As a platform, the Switch has managed to delight us on numerous occasions with ports that seemingly outstrip the capabilities of the console - to the point where maybe we were starting to believe that anything was possible. Can developer Virtuos pull off another miracle port with The Outer Worlds? "Off the back of our work on Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Dark Souls: Remastered, The Outer Worlds and the coming XCOM2, we now have no doubt that Switch adaptations can be worked for games on any of the current generation of console," senior product Zhang Chengwei told Nintendo Life. After checking out The Outer Worlds, we'll have to agree to disagree.
Technically, what the studio is saying is correct. When you load up The Outer Worlds for Switch, you are getting the complete game package in content terms. Indeed, Virtuos itself has a good track record in delivering decent Switch ports, but there's the sense that the team bit off more than they could chew with this one - there are genuine problems that simply can't be ignored. We're used to accepting a certain degree of compromise on these conversions, the pay-off generally being the ability to play triple-A titles on a portable device. However, The Outer Worlds is the game where the cumulative downgrades are just too impactful to the experience, and where the promise of mobile play doesn't deliver enough to make the exercise worthwhile.
On the positive side, there's little doubt that what has been accomplished here is impressive in terms of ambition - Virtuos has managed to transplant a high-end Unreal Engine 4 RPG to a portable machine. That it works at all is a remarkable feat, but once you dig in, the problems start to stack up. It kicks off with image quality. On the surface, the pixel-count numbers are reasonable but not quite in line with promises from the publisher. Based on pre-launch PR, The Outer Worlds was mooted as running at 1080p while docked and 720p in mobile mode. However, our findings suggest a typical 720p resolution while connected to your screen, with dynamic resolution dropping this lower on occasion. Meanwhile, 540p is typical and 384p seems to be the low point for portable play. There is none of the clarity and crispness you'd expect from the native resolution metrics suggested pre-launch, that's for sure.