The Outer World: how to turn off chromatic aberration

I quite like The Outer Worlds, and a lot of people agree with this positive opinion. However, as soon as I started it for the first time, something struck me. At first the game looks good, but at first I noticed that my eyes started to hurt. I had to play in small bursts and then pause, as it felt like my eyes were going to bulge out of my sockets.

I took care of this for a while, until I couldn't take any more, and went to find an explanation. It turns out that my problem was chromatic aberration.

It's a term for something that tends to happen with poor quality cameras. In summary, chromatic aberration causes a sharp contrast between dark and light parts of an image, distorting it and creating a red and blue "aura" around objects. The intentional introduction of this aberration into your art makes me scratch my head, but it's not uncommon in games. I think that could be a way to increase the realism, and it probably works very well in other games. Nonetheless, it just causes me a literal headache in this game, something others share, as well as a potential risk of motion sickness (the blurring of this phenomenon, plus the innate blurring of motion is a nightmare).

Fortunately, removing it is relatively straightforward. There is a mod on Nexus Mod that does this automatically for you, but it's not necessary; it only requires a simple modification of the "engine.ini" file which is in your% APPDATA%.

To quickly access this folder, open your command line (Windows key + R on a Windows computer) and type or paste "% LOCALAPPDATA% Indiana Saved Config WindowsNoEditor" without the quotes.

From there, open Engine.ini and paste “(SystemSettings) r.SceneColorFringeQuality = 0” without the quotes under everything else in the file. This line removes the aberration and makes the whole edge sharper and less headache inducing.

Hope this helps!