With the Starfield release just around the corner, the wonderful Todd Howard decided to let us in on a few details that I’m pretty sure everyone everywhere was wondering about, or at least, I was.
One of the beans that Todd spilt was that the team had spent a lot of time on making sure that the font accessibility options for different monitors were right. In a game that contains a lot of text, reading this text is obviously important and there are a lot of monitor sizes out there. Steam Deck, ROG Ally, I’m looking at you. Although, when asked about the game being played on these platforms, Todd just said “We’ll talk about that later”.
Another bean was based on the frame rate that a lot of people are up in arms about, 30 FPS does sound like a low number in this day and age, but a single-player game, filled to the brim with exploration, that sticks to this frame rate sounds even better. I’d bet that most people won’t even notice it, and according to Todd, “the game feels great in your hands.”. When asked about a performance mode Todd said that they weren’t looking to drop any of the in-game features to push out a few more frames from the game. So 30 FPS it is, and that’s that.
One of the things I was most worried about was how much of a difference players would feel between the 1000 planets. Todd explained that only around 10% of these planets would have actual life on them. I suppose, if you really think about it, our solar system only has about 10% life as well (that we know of…), so we can’t really be too mad about them leaving the other 90% as giant space rocks. I’m sure, though, that even the planets without life will still be an exciting experience to explore, as we’ve already seen the amazing lighting, gravity and procedural systems that the Bethesda team has been working on.
If you’d like to watch the full interview between Todd and Kinda Funny Games, check it out below. Otherwise, carry on with your space training. Those G’s aren’t going to force themselves.