Star Wars Outlaws best settings and options for a smoother journey

Getting Star Wars Outlaws to look and play at its very best takes a bit of tweaking. This is a testament to Ubisoft’s ability to give the players plenty of options in how the game appears. It’s also a sign that Ubisoft wants you to take the initiative and transform what they created to fit your play style or preference for aesthetics.

There are numerous things you can change or tweak to make the game both look and play better on PC, but also console. Let’s dive into the settings menu and take a look at some opportunities for you to get things just right in Star Wars Outlaws.

Gameplay

In the gameplay settings, you can tweak the overall difficulty of the game down to a granular level. Of course, you can choose from the basic settings - Explorer, Adventurer, Outlaw, and Scoundrel, which represent the difficulty. However, you can customise these further, choosing the toughness of Enemy Difficulty, Wanted Difficulty, while also giving Kay Vess more health. There are even options to make the lockpicking and slicing (hacking) a little easier, too.

TIP: You can make the game more challenging too, but turning off Nix prompts, plus the yellow paint which guides you where to move in the platforming sections.

If you explore the Accessibility Presets, the options will be broken down into several sections - Gameplay, Cognitive, Colors, Vision, and Hearing. While these are incredibly helpful for differently abled players, everyone can benefit from browsing these sections and fine tuning the experience. For example, when playing Sabacc, the cards will have stylised numbers on the cards and this can be changed to numerals in a Star Wars font, or even a simple font, if you find it hard to see the details.

TIP: Ubisoft has thought of everyone from detailed subtitle backgrounds, down to an option for cutting out background noises to help players focus on the critical sounds.

Graphics - PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X

While you can certainly dabble with the graphics settings of the game, there are some changes we would recommend to make the game look the best it can possibly be. These options will be found under Display and Graphics.

Perhaps the most critical option for many will be the Cinematic display mode, which refers to the black borders at the top and bottom of the screen. While these do indeed make the game feel more like a film, it also feels like the field of view has been shrunken. Here, you can simply toggle to ‘Fill screen’ and the bars will vanish.

TIP: Turn off motion blur, film grain and chromatic abberation for a generally better picture quality

Whether you choose Performance of Quality visuals is entirely up to you. However, those with TVs or monitors that can display up to 120hz will see a third option of Quality (40fps). This is what you should be choosing if you have the opportunity. The quality mode really is quite something to look at, but you’ll sacrifice framerate. This is the best of both worlds.

Graphics - PC

It goes without saying that PC players will have more freedom when it comes to visuals and many of the options will be restricted somewhat by the hardware you’re running. However, there’s still a rough guide to how you can set up your graphics settings to get the best from the game.

We’ll point out the options we believe you should change, while the others not mentioned should either be left to default or will be personal preference.

Cinematics Framerate - OFF - This will give you a smoother transition between cinematics and gameplay

Target Framerate - 60 or OFF - This ultimately depends on your hardware, but more frames are always better.

NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency - OFF - Turning this option off can prevent stuttering

Upscaler Type - Either DLSS for NVIDIA users or FSR 3 for everyone else

Upscaler Mode - OFF - This renders the game at its natural resolution

Upscaler Quality - Native for 1080p or Quality for 1440p

Of course, you’ll want to fiddle around with the actual graphics setting based on your rig. If you’re sporting something closer to a NASA supercomputer, then whack everything up to the highest it can go. If a more sensible budget was behind your gaming PC, we’d recommend medium settings for the more advanced options, while turning off fog blur and keeping your ray tracing options to low, just to keep your framerate up.

TIP: Set destruction quality and deformable terrain quality to low as the difference in visuals is minimal and it’ll improve frames