Whatever the reason, quite a few Switch ports seem to be punted out the door in a bit of a pickle.

Tempy wrote:

ok i’m done, carry on

edit: ooh good timing, some anonymous W3 staff have said they worked Crunch hours for 3 years on that game amidst many complaints about working for CDPR

Makes me feel a little worried about enjoying cyberpunk.

Kow wrote:

Eager to jump on the Switch wagon as fast as possible, I guess.

I'm not sure on numbers, but I gather cross-platform indie games sell extremely well on Switch.  Obviously there must be numerous occasions where hard working devs have been left utterly fucked off with the decision to Get It Done Now resulting in sub-standard software.

i'd guess a lot of smaller devs get caught out on ports where the publisher will expect it by a certain date, and they're faced with releasing the game as is or missing out on their pay...simply porting to another platform is not always that simple, there's always loads of little things need to be done differently and changed, even if the core gameplay code/graphics elements transfer simply. eg. i'm looking to port my game to xbox one, which means all the player id, friends, leaderboards and stat stuff etc needs to be redone to work with xbox live instead of steam

And overall performance is nearly always down to graphics, and to improve that often comes down to basically lowering the overall quality - particularly for an indie dev who will be working with a 3rd party engine. You have some simple options like reducing res and effects etc. but if you have to start having different quality assets, and/or different versions of the levels for different platforms, it suddenly becomes a huge task.


That's not to excuse sub par games being released...it's just there seems to be this concept that optimisation is just a case of devs coding a bit harder and faster, and it's just laziness if you don't do it. A dev could go through the process of porting their game to switch, work their tits off to get it all working etc. but find it averages out at 25fps...and the realisation that the only way to get it over 30fps and still look nearly as good is to spend another year basically re-making it with different quality assets, and ending up with effectively a completely different game to the pc/xbox/ps4  version making ongoing support and development much trickier. And their publisher says "we're not paying you for another year, release it now".

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Whatever the reason, quite a few Switch ports seem to be punted out the door in a bit of a pickle.

I recall reading somewhere that it's games developed in Unity that are struggling to be ported to Switch well.

Is Overcooked ok on Switch now?

I remember reading about the dev company that ported Doom and some other stuff to switch having a rediculous amount of projects to choose from as every company was approaching them, as they did really well with their ports. It seems (obviously) everyone wants to get their stuff on switch right the fuck now, especially before the library expands too much, as a decent game won’t have too much competition.

Childintime wrote:

I tend not to use the “lazy” thing because I’m not a dev, and have no knowledge of how any of the code and systems in games work, so what the hell would I know? With something like XCom 2 where there are issues across multiple platforms, I tend to assume there’s software / development issues, but I wouldn’t make a definitive statement towards “laziness”. With Sexy Brutale? Maybe look at the company that handles the port (they also did the Switch versionnof Rime) - but even then I wouldn’t, honestly, have a clue.

So, when it comes to performance issues, I tend to just talk about how it plays, rather than make assumptions about the reasons behind them. If we do a port / performance thread, I’d prefer we just stick to those details and give the type of issue, plus frequency and severity.

If anyone is interested, Sexy brutale would be something like:

Semi-Regular moderate loading between rooms.
Minor audio issues / jarring switches when changing rooms and music changes.
Regular and severe frame rate drops.
Occasional Text window placement issues depending on whether switch is docked / undocked.

I think someone who said it was panic button who did the port? I think they did Rocket League as well and that runs at 60fps in any config. I think it depends on how the have was originally made and how the game engine does it's thing. I'm sure some have great scalability but if it doesn't or was largely designed with one architecture in mind it would be tough to bend that into a lesser console power-wise.

Resi 4

Overcooked indeed is great now, no issues at all

Stick them both on a cart with the DLC and I'd double dip.. despite rinsing the second one for two play throughs and some trophy hunting.

I really don't give a fuck about 1, but think 2 seems to have done a lot, I just need to play it

Ooooh, shout. Would also take a Prey.

regmcfly wrote:

I really don't give a fuck about 1, but think 2 seems to have done a lot, I just need to play it

It's a really lovely game. Everything comes together in so much as world design and the playgrounds and the powers. It's kind of sand boxy and there's so many ways to go about things and so many things you can miss. It was fun the first time to go blazing through killing everything, it was fun to go through stealthing as much as possible. It was fun to use a guide and discover all the stuff I'd still missed. The more time I spent with it the more I liked it.

But then I really liked the first one too.

Dishonored 2 is legit. Unfortunately I think the opening couple of levels aren’t all that, so I actually ditched it first time round. Stuck with it on my second attempt, though, and had a lot of fun. In that whole Immersive Sim kinda genre, only Prey has it beat this gen.