Digital Foundry Analysis: In Theory: The Witcher 3 on Switch - Is A Port Actually Possible?

[DonFerrari]

HoloDust said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Right, maybe sales could even be better if they opted to really make a version built for Switch. Might even encourage avid fans to double dip.

This is certainly the cheaper/easier route.

I have to be honest, I have no horse in this race, I don't do portable gaming since early 80s, so Switch is not really something that interests me much.

The thing that interests me however, and always have as long as I've been gaming (which is almost 40 years) are downports - ever since first arcade ports to NES and C64/Speccy to this very day. So whenever I see some game being ported to something that originally wasn't intended to be running on I get somewhat excited to see results.

Now, Witcher 3 was never really that much of a strech to begin with - game looks good on ultra, but on low it's more of 7.5th gen game...and knowing what I've known from messing with ini alone when it launched gave me solid estimate of what to expect. And with some mods you can even get the so called "3DS version":

I know there's no chance in hell any publisher will make custom version these days, unlike in the past (take Force Unleashed for example for PC/PS360 vs PS2/Wii/PSP version)...simple reductions are easiest and cheapest and potential buyers don't seem to mind them. But advanced port of TW3 that looks more like this would be lovely to see (this is done with Topaz Simplify on screenshots):

Now I do admit that I've always much more preferred concept art for TW3 than actual execution, so this approach would be somewhat more up my alley - hm, guess I did have a horse in this race ;)

Not sure if the "cell shaded" version you posted would be entirely possible, but they look gorgeous, and much better than what the screenshots showed.