It’s time for round four.
(Disclaimer: MMO Fallout was provided a key for the purpose of review)
I have played The Outer Worlds on three systems so far; PS4, Xbox, and PC. I guess you could say I am ambivalent about the title.
The Outer Worlds is a wonderful game that I deeply enjoyed playing on PC and other consoles. If you have an Xbox One or gaming PC and a subscription to Game Pass I highly recommend you stop reading what I’m writing and play this. Right now. The Switch port has come along months late, having been developed by “guys who work on Switch ports” Virtuos. Can they perform magic with the underpowered Switch? Yes. Also no.
So let’s talk about the game itself. The Outer Worlds is a future science fiction title centered around a plot involving rich megacorporations colonizing deep space because William Mckinley was never assassinated and the United States never passed the antitrust laws. Yea, it’s a stretch. You the player were put in stasis along with your colony and because you were deemed to be unprofitable to thaw out, your colony was never thawed out but instead left adrift in the outer reaches of space and publicized as a tragic loss and basically turned into marketing propaganda to make soulless corporations look empathetic.
You are rescued by a crazy scientist who enlists you to help him acquire a means to bring back the other colonists. To accomplish this you’ll need to travel across the galaxy and get into all sorts of crazy hijinks, meet a cast of lovable characters, and kill a whole lot of marauders. A lot of the plot can be summed up as “f*^k capitalism” as you deal with exaggerated themes like suicide being considered a crime of vandalism against company property and little things like a lady asking you to rescue her “little boy” only for that little boy to be a 42 year old man who wants his mom to leave him alone.
The Outer Worlds is effectively Fallout New Vegas 2.0. You have a first person shooter combat system that is functional but not fantastic complete with a built-in VATS-esque system that slows time to a near halt so you can get some extra aim-time in and bonuses. RPG fans will appreciate the return of the skill-check system that allows for the same scenario to be completed in several different ways. The system is generous early on with skills lumped together allowing one skill point to level three different crafts up to level 50 after which they need to be leveled up individually. You won’t get out of every encounter without a shootout, but you can get pretty far with just your silver tongue.
For example, in one town you need to get medicine from a dispensary but the person in charge won’t give them because the individual who needs them has gone over her limit for the month. If your “lie” is high enough, you can say they’re for you to get an exp check and not get the pills because you’re an outsider. Skill check persuade and the pharmacist will tell you that there’s nothing she can do because the quotas are hard coded into the system. You can find the corpse of the guy who runs the system and take his key, or you can hack the computer and just do it that way, or you can just intimidate the pharmacist into giving you the drugs, or you can hack into the storage room and steal them, or you can pickpocket the pharmacist for her key and hack the system but if your intelligence is too low you can’t alter it because you can’t spell the person’s name you are looking for. All of this is one step in a quest!
Your choice.
The protagonist is followed on their adventure by a rag tag group of companions that you recruit pretty early on. They all have their own personalities and you can have up to two with you on the field at any time (or none). They talk, react to the environment, add in on dialogue, and even interact with the NPCs in the various towns and unlock quests. There’s a lot of personality that you don’t quite get with other titles where your followers are just sorta one-liner machines at best and to provide more DPS or healing. Each companion has their perk be it healing, offense, defense, or just making you better at killing certain categories of creatures.
Leveling up gives stat points to be allotted into skills each of which has a tangible effect per level and also grants bonuses at specific intervals like being able to buy restricted items from vending machines. Every two levels you receive a perk point that grants something minimal but fun like being able to fast travel while encumbered or gaining +50% experience from companion kills. The flaw system is unchanged and still worthless; taking major permanent debuffs in exchange for a singular perk point. I never found perks important enough to be worth something like +35% plasma damage.
On the Switch side of things, the fact that Virtuos got this game working on the platform in and of itself is quite an accomplishment. There have been a lot of games ported over to the Switch in the past year and the results are not always so good, especially for games coming from this generation and not the 360/PS3 era. Virtuos deals with the lower performance by absolutely murdering the texture resolution. You get used to it but coming off of the PS4 pro the result is jarring to say the least.
The game doesn’t look terrible but it of course doesn’t look great. Graphically The Outer Worlds looks much better indoors where more detailed versions of the textures can load in. Otherwise the first hour of the game actually strained my eyes to the point where they hurt, and that even happened in handheld mode. There were some framerate stutters but they were few and far between.
The Switch version also allows for motion aiming if you’re into that and it is nice to be able to adjust aim ever so slightly to hit those weak points on enemies. The functionality is nearly broken with auto-aim also enabled, which it is by default. Don’t use motion aiming with the pro controller.
As all of the content is here and the levels seemingly unchanged, the method utilized by Virtuos to optimize The Outer Worlds for Switch was to take the textures and beat the quality out of them with an ugly stick. At its best the port looks okay. At its worst the game looks like someone smeared vasiline all over your screen. NPCs in The Outer Worlds is a scarred world with scarred NPCs. The Switch port has a tendency to smooth over their pockmarked and scarred faces like a bad Instagram filter making granny look like she’s 40 years younger.
The most damning thing I can say about The Outer Worlds Switch version is that the slower loading can sometimes effect the game itself. I have had instances where mobs didn’t spawn in until I was right on top of them, or others where I ran past an area I knew there were marauders in for them to just not appear, only to spawn in once I had completed a quest and come back. There are points where the world will just arbitrarily stop and make you watch a spinning loading disc for 5-15 seconds as it loads in chunks of the world, which can also lead to you walking into a dense pack of monsters appearing three feet away.
The game does not like when you die several times in a short period, as I found that to reliably cause a crash to dashboard.
The Outer Worlds on Switch is a serviceable port, but stacked up to the other options it should be your last choice. Every game ported to the Switch is a tradeoff; you have the game available on the go but lose graphical fidelity and performance. It is flawed but it works, and I never found the technical hiccups to be a hindrance to me enjoying the game. The performance surprisingly holds up well even in hectic battles.
Expect long load times, random load zones, and a graphical fidelity that can best be summed up as “butter face.” The Outer Worlds hits Nintendo Switch on June 5, available in digital or physical format.
MMO Fallout 