The French publisher used to do what Bethesda Game Studios is doing now.

About 7 or 8 years ago, it was common for the French publisher to present a game at, say, E3, and then, it would be far from pretty at launch. Especially in the case of Watch_Dogs, there was a significant difference when you compared the visuals of the 2012 E3 video with the retail version. Starfield has done something similar, although not to the same extent; Todd Howard may still get some embarrassing questions about it later.

Starfield will officially not run at more than 30 FPS on Xbox Series. Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that it was a creative decision that Howard’s team wanted to make and then defended it by saying that they have Xbox games running at 60 FPS in 4K resolution. But even the native resolution is nowhere near that, with Digital Foundry’s analysis showing that Starfield runs at around 1296p on Xbox Series X and scales up to 4K from there…

But that’s not the point: Cycu1 has made a comparison video of what Starfield looked like in 2022 and 2023. Let’s start on the positive side: lighting has improved in this year’s build, and the environment and atmosphere seem to have improved, but the characters’ detail has decreased. Especially the facial hair and eyes show a lower quality!

“We do have an awful lot of people internally playing Starfield. Working with Todd and the team, I see bug counts, and just by the numbers, if it shipped today, Starfield would already have the fewest bugs of any game Bethesda has ever shipped. Also, I think about Skyrim and where that community still is over ten years later. You start to things about other things they’ve done with the game. I think there’s a potential that will get unlocked in the game over time as people discover everything,” said Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios.

Starfield arrives September 6 for Xbox Series and PC, but will also be on Game Pass.

Source: WCCFTech