The Outer Worlds Switch port is a shockingly poor version of the game

The Outer Worlds is a fantastic open-world RPG on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, but the The Outer Worlds Switch port is a great game in a technical minefield.

Shown during a new Digital Foundry video, those looking forward to The Outer Worlds Switch conversion will have to look elsewhere for a portable version of Obsidian’s RPG.

While the game does run at a fairly low resolution — 720p for TV play and between 540p and 368p for portable play – the game’s low pixel count is far from its only visual blemish.

The game suffers from a wealth of graphical defects: object pop-in, textures failing to load in, glitches causing buildings to load in and out, entire environments lacking dozens of trees, debris and other visual nicities. There’s a lot of visual content that’s been cut.

Of course, if performance on the The Outer Worlds Switch port was any decent, some players could overlook that the game looks like wet newspaper from time to time. Should I have italicized that if? Because this port runs bad.

While some very small areas see the game running at a consistent 30fps, most times this version of the game lurches all over the place. In a first-person game, this is bound to make players extremely motion sick; combat especially has the framerate go up and down more than a cheap drop tower at a Cwmbran carnival.

Spoiler: That’s pretty darn shocking – don’t go to a Cwmbran carnival! 

On the up side, this version of Obsidian’s RPG isn’t as bad as the Nintendo Switch version of Ark: Survival Evolved which was absolutely awful and was probably designed by Satan himself. This was probably made by Lilith instead.

If you want to read about a really good Nintendo Switch port of a huge console RPG, check out our review of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. After recieving a big update a few months after release, we think it’s a brilliant competitor for the Xbox One/PS4 version.