The Outer Worlds

As promised, Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds has a new patch live for Nintendo Switch. It improves the visuals by a fairly decent amount, implementing a half-resolution SSAO, clouds in the skybox and so on. There are also a number of changes and fixes that help improve CPU performance and optimization.

For instance, the max instance count for sounds has been limited while their volume threshold has been adjusted. Textures have also been packed to save memory while world buildings have received added details. Some buildings have been re-designed entirely and more vegetation can be seen in the world as well.

A more detailed side-by-side comparison is required but judging by official images circulating a few days ago, there should be a fairly big jump in visual fidelity. The Outer Worlds is also available for Xbox One, PS4 and PC but will also be coming to Steam today. Stay tuned for more details on the Steam version when it goes live.

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