60fps console games will become increasingly rare, analysts warn gamers

As technology progresses, it makes sense that the gamers expect fresh games releasing on new-gen consoles to look and perform better than ever before. With more powerful hardware making it possible to have higher-resolution graphics and smoother frame rates, it just makes sense that the biggest titles would strive for the very best, right?

It’s for this reason that so much controversy tends kick off whenever it’s announced that a highly anticipated game doesn’t reach 60 frames per second on consoles. We’ve seen it loads, with Gotham Knights’ release last year being a particularly memorable example. More recently, it was confirmed that Bethesda’s space adventure RPG Starfield will also be locked at 30FPS on consoles, and some tech analysts think this could be a sign of things to come.

Take a look at Starfield’s story trailer below.

As TheGamer reports, two game tech analysts at Digital Foundry discussed Starfield’s frame rate in a recent breakdown video, where they noted that a lower frame rate makes sense for a game that is “designed for object permanence”. Basically, the game needs to constantly remember what players have done to affect its many worlds, on top of the fact that it needs to maintain a steady performance across a massive expanse of locations. However, they think that this could become the norm for future games, too.

“For better or for worse, mainly for worse I suppose, I expect that 30FPS is going to once again become the most common frame rate we see in big console games, and if performance modes are offered, they might not be as stable as we would like,” Digital Foundry’s John Linneman said. “I do think that's a bummer to some degree, but I feel like that's natural with this expansion towards more advanced graphics capability. We had this cross-gen period, and that was the opportunity for developers to push frame rate because they still needed to target lower-end platforms, but we’re now seeing this stuff go way beyond that.”

It definitely would be a shame if this is true, although I’m sure we can all agree that it’d be better to have a game running smoothly at a lower frame rate than constantly stuttering and dropping frames trying to hit a higher one.