- Ubisoft says Star Wars Outlaws requires a game key card on Switch 2 for quality assurance.
- The game was primarily designed for SSDs and wouldn’t have worked well on a cartridge.
- It seems to be a very decent port with good visuals and consistent performance.
Star Wars Outlaws is finally out on the Nintendo Switch 2. Ubisoft appears to have done a decent job with the port, focusing on both optimization and visuals. However, to do so, they had to put it on a game key card, and there’s a reason for that.
Ubisoft says that Star Wars Outlaws on Switch 2 requires a game key card to ensure the quality of the port. Because the game was primarily designed for hardware with SSD support, it wouldn’t have worked well on a cartridge.
Why it matters: Although the Switch 2 uses UFS 3.1 storage, which in theory can reach SATA SSD speeds, it still lacks proper NVMe speeds for which the Star Wars Outlaws was basically designed.
Ubisoft audio architect Rob Bantin replied to a Bluesky post where fans expressed their annoyance with Star Wars Outlaws being included on a game key card. For instance, Cyberpunk 2077 is entirely available on a cartridge.
However, the latter was designed for last-gen consoles as well, so SSD wasn’t a basic requirement, which is different for Star Wars Outlaws. It would’ve meant serious performance issues for the game on Switch 2.
Now, based on testing, Outlaws seems to be a very decent port, even featuring better visuals than the more powerful Xbox Series S. While its earlier reviews showed performance issues too, it now runs at a consistent 30 FPS.
So, yes, it would’ve been more convenient if the game were on a cartridge, but that would’ve presented the game with a lot more issues. Ubisoft also says that cost-cutting wasn’t involved in this process either.
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News Reporter
Abdullah is an avid gamer who primarily plays single-player titles. If you can’t find him anywhere, he’ll probably be at his desk playing The Witcher 3 for the millionth time. When he isn’t playing games, he’s either reading or writing about them.