The Outer Worlds on Nintendo Switch proves not every game needs a port



Please, I'm begging you. Stop with the ports.

The Outer Worlds was one of the top games from 2019 and for good reason. It presented a colorful world filled with unique characters, a quirky sense of humor, and developer Obsidian Entertainment's knack for dialog, especially in regards to dialog trees. It was also available on just about every platform… except for one.

Now the game is out for the Nintendo Switch, a platform not typically known for having huge, big-budget, AAA games — at least, the graphically-intensive ones. That hasn't stopped developers from trying. Newer games like The Witcher 3 have been successfully ported over to the Switch and despite some technical and visual limitations, people were excited to play some of their favorite games on the go.

Can The Outer Worlds still be successful on a less powerful, handheld platform? Virtuos handled the port and have done stellar work on others — the recent BioShock: The Collection and XCOM 2 Collection for the Switch, for example — so it was in capable hands. However, not even the experts on ports could've made this work.

Does this game run as it should?

Note the blur. That's how it renders in console.

Publisher Private Division claimed ahead of the launch that The Outer Worlds was set to run at 1080p in docked mode and 720p in handheld mode and had a target of 30FPS. The first part of that sentence is apparent; playing the game on my Switch Lite in handheld mode was a rough experience while playing it on a docked regular Switch was a more reasonable one.

However, there were times running the game in handheld where it was clearly below 720p. Text on signs couldn't render sharp enough to be read, while people appeared downright blurry while in the distance. Buildings and other details out in the distance were impossible to see clearly, and would only come into focus when you got reasonably close. This, as you expect, became a huge issue during fights since enemies were tough to spot, especially if they blended in with their environment in the open world. This definitely improved in docked mode, but even then I wonder how much the game actually hit 1080p since a lot of the blur still existed.

Digital Foundry confirms my suspicions, reporting that the game typically ran at 720p docked and 540p in handheld mode. It also stated that the game could drop even lower than 540p while on the go.

You can see the difference between the Xbox One version (right) and the port (left) below. You'll notice that there's also a lot more contrast in the Xbox version, which makes the images stand out even more.

I've written in the past how little most people don't care about resolution and frame rates. A lot of people on our team can't tell the difference between 1080p and 4K, for instance. However, the difference between high-definition and close to standard-definition is much easier to...

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