Original Story: We are mere days away from the Switch 2's next big port, with Star Wars Outlaws gearing up for a hyperspace exit on 4th September. Ubisoft has been pretty shy with Switch 2 footage so far (bar a sizzle reel appearance in the console's reveal Direct, and another brief look back in July), and if initial impressions are to be believed, there might be a good reason for that.
Outlaws' Switch 2 port has arrived at PAX West, giving all those in attendance the first chance to see how Kay Vess' planet-hopping adventure fares on the new Nintendo hardware. One such person to go hands-on with the game was GVG's Steve Bowling, who, despite revealing that Ubisoft allowed no direct-feed capture or over-the-shoulder recording during the preview, assembled his thoughts into a YouTube video. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't sound great.
According to Bowling, Outlaws runs "pretty poorly" on Switch 2, with both the game's resolution and framerate taking a hit to account for the scope of the open world and the technology under the hood. What's all the more concerning is that this comes despite the majority of the demo taking place in a relatively enclosed area — the early Imperial ship escape.
Even in these smaller environments, Bowling noted the "unstable, uncapped framerate", which apparently dropped below 30fps at several points during the demo. In a larger dogfight section, Bowling notes that the game simply "didn't look very remarkable", despite the ray-traced lighting and DLSS providing some neat visuals in more intimate moments.
[Update: 17:45pm BST]: As some readers have pointed out, videos claiming to show docked Switch 2 gameplay are also online, which suggest that docked performance may be better than described in the preview above. The uploader claims that they managed to get early footage after "a local retailer had their copies out early, clearly by mistake".
All in all, it sounds like we might be in for a bumpy ride when this one arrives on Switch 2 later this week — heck, we have to assume that the PAX West demo is the finished version of the game with that tight of a turnaround. We'll be able to see it for ourselves soon enough, though we're getting those expectations tempered.
