Xbox Series X/S users are reporting a dizzying motion blur effect while trying to play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed through backward compatibility.
Xbox Series X/S owners jumping into Star Wars: The Force Unleashed are reporting a dizzying motion blur effect that is inspiring more headaches than wonder at the sights of the fabled Galaxy Far, Far, Away. One perceived advantage the Xbox Series consoles have over competitors like the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch is that they readily allow users to play titles from every previous Xbox generation through backward compatibility. The list of old games that can be run on Xbox Series X/S was already extensive when the consoles first launched back in 2020, but an update patch from last November added 70 more to that number, including a small handful of old Star Wars games.
One classic Star Wars title that has been fully backward compatible on the Xbox Series X/S since day one is 2008’s Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which originally launched during the Xbox 360 era and put players in the role of Galen “Starkiller” Marek, Darth Vader’s extremely powerful secret apprentice tasked with eliminating the enemies of the Galactic Empire a few years before the events of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Aside from fleshing out the lore of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe and providing some earth-shattering twists on the backstory of the classic Star Wars films, The Force Unleashed was praised by fans for its impressive graphics, which captured the power and intensity of an all-powerful Force wielder laying waste to runaway Jedi and common soldier alike.
Unfortunately, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed’s visuals might be a little too intense while rendered on current-gen hardware, as some Xbox Series X/S users are reporting a dizzying motion blur effect while playing the game through backward compatibility. Reddit user tocarloswebos was one of the players to document this problem on r/xboxone (via PureXbox), posting a video clip of Darth Vader’s ominous march through the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk in the opening level of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Sure enough, the Dark Lord’s rampage is shrouded by an unreasonably thick blurring effect that is more likely to give players motion sickness than a fear of the Dark Side. Other Reddit users in the comment section of tocarloswebos’s post sympathized with the issue, but luckily Uday23 would share a few potential solutions to the problem. According to them, players can mitigate this motion blur issue by manually disabling Auto Low Latency and Variable Refresh in Xbox Settings, pausing and unpausing the game (though they might need to do this multiple times, especially after cutscenes), or simply playing through and hoping it goes away after their Xbox activates its Auto HDR setting.
This unfortunate Star Wars: The Force Unleashed glitch is being discovered not too long after the game was ported to the Nintendo Switch last month. While the newly-released Switch version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has been met with lukewarm reviews, it has sparked nostalgia for the 2008 original and even prompted Starkiller voice actor and Star Wars veteran Sam Witwer to open up about how he was once intimidated by Darth Vader during recordings and compare The Force Unleashed to the more contemporary Ghost Of Tsushima.
Naturally, many Xbox players have started digging through their old game collections and booting up Star Wars: The Force Unleashed by way of the Xbox Series X/S’s backward compatibility. However, it seems this motion blur could sour the experience for anyone hoping to re-experience Starkiller’s original Force-powered adventure. Hopefully the minor fixes that have been discovered online will help prevent players from having their gaming experience soured for good.
Source: tocarloswebos/Reddit, Uday23/Reddit (via PureXbox)
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