| Soundwave said: You'll probably see a Pascal based Switch in 2018 that has considerably better battery life. |
Yeah, a New 3DS/DSi type mid-gen upgrade to the Switch is very likely.
nuckles87 said:
Treyarch had to build a completely new version, completely from the ground up, for the Wii. Using completely different assets and technology. This was the story with basically every HD "port" to the Wii, with the exception of sidescrollers like Rayman. It was basically a de-make. Same would be required for Dark Souls 3, or any any game that was built to run exclusively on current gen hardware. The 360, PS3, and Wii U can't just "run" character models and environments using way more polygons, textures, and details than they were ever capable of running. They would require all new models and environments designed to run on them. This is why certain games like Assassin's Creed Unity were not released for Xbox 360 or PS3, which instead received their own Assassins Creed games released at the same time. Because a whole new game would basically need to be built whether it was a port or something else. So it is very much a question of power as well as cost. If anything, the two go hand in hand: less powerful systems can be more costly to port to because a whole new game needs to be built, with all new assets and changes in design to accommodate a difference in power. More powerful systems that can receive simple ports of another system's games, same assets and everything, are less of an investment. But of course, it's still not always worth the investment even when a direct port is possible, but it at least makes it more likely. |
Money is a bigger deciding factor than hardware power.
Switch isn't going to be able to run PS4/Xbone games without downgraded assets either; how many ports it gets will depend on how well said ports and the hardware itself sell.
COD on Wii was still viable in spite of the heavy re-engineering required, because they consistently cleared the million mark. Likewise, PS3 and 360 got PS4/Xbone multiplats like Advanced Warfare because they sold well enough to justify porting costs. On the other hand, Wii U missed out on plenty of PS3/360 games that it could easily have run because of poor sales.
That Switch could get a port of Dark Souls 3 tells us practically nothing about it's power level, because the 240 Gigaflop Xbox 360 could've gotten a port of Dark Souls 3, if the game had released back when 360 was still a healthy platform.
