Whenever there is talk about what the minimum FPS at which a game should run is, a debate can arise, with many people saying it should be 30, others that it should be 60, and even more who tend to say that it should run even higher. This time, the debate is centered around Avowed, the new first-person action RPG created by Obsidian, and the developers themselves have indicated that the game is originally created to run at 30 FPS on console.
Many of the games we can find in the previous generation of consoles used to set a frame rate limit to achieve the most stable performance possible, and the biggest problem with some titles was the number of effects and particles that could be present, making them quite unstable. But in the current generation, it is most common for any game to run at 60 FPS, and the hardware should allow this to be the case if the game is well optimized, which makes it quite strange for it to be originally created to run at 30 FPS.
Its developers confirm it, Avowed is created to run at 30 FPS
One of the biggest problems we currently face with the various video games on the market is clearly optimization, there are titles that come out from day one being practically unplayable, while there are others that manage to maintain stable FPS through practices that not all users like. In the case of Avowed, A great debate has been created because its developers have confirmed that the game is designed to run at half of what we are currently used to, 30 FPS.
In general this would not be a problem in other games like those made by Obsidian, such as Pillars of Eternity, since in the end it is a type of game that has a turn-based combat system and an isometric view, where you don’t really notice that the frames are limited that much.
But it is worrying that the developers themselves have indicated in an interview that the game is limited to these FPS:
«Since the game is a first-person single-player game, a 60fps mode is not needed.»
It is very likely that they say this because, in the absence of a competitive environment, they do not believe it is necessary to reach this minimum, which is practically achieved by most games that use this type of view. But what worries us most is whether the real reason why the game has been developed with 30 FPS in mind is related to the performance it can have if this limitation is removed, that is, if the reason for applying a standard from the previous generation is really influenced by the fact that it cannot exceed this number of frames, or if it can reach 60 but causes problems such as crashes and so on.