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Frogger on 21 December 2016
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BraLoD said:
spemanig said:

I don't know, dude. There's a lot of rumors saying the Switch is easy to develop for. Even Patcher said he's heard that it was the easiest out of the three. With Switch supporting UE4, Open GL, and Vulkan, with it using a more modern architecture than both PS4 and XBO, with it having the amount of ram that it has and the CPU it apparently, maybe that's all contributed to a system that's really easy to downport to.

Square was able to downport Tomb Raider 2 to 360 with what seems like relative ease, and that's supposed to be one of the prettiest games of this generation. Switch would surely be astronomically easier to develop games for than 360. Maybe that's the trick here.

Yeah... Patcher... xP
I mean, maybe it is in fact easier, can be, but if it just lacks the power to do so, there is no magic to solve it, either there will be big compromisses to make it available on it, or it just won't be done, and later is most likely the case.
Devs can make console games fit handhelds, the Gameboy had several ports with insanely less power, but the games were completely changed, pretty much like DQ11 is doing to fit on the 3DS, it's the same game that you'll play on the PS4? Definitely no, but... it also is.

If it's not really at least close to the XBO power, I don't see most devs bringing their games to it, too much trouble, too many compromisses, too little to be gotten back (most likely).

I mean, the "let down" specs has is at better than Wii U when in portable mode, so it should definitely be stronger than 360.

I'm not saying there won't be big compromises. That's why I referenced Tomb Raider 2 on 360. It preserves the original game in its entirety in gameplay, scope and cinematics. It just doesn't look at good. Maybe the "secret sauce" is that Nintendo made a system that it's extremely easy to do that to for just about any current gen game.

To aide with that further might be subnative resolutions in handheld mode. We know that the difference between portable mode and console mode is a resolution jump and not much else, meaning the game will be pretty much identical in all other respects between the two modes. So 720p in portable mode and 1080p in console mode.

Let's use RoTR again. Square was able to get it to run on 360 hardware at 720p looking the way it does. Most people speculate that Switch will be more powerful than that in portable mode. What if, instead of running at 720p in portable mode, the same game targeted 540p in portable mode? Obviously on a big screen that would be absurd (I wouldn't care but I digress), but for such a small screen it would be much more acceptable, and the game would be able to use all those resources to make the game look graphically closer to the XBO version, just with a serious drop in resolution rather than in assets.

Then, when docked, you take that version and boost it up to 720p instead of 1080p. Outside of clarity, a game will look better when targeting lower resolutions. That might be the strategy here. PS4 games target 1080p, XBO games target 900p, and Switch games target 720p when docked/540p when undocked.