Team Digital foundry published a detailed technical analysis Switchversion of the role-playing game The outer worlds Obsidian Entertainment Studios.
The game uses dynamic resolution. The dock most of the time it’s about 720pwhile in portable mode the picture quality is scaled from 540p before 384p. This is below the numbers promised by the developers, but low resolution is the lesser evil.
Due to the limitations associated with the amount of available RAM, it was necessary to sacrifice the quality of textures, and the developers did not adapt the assets to the specifications of the device in terms of art design, but simply underestimated the resolution. The same goes for radically simplified geometry. From rocky formations to elements of the player’s ship, buildings and everything else, the impression is that the game works at the lowest detail settings. In many places, developers greatly reduced the number of trees, stones and grass, and from the voluminous clouds there was no trace at all. As a result, The Outer Worlds, according to DF, looks even worse than similar projects with Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
The same applies to NPC models, which lost in detail and quality of textures, as a result of which the characters became more angular, clothes became washed out and strange artifacts appeared when some elements of equipment fall through others. Meanwhile, the lack of depth of field on the close-ups of the characters gives a bad picture in the background, especially when the textures have not yet fully loaded.
This leads to another serious drawback of the port – slow loading of textures, sometimes taking 10 seconds or more. Based on their low level of detail, Digital Foundry compares The Outer Worlds to exploring Google earth in street view with partially loaded map details. The situation is also depressing that the game often just falls out onto the loading screen, loading new locations against the background.
At the same time, at the beginning of the passage, all these problems are not so noticeable, however, the longer you play, the more obvious they become. It was similar in its time with the original The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on the PlayStation 3, only here it shows up much earlier.
In addition to the fact that almost every element of the game was put under the knife, users also need to be prepared for unstable performance. Like other console versions of The Outer Worlds, the port for Switch is aimed at 30 frames per second, and although at first the performance seems quite stable, the more you play, the more it crashes. In scenarios, when you are just doing research, the frame rate as a whole keeps up well, provided that there is nothing too complicated on the screen, however, in battle, and especially in battles in detailed spaces, the frame rate drops to 20 FPS or even lower.
According to Digital Foundry, what the team Virtuos generally managed to get the game to work on the Nintendo Switch, is already a feat, but the sacrifices that they had to make for this, influence the final experience too much and are simply not worth it.
Read also: Break the law: Sony has been fined heavily for a refund policy on the PlayStation 4.
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