Star Wars Outlaws' New Patch Makes The Game Look Bad On PS5

Screenshot: Ubisoft

The third big update for Star Wars Outlaws is finally here with promised improvements to stealth, NPC AI, and more. Unfortunately, the patch has also messed up how the game looks on PlayStation 5, with players reporting screen tearing issues that break the immersion of its normally gorgeous-looking open worlds.

Star Wars Outlaws title update 1.3.0 went live earlier today as promised and marks an important milestone on the sci-fi blockbuster’s road toward becoming a timeless classic, or at least the big money-maker Ubisoft was originally hoping it would be. Highlights in the patch notes include more forgiving stealth conditions in “False Flag” and other missions, fewer collisions while riding speeders, more auto-saves while playing, and scaled “wanted” difficulty based on player progression. A bunch of bugs were also addressed, while overall stability and framerate drops are also supposed to be better.

Unfortunately, the thing many players on PS5 instantly noticed after booting the game up post-update wasn’t any of these improvements but a noticeable visual downgrade with screen tearing, i.e. ripples across your TV while navigating the world and even menus. The problems are particularly bad in performance mode, which is how most people play their PS5 games.

“I loaded the game up about half an hour ago and noticed the screen tearing immediately, tried fiddling with the settings for a bit but favor quality (40fps) seems the most stable with very little screen tearing compared to the other graphic settings,” wrote one player on the subreddit. “I just hope this gets fixed soon as the visuals are the only thing that game really has going for it and having to deal with screen tearing is just getting in the way of enjoying the game overall.”

Star Wars Outlaws has one more major update planned for November alongside its arrival on Steam on November 21. That patch is supposed to go even more deeply into fine-tuning combat and stealthy systems, with a Lando-based story pack and free new contract mission types also getting added that month. That’s just in time to make it an extra appealing Black Friday discount pickup for anyone who hasn’t already given the Han Solo simulator a try, at least as long as no more visual bugs get introduced along the way.