![]() ![]() AdvertisementĮven with higher-res assets, the game's aggressive level of detail (LoD) system turns anything outside of a six-foot radius into a smeary mess. In massive outdoor scenes, the game's presentation borders on N64 levels in terms of fuzzy, low-res textures all over rocks, trees, and foliage. The Outer Worlds, in comparison, takes a sledgehammer to the game's visual quality, with the most obvious downgrade coming from texture quality. Last year's Witcher 3 port on Switch was a masterwork in optimization, designed to preserve as many polygons, as much lighting, and as high of texture quality as possible-with its major concession coming from a reduced resolution across the board. The gallery at the top of the article is damning stuff. Lower res, lesser textures, freaky NPCsīut the real crux of the Switch port is that a lot had to give to get this game anywhere near a 30fps refresh. Since this gets in the way of fine-tuning your shot's aim, we hope the issue gets patched soon. In either case, this option currently conflicts with auto-aim whenever your view auto-attaches to a foe, motion control will turn off until you push your right joystick away from the foe. I am a fan of the latter, as it lets me nudge my hands to line up a precise shot against a foe's weak point. Whether you play the game in "handheld" mode or dock the system and use a pair of Joy-Cons or a Switch Pro Controller, you can toggle two types of motion-based view control: at all times, or only when you hold down the "aim through sights" button. This wholly optional toggle works pretty well in action, complete with adjustable sensitivity options. Speaking of: Outer Worlds is one of the growing number of Switch ports to implement motion-based aiming support. Controller auto-aim is generous, should you leave the option enabled. You'll eventually amass quite the weapon arsenal, and the combat on platforms like PC does feel satisfying with keyboard and mouse-but we're not talking about Quake III Arena here. Or you can pump up your gun-related stats and take advantage of a "time dilation" ability to focus fire on enemies' specific body parts (cripple a leg, blind their eyes, etc). You can customize your hero to have superior abilities in stealth, dodging, melee, or out-of-combat dialogue options, which can all lead to less fighting. To some degree, that's because Outer Worlds, like its Fallout inspirations, has always been a serviceable combat game, not a precise one. Advertisementīut you'll still enjoy 30fps gameplay on the regular, and the exceptions are tolerable enough, even during frenetic combat. The latter is a particularly confusing case, and it may point to Unreal Engine 4 loading a new interior chunk of geometry while also juggling objects on the other sides of walls in system RAM. The apparent frame rate chugs as low as 20fps for unpredictable reasons: turning your gaze toward an open field, rotating your view at a high speed (which emphasizes the Switch port's unbecoming motion blur system), or even walking into a new, tiny room. Like the other console versions, Outer Worlds on Switch has a 30-frames-per-second cap, but unlike more powerful consoles, Switch can't lock to that frame rate at all times. Then you'll reach a town full of chatty NPCs, and if you decide to take Obsidian Entertainment up on the devs' promise of playing however you like and attack the townspeople, the locals will react by running around and fighting back. You'll see a ship's wreckage in the distance, run a ways to reach it, and find it littered with loot, dead bodies, and dangerous monsters. And right from the jump, the game remains the same mechanically. You'll eventually hop from one planet to the next, each with giant fields to traverse, monsters to fight, and citizen-filled towns to contend with. ![]() The opening planet is a good test of the larger game's sales pitch. In good news, the entire game appears to have been ported with zero cuts to content or apparent changes to level layouts. This weapon has been upgraded with an "electric field" effect, and the resulting particle effects may affect the game's frame rate.
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