Are Developers sacrificing quality gameplay by rushing to the Switch?
Oh, indies don’t be hasty.
There has been some fuss and with fuss often comes some interesting points of discussion. The centre of this week’s fuss is, unfortunately for it, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
An increasingly popular side-scrolling RPG, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night released on PS4, PC and Xbox One last week to some very positive reviews. It then released on Nintendo Switch earlier this week, but the response this time wasn’t nearly so positive. When you view a side-by-side comparison of the footage from the Switch version to the PS4, as seen below, it’s easy to see why.
In comparison to the PS4 version, the graphics of the Switch port are dull and lifeless. The textures of the protagonists clothing and the interplay of light and shadow in her environment are no where near the same standard as the PS4. There are performance issues too, with the 30 frames-per-second rate coming across somewhat unstable. It’s an issue that the developers have since acknowledged in a forum post.
They wrote: “We’ll also have more to announce soon as we do more to improve the Switch version of Bloodstained. We are committed long-term to making sure the Switch version is just as great and enjoyable as the other platforms, and this is just a window into our immediate action plans.”
All of this kerfuffle has brought up some interesting questions regarding porting onto the Switch and the games that do and do not succeed on the platform. We’ve seen lots of titles have a second lease of life on the portable hard-wear, but with far less performance power than PS4, Xbox One and PC, are these ports always the best choice?
Games such as The Witcher coming onto the Switch have garnered scepticism for this very reason. How can worlds so big possibly be handled on such a small piece of hardware? As was the case with FIFA 2018, with these ports something often has to give. With FIFA 2018, the Switch version was stripped of several features in order to port successfully, including the Journey and Pro Clubs modes. This approach isn’t limited to AAA either, the recently released Car Mechanic Simulator has drastically cut back on it’s Switch version, so that at best it resembles a version of the mobile game, rather than the whole experience.
There are plenty of indie games that feel perfectly suited to the platform (recent releases such as Vectronom, and classics like Hollow Knight spring to mind here) but for some, the hastiness to port is taking a hit to gameplay quality. There seem to be announcements every other day of a new indie coming to Switch, with Close to the Sun being announced most recently, but perhaps not all these games are suited to the platform.
The Nintendo Switch has done fantastic work to revive old indies and heighten the popularity of new releases in the community but if developer rush to port, something often gets lost along the way. Hopefully considering Close to the Sun has been released on consoles and PC for some month now, it’s Switch port won’t hold the same kind of quality sacrifices, and if so, we hope they give plenty of warning.