Many have postponed playing a great open-world RPG from the developer of Fallout: New Vegas, due to the unbearable problems the Switch version of The Outer Worlds had, but now Update 1.20 has finally arrived and with it the hope.
The highly anticipated patch for The Outer Worlds Nintendo Switch is finally out and brings with it many improvements. What players expect the most is an improvement in performance, as the game has come under sharp criticism since its release for the Switch due to two things: poor graphics and poor FPS.
Update 1.20 is supposed to bring something for both those issues.
Obsidian Entertainment, the development team behind The Outer Worlds, have been working on better optimization as seen in the patch notes, two items to be precise:
- Limited the max instance count for sounds to improve CPU performance
- Adjusted the volume threshold for sounds to improve CPU performance.
It’s hard to get better performance from the not-so-powerful Switch hardware in an open-world FPS game like this, but it’s certainly highly commendable that publisher Private Division have decided to release a version for the Nintendo Switch as well, in addition to the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
As for the features implemented through the 900mb size patch, we see that the team made an effort to beautify the game, so they added SSAO, Depth of Field to the convo cam, etc.
The full list of features and fixes in Update 1.20:
Features included in this update:
- Implemented a half-resolution SSAO
- Implemented Clouds in Skybox
- Replace SSR with SphereReflectionCapture
- Disabled subsurface profile shading
- Added Depth of Field to Conversation Camera
Changes and Fixes included in this update:
- Limited the max instance count for sounds to improve CPU performance
- Adjusted the volume threshold for sounds to improve CPU performance
- Packed textures to save memory
- Optimized materials for the environment and terrain
- Optimized and added more vegetation to the world
- Added details to the world buildings
- Used normal map textures instead of triangles for objects
- Re-designed some buildings
- Meshes rebuilt for improved visuals
- Lightmap texture streaming rebuilt
- Fixed character AI issues
- Improved the streaming performance to fix the building dark issues players experienced and some texture blur issues
