Hogwarts Legacy website lists Switch version

[UnderwaterFunktown]

Hiku said:

Based on what I saw, this would seem like a very impressive accomplishment if they got it on Switch natively.
So it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

SKMBlake said:

Yeah but you never got any box art for any cloud game, nor Amazon placeholders.

No, this shows again how incompetent Square was with Kingdom Hearts.

IcaroRibeiro said:

It's neither. It's laziness and lack of vision and trust about Switch-only owners. 

KH3 is another story but porting a collection of a bunch of PS2/PSP/3DS games is a breeze and wold sell consistently better than a cloud version

Square is likely to think the only people really interested in KH are playing on PlayStation. Seems a common misconception studios have that Switch gamers only play Nintendo games but I digress 

The main issue with the original KH games is that Square Enix lost all the source codes for the old games.
They were made back in the day when the companies probably didn't even consider that they would one day need it again, so those old harddrives were wiped.

So what they did was reverse engineer the games just based on the discs.
But if they don't have the original source code, the best they can find on the discs is information that tells the game how to run on a PS2.

Even porting a game like that to PS3 would be very time consuming, because they would have to re-write a lot of the code. It may even be more difficult than programming the original game.

Porting the PS3 game to PS4 and XBO probably required a lot less effort because they use similar coding language, but Switch's coding language is very different, which is a big reason why so many games are either not ported over at all, or arrive late.

The indie developer of Eiyuuden Chronicles expressed that they may not make a Switch version because they'd essentially have to re-code the whole thing for it.

That's how they feel when they have the source code of the game. Now imagine this process when you don't even have the source code, but rather a frankenstein version you reverse engineered to make all the parts move the way they are supposed to, on PS3.

Ahh, I wondered if this might have been the case. But it makes me wonder exactly how those other ports were made if they only had the compiled game, especially PC and Xbox.

Edit: As a side note I seem to remember that they also lost the code to FF8 and yet they managed to salvage that enough to "remaster" it for modern systems including Switch. So it's certainly not impossible, but it does of course complicate things.

Last edited by UnderwaterFunktown - on 18 March 2022