Yesterday I played Starfield on my XBX for roughly 90min. When gameplay started, I thought that my Xbox was stuttering but then I recalled that it’s a 30fps game. My reaction was “Ew but let’s focus on game play, like with some graphics settings your eyes adjust after a few minutes“.
Gameplay mechanics, skill trees and the whole concept of the game is well thought out. It’s explorer game like Minecraft/No-Man‘s sky meets a shooter like Halo and RPG. Combat is convincing and doesn’t feel like an after thought.
However, my 60-90min I had not adjusted to 30fps. It was hurting my head a bit.
I blame Microsoft for for showing 60fps and backwards compatibility down our throats. Now they are asking us to take two steps back and accept 30fps for their most ambitious titles. Surely there must be a 60fps mode in the pipeline.
I don’t believe that Starfield will be stuck at 30fps on the Series X for ever. Regardless of game, I would rather play 1080p at 60fps rather than ”4k”(1440p dynamic resolution scaling) and ray tracing at 4k. There isn’t a single game that I’ve played on my Series X and chosen quality over performance mode.
As a result, I’m taking a break from Starfield and will resume when a 60fps has launched. I think MS just wanted to get the 30fps variant out the door, optimise it and fix bugs rather than launching and maintaining two modes From launch day.
