Gaming

People 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. Graphical effects and details and fisual fidelity are a higher priority and more important in a game where generally you mostly just walk around and explore.

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.

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, 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.

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

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

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.

I'm sure you're right about this. Probably the framerate bounces all over the place which feels much worse than simply locking it to 30fps and having a consistent experience. I think a PC has the potential to simply brute force it into 60fps, but an Xbox simply cannot. Which is probably fine. The game is said to run at 4k and 1440p depending on which Xbox you have, and for a game like this where exploration is going to play a big role, those visuals will do a lot of silent storytelling.

I would rather walk over a hill and see an incredible alien sunset on some moon, than have more frames, especially if those frames are bouncing around between 60 and 40 and going over that hill stutters and jerks spoiling the immersion.

Call of Duty still runs on the Quake 3 engine, if we go off of the logic people uncharitably use for Bethesda's games specifically.

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).

I'd be a lot more willing to believe it's down to the engine if we weren't also dealing with a bunch of other games coming out on consoles at 30FPS.