The Outer Worlds – Obsidian Reveals Challenges of Porting to Switch

Obsidian's Eric DeMilt talks about the how controls were tuned.

Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds is coming to the Nintendo Switch this week, courtesy of Virtuos after some delays due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. As such, details on one of its Switch-exclusive features has been revealed to Nintendo Everything. Production director Eric DeMilt had previously said that gyro controls would be supported but optional.

However, he added that a lot of time went into “tuning controls to help with playability on the Switch.” The developer had “tuned sensitivity, exposed some inputs to users in the settings menu, tweaked and iterated aim assist values and added support for gyro aiming, and sticky targeting.” This should ensure comfortable process of aiming for everyone on Switch, regardless of their control set-up.

The process itself of porting the game was a challenge but overall, Obsidian is “very happy” with the results. As DeMilt states, “Porting a game with thousands of assets designed to be loaded and displayed on current gen PCs and consoles with the power to display in 4k made streaming and visual fidelity a challenge on a handheld.”

The Outer Worlds is out on June 5th for Nintendo Switch – it was confirmed to run at 720p resolution in handheld mode and 1080p resolution in docked mode while targeting 30 frames per second. Check out some screenshots for the Switch version here. It’s already available for Xbox One, PS4 and PC via the Epic Games Store but it will also be coming to Steam later this year. In the meantime, check out our review here.

obsidian entertainmentpcPrivate Divisionps4The Outer WorldsVirtuosXbox One