What This New Gameplay Video Tells Us About Star Wars Outlaws On Switch 2
What do you think will happen with Star Wars Outlaws on the Switch 2? Is it going to be the system's first disaster? Will it turn out OK? We may have some surprising answers.
A lot of the buzz surrounding Star Wars Outlaws comes from an impressions video from Good Vibes Gaming in PAX West.
To quote Steve Bowling:
Unfortunately, Star Wars runs pretty poorly on the Switch 2, and I don't think I've even seen the worst of it yet.
...I got to play a little bit of a space battle and a lot of a Star Destroyer segment, but I didn't get to see any of these big open world environments.
And the bad news here is that in that Star Destroyer, the frame rate just wasn't solid. Wasn't very good. It would drop pretty precipitously at times and then kind of come back up. It felt like a very unstable, uncapped frame rate, I would say.
And of course, I didn't have any means of analyzing this because I couldn't even get over the shoulder footage, but I would say that it dropped below 30 at several points during my demo.
Bowling also believes this is the final build since he got to play this demo a few days short of the game's launch.
In particular, there are no visible signs of unstable framerate or poor performance. In fact, it's impressive for a handheld of any kind. You can also see Kay Vess move between closed buildings and the open world with no sign of constant framerate issues.
A redditor shared this comment:
Game is almost unplayable on the Steamdeck. If this is really Switch 2 footage, then I'm impressed. I doubt it runs stable throughout all areas (especially with a lot of NPCs around, but if true, this is already more than I expected).
There are completely different technical issues that are also not mentioned in the Good Vibes Gaming video. Textures can be either highly detailed and have lifelike animation, or they can look like static pngs. Vess' hair occasionally wriggles unnaturally, though it doesn't happen through the whole game.
It was probably unrealistic to expect Star Wars Outlaws to run without faults on the Switch 2. But viewers can actually see Redlynx force ray tracing on the console, with some unexpectedly vibrant lighting.
This makes Star Wars Outlaws an unusual animal on the Switch 2. While other developers like Capcom played it safe with optimizing Street Fighter 6 the best that they can, Ubisoft seems to want to force the issue that ray tracing can be used on the Switch 2.
Is it possible to get ray tracing to work on the Switch 2 in a way that improves all the games on it? That seems to be the question Ubisoft posits.
Of course, you don't have to take our word for it. You can watch mataleao's video below.