole and stack them into a pyramid in your home base area.
Are their quirks? Sure the physics tied to framerate in skyrim was a problem, the games are always buggy, and they arent usually the prettiest games out there(though skyrim looked decent when it first came out and the graphical fidelity mods can work magic).
As for the premise does it have to do with fidelity? Of course it does. Setting a framecap on consoles means theyre able to use higher resolution assets, better lighting effects, and more complex models. I understand the preference of giving up fidelity for some smoothness and frames but 30fps isnt totally uncommon in console spaces and this is a bethesda game not a twitch shooter or a 2d fighter.
Outside the PC space gamers hardly ever talk about or think about framer rate and effects, and details of a game where you mostly wander around taking in the sites matters more.
It would be nice if they had an option for a lower res mode or less detailed mode and 60fps target, but I get why they made the choice they did and ideally Im sure it'll run at a normal framerate on pc.
Now if it runs poorly on PC then we can riot.
I also agree with that. I love the modding aspect of it and I fear it'll go away with a new engine.
CleoTheWizardIt's also a personal choice of Bethesda not to rename their engine. Many other studios do this same thing and reuse engines, but they often rename them after significant rewrites. Bethesda just doesn't do that.
Also they aren't worried about how the game will be released. Their games have legs. So a 60fps version will eventually come out. Then they'll release it 5 more times.
But they did? For Oblivion it was Gamebryo, for Skyrim it was the Creation Engine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Engine
The Creation Engine is a 3D video game engine created by Bethesda Game Studios based on the Gamebryo engine.
I mean that they haven't changed it from the Creation engine. Which has been used since Skyrim despite some big rewrites for Fallout and I'm sure more big rewrites or additions for Starfield
But it's only been 2 games since Skyrim, right? And for Starfield it's being renamed Creation Engine 2. Either way that statement "Bethesda just doesn’t do that." Doesn't seem accurate when they have done that multiple times.
Huh okay yeah that's fair. I guess I'm thinking more about the time span since that game engine is now well over a decade old whereas the previous examples are separated by a handful of years. And I didn't know about them putting a '2' in front of it for Starfield.
Arm-chair babbling idiot who plays too much video games here, I am one hundred percent convinced that it has nothing to do with visual fidelity and everything to do with that asthmatic engine they've been dragging since Morrowind.
Code doesn't go bad with time, that's not really how it works. And game engines tend to be a ship of Theseus situation, where just because it's still the same "engine" in theory, doesn't mean that large parts (or all of it), haven't eventually been replaced or refactored over the years.
Unreal Engine has been around for 30 years at this point, would you also consider that an "asthmatic engine"?
No, what I mean is that this engine always had a cobbled up together with duct tape feels to it. It's also the beauty of it.
Some engines get better and some just get more and more spaghetti duct tape.
I think that they talked at one point about how they had it running at 60 fps at one point, but they opted for a more “stable” experience (translation: the amount of frame drops probably would’ve made Cyberpunk on the base Xbox One blush).
If only players could make that choice themselves, perhaps through some sort of graphics settings menu. No, that's crazy and unprecedented, it could never work.
that asthmatic engine they’ve been dragging since Morrowind
I don't believe that's true at all, though. At least by Wikipedia, Morrowind was NetImmerse, Oblivion was Gamebryo (modified Havok), and Skyrim was Creation. And I remember in the announcements for Skyrim that they remade the engine for the game. And Starfield is an updated engine, Creation 2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Engine for more
Creation is a modified gamebryo. So Creation 2 will also be Based on it. Beteshda will not change away from it because gamebryo is a large reason why the modding community is as strong as it is for skyrim etc. And the modding community sells a lot of copies!
The engine also started as an engine for MMOs, which allowed them rich scripting for every NPC, as well as an inventory for every NPC.
The world fidelity that Bethesda builds, on a technical and simulation level, is unmatched — yeah, something like The Witcher 3 might look better, but it also doesn’t let you interact with basically every item in the world or pickpocket every NPC’s weapon as a way to neutralize them in combat.
MummelpuffinCall of Duty still runs on the Quake 3 engine, if we go off of the logic people uncharitably use for Bethesda's games specifically.
This incessant nagging about fps is the most tiresome thing in gaming since gamergate.
Yeah how dare consumers expect their products to be good
Good ≠ a single metric.
What is the absolute most important thing about every video game? They all have it in common: there are zero video games ever made, ever, where this isn't the absolute most important thing that there is.
The answer is: being able to play it. Is a game that crashes to desktop every time you move the camera a good game? No. If I can feel comfortable judging whether or not a video game is any good based on whether or not it passes that single metric, I feel even more comfortable to extend it to "being able to see it without motion sickness and eye strain". Wanting your game to be optimized properly and not a juddery slide show isn't entitlement, it's the bare minimum of functionality.
HermitixEvery video game and every TV program for DECADES ran at 30fps. 29.97, actually. Nobody was motion sick or got eye strain.
People who were actually there at the time say otherwise. And so do I, because I was there too. Slow frame rates look like shit, and they have always looked like shit. The first video game I actually enjoyed because it wasn't visually uncomfortable to look at was F-Zero X on the N64. Would you like to take a guess as to why?
Most games of the NES, Genesis, and SNES era ran at 240p, 60fps (in the NTSC regions).
Sure, but a game is objectively better if it can run at a higher framerate.
Bloodborne is excellent, but it would be 100% better if it ran on solid 60 FPS.
Computers (including consoles) have limited resources, at some point you need to deal with tradeoffs, for example do you prioritize graphics quality or do you prioritize FPS? Do you want/need to have more resources available for the physics engine? That eats on the maximum possible FPS. Do you want to do real time procedural generation? Do you want to use the GPU to run some kind of AI? All this are design considerations and there's no one size fits all prioritization decision for all videogames. Clearly the people working on Starfield believe that for their intended game experience graphic fidelity is more important than FPS, and this is a perfectly valid design choice even if you don't agree with it.
It's a matter of optimization and Bethesda games have all had pretty poor optimization. They could get it running at a higher framerate but there's no need because people will buy it even if it runs 30fps.
If it was only a matter of optimization we would all still be playing games on the original NES.
What's so revolutionary or ambitious about Starfield that it couldn't be optimized to have "acceptable" framerate? Pretty much everything Starfield does has been done before and the creation engine isn't some visual marvel that would burn down graphics cards. So where's the performance going?
garretbleI agree up to a point. If a game is at 30 and feels good to play, then I’m OK. For example, Zelda feels great. Controlling Link is tight and snappy.
On the other hand, if the game has bad frame pacing (like Bloodborne), playing at 30 feels real bad.
I try not to get too crazy about frames, but sometimes some games just don’t feel good.
I will say, though, that while I really like channels like Digital Foundry, I sometimes wonder if them picking apart games to show the most minor frame dips is slowly teaching us to see these things, and as a result we kind of subconsciously will be like, “Well now I noticed this game had some moments where the frames dropped during an explosion. Obviously it’s a bad game.” I know that’s some hyperbole, but still.
I have no problem playing 30 fps games. It's when it goes really low like 10 fps that it's choppy. Like dark souls in blighttown. Now that isn't the best to play. But it's still doable and an awesome game. 30 fps games are great. 60 is butter but not necessarily.
m-p-3What irks me is when game developers ties the physics engine to the framerate. We all know this will cause issues down the road, could we just.. not?
Is this really a thing lately? Maybe on some Switch games, but I think most modern games can have a dynamic framerate.
HubiSkyrim famously did this. So the concern that Starfield will have similar issues is not unfounded.
One one hand, Skyrim was released in 2011, on the other hand Skyrim was also released in 2022
Remember Red Dead Redemption 2? On PC, your stats depleted faster the more FPS you had so with 60FPS you'd get hungry twice as fast as with 30FPS.
Iirc even the sun moved faster so a day was only half as long.
In Dark Souls 2 the weapon durability was cut in half at 60 fps compared to 30 fps as well. They did eventually patch it though.
HDMI KojimaThey better delivery that "visual fidelity" if you are already capping at 30 fps on a current-gen console.
dillI imagine there is some reason we still see this. Any devs in the Industry lurking?
I'm not in the industry, but I've dabbled in Unity and that's just kind of how it works by default. You create a game object and it gets an Update() function that is called once per frame. You're encouraged to perform calculations and update it's position in that callback.
You're supposed to use Time.deltaTime to scale your calculations based on how long it's been since the last frame.
But that takes effort and it's very easy to just not do that and your game will still work fine in most cases.
Unity also has FixedUpdate which is encouraged to be used for any physics related updates.
Not doing it also causes issues in the form of micro stutters when some but not other frames have updated physics or not.
Frame pacing is hard, and locking everything down happens to be the only sure-fire way to completely eliminate display issues. But then, of course, you have a locked frame rate.
I think they fixed this with Fallout 76, so here's hoping that those changes also made its way into their future projects.
Assuming that it will be ported to PC then I'm sure they've resolved those issues.
No lock 24 and add film effect
nii236Reminds me of Horizon Zero Dawn running at 30fps but it felt silky smooth because the FPS was rock solid.