AngryLittleAlchemist said:
I'm not trying to say I know much of anything on this topic, so apologies if I'm wrong. But don't you think it's a little ... ehh ... convenient ... that just about every time someone has an issue with a third party company on the Switch the conclusion is always incompetence? That seems to be the leap in logic made almost every time, and yet I don't think it's fair to make that conclusion about so many developers. The studio that develops Ark is far from small, and not only that, but they were developing a mobile port for who knows how long (probably before the Switch version, which makes it convenient to make a Switch port). I understand that Square Enix is bigger, but realistically speaking, they've already made most of their money off Dragon Quest; which unlike Ark Survival Evolved is not a "platform" title in the sense that it doesn't live on like Minecraft or Ark. It could even be that in reality, the amount of resources being located to Ark Survival Evolved on mobile and Switch is similar to that of a single Switch port for a triple A game like Dragon Quest. Not to mention Ark's developers are hardly praise worthy when it comes to stability and the Switch version will probably come out buggy, glitchy, and messy. I'm sure if the standards were the same you'd be getting Dragon Quest 11 a lot faster, too. I get the frustration and I'm probably wrong admittedly. But it just seems all too convenient to chock everything up to laziness or incompetence. |
It is NOT always my conclusion. There are only 2 devs I give that one to. Capcom and Square Enix with regards to this one game. Oh and the team at 2K who brought over WWE. I'm fully understanding of the issues and I don't expect Switch versions to pop out of the ground. But this. Is. Ridiculous.
Here's the thing, I work in Unreal Engine 4, I know the kind of issues these updates bring and can tell you 1) no update I've seen has caused crippling issues that would necessitate a long, protracted fixing period, 2) whenever an update does cause a fuss, a follow up that fixes it comes within WEEKS, and 3) I would have heard about the Switch compatibility updates causing any major issues or necessitating big changes and no, they didn't. Then there's the evidence that this line is BS. Multiple Unreal Engine 4 games have come over and every dev has said the process of getting the foundations in is pretty painless. Snake Pass is another prominent example of this. Square has had dev kits from what we can gather for ages. Since before the Switch launched. Studio Wild Card didn't get a dev kit and set Abstraction Games on the port until mere months prior to GDC. The fact Ark has a presentable build, be it alpha or not, and Dragon Quest XI doesn't even have a *screenshot* is laughable. And yes, exactly, ARK is a major pain on systems much stronger than the Switch. So why is Dragon Quest XI, a much cleaner game that is much lighter on the hardware, not even in alpha. I mean, the way he talks about it it sounds like the Switch version hasn't even started since updating UE4 would be near step 1 so what on earth have they been doing for over 12 months? Twiddling their thumbs?
