Another day, another overly expensive port of a decidedly not new game. It’s business as usual for Nintendo’s new console for sure, but this time the game is Star Wars: Outlaws, a release that panned by a great many for being decidedly lackluster at best and utterly broken at worst just a few months ago. Yet, now that it’s on Switch 2, its not only being treated as a new game, but is largely getting a very positive reception. …huh?

Well, it should be first said that a lot of outlets game the game a very favorable score the first time around too. It was Star Wars. It was the standard Ubisoft Game fare. It was a AAA game. That is to say, it was par for the course. Nothing special. And something being nothing special is often good enough to warrant 8s, 9s, and 10s from a lot of places so long as they like the IP. The biggest issue with the game was that it was a buggy mess at and for a long time after launch, which caused my drops in score and scores of customer complaints. All this is to say that favorable reviews for a game that’s now in a better state on a new system isn’t terribly surprising, I suppose.

What bugs me though is that this port of Star Wars: Outlaws is, like many other ports before it, being treated as a brand new experience. All the non-technical compliants players and critics had just a few months ago seem to be entirely forgotten, with the story now being that the game was somehow under appreciated last year. It’s just…how though? We were all there last year. We saw the game. We saw the issues and overall blandness. It was average to below average then, but now that it’s on Switch 2 its suddenly good despite being the exact same game? Tell me how that works?

This has been done with other ports too, especially from last generation to current generation ports, as if being on newer hardware somehow makes the exact same game better. It’s something that’s always bugged me and bugs me even more with games like this. I don’t begrudge anyone enjoying Star Wars: Outlaws or anything, it’s just weird to me how something can be plain or even bad on one platform but be good on another (outside of porting problems like we saw in the PS3 era). Okay, that’s all I’ve got since I’m already starting to repeat myself. Let me know what you think below!

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How do you feel about how ports are treated? Should they be considered different from the original version without any additional content or fixes?

Image from the Nintendo website