When gaming, the general rule of thumb is that the higher the number of frames per second, the smoother the gaming experience. This is especially true if the game has a lot of objects moving quickly on the screen.
Examples of this can be found all over the gaming landscape, including competitive first-person shooters, MOBAs, third-person shooters, and even fighting games. However, where a high frame rate isn’t strictly necessary is in games whose content is much slower, such as RPG titles with dense stories and lots of detail.
The current generation of consoles on both the Xbox and PlayStation side have been marketed to consumers with a leap in performance in the framerate department, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X capable of hitting 120 FPS in certain circumstances. However, Matt Hansen, art director at Obsidian, doesn’t believe this framerate headroom is necessary when creating a first-person single-player game, especially when the goal is to push digital fidelity to the highest possible level.
Hansen made these comments on the Iron Lords podcast, where he stated that Obsidian is “The goal is 30 frames per second” for his upcoming title Avowedand this has been the FPS goal since the early stages of game development.
Personally, I would consider this a good idea from Hansen, especially considering how smooth players find 60 FPS compared to 30 FPS, especially in first person shooters where movement issues can arise. Hansen suggests that a choice needs to be made between graphics and performance, which while a difficult choice, should mostly fall on the latter. Make the game feel good before and makes for an eye-catcher.
Furthermore, I also agree Kitguru It argued that a higher frame rate would be more necessary for a first-person game than a third-person game because the field of view is much smaller. There are also other points, such as that the PlayStation 2, Nintendo 64 and other now-obsolete consoles were capable of 60 FPS and the games released at the time actually took advantage of those capabilities.
This is also not the first time a game has targeted 30 FPS at launch and then caved in to community complaints, only to add a 60 FPS mode later. Starfield did this at launch. There’s also the point of implementing frame generation, which technically doesn’t add anything”real” frames to the total FPS, the frames generated still provide a much smoother gaming experience overall. AMD’s FSR is available on consoles.
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Given the reasons above why increasing FPS above 30 is justified in almost all cases, I don’t think there’s any reason why a developer/publisher would release a AAA title with a 30 FPS cap without additional options. This is especially true if the 30 FPS cap is to improve the game’s graphics and thereby make it more marketable.
30 FPS caps in games released on current-gen consoles at 120 FPS (excluding handhelds) should be gone by 2024. Gamers want to play games, not tech demos, or at least have the option to make a choice.
