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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Complete Edition is, for the most part, an incredible game on Switch (earning an Editors’ Choice Award in our review). But it does have its flaws, in particular the significant graphical downgrades compared to other platforms, bugs, and general issues with crashing. So it perhaps comes as no surprise to learn that when CD Projekt Red first imported the game to Switch, the results weren’t pretty.
Saber Interactive Chief Executive Officer Matthew Karch recently opened up more about the process of bringing The Witcher 3 to Switch in an interview with GamesBeat:
“When the initial port was done, the game was running at 10 frames per second, was taking 50% more memory than the Switch has, and the build size was 20GB larger than the biggest Switch cartridge,” Karch said.
CDPR eventually managed to fit the entirety of The Witcher 3 onto a 32GB game card, but not without some struggles:
“For example, after cutting the number of NPCs by 30%, we started getting complaints that the levels, especially Novigrad and Toussaint, felt rather empty. We had to reintroduce most of those features back and find creative optimizations to get the frame rate up.”
Saber had to make other adjustments, including rewriting the algorithm for how grass was generated and rendered, working with the engine to calculate in-game shadows, and other changes to environmental details to ensure the Switch version of the game looked comparable to other versions of the game . Finally, after a year of toil, CDPR was able to get the game running at 30 FPS on Switch.
Do you have The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Complete Edition on Switch? What did you think of the port? Let us know below.
Source: Nintendo Life
