First trailer for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, coming 2025

[Pemalite]

curl-6 said:

Pemalite said:

Unlikely.

The issue is they have gone for baked lighting, you can't just layer on Ray Traced Global Illumination on top of that unfortunately, you would need to go back and remake a ton of art/assets.

They could use RT for reflections, but considering how weak the next-gen Switch is going to be for RT, they may ignore it entirely in order to maintain 60fps.

The game is very much an artistic piece, not a game that is pushing lots of effects. I.E. Minimal Dynamic lights... But some good shader work. - They are playing to the Switch's hardware strengths.

Given how aggressive Retro always are about achieving a flat 60fps, I can't see them going for RT reflections either if it would compromise performance.

That said, the Prime games have always pushed detail and fidelity, so I'd be surprised if the inevitable Switch 2 version was a simple up-res; maybe they'd thrown in some nice ultra-sharp textures and boosted geometry and draw distance as well, sort of like we see with some cross-gen first party PS4/5 titles.

Lots of room to move on the texture front, with the expected multiple increase in framebuffer storage.

They could add some lights to some of the weapon effects to influence the environments lighting considering they won't be limited by the Switch 1.0 hardware anymore.

But basically texture and resolution improvements is the most I would expect, which is more than what we got with most WiiU to Switch ports like Mario Kart 8, Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Bros U, Pikmin 3, Wonderful 101, Captain Toad and a heap of others.

Which is not a bad thing, cross-gen games tend to be fairly technically underwhelming on successors platform anyway... So better texturing and resolution will let the art pop anyway.