'One of the major challenges with the port is that Rocket League runs on Unreal Engine 3. Nintendo worked with Epic to build support for Unreal 4 into the Switch, but the earlier version of that game-development tool doesn’t work quite as well.
“We feel really confident about it,” said Dunham. “In the beginning, we weren’t so sure. We had to do custom work. The Switch by itself doesn’t have inherent Unreal 3 support. It only has Unreal 4. To support 3, we had to do custom work.”
That custom work didn’t involve porting Rocket League to Switch. Psyonix’s game first debuted in 2015 before Unreal 4 was everywhere, and it would require a lot of labor to bring the game into that new framework. Instead, it’s the same game on Switch as it always was on the other systems, and the studio once again brought in co-developer Panic Button to do this port after it successfully brought the game to Xbox One.
But while Dunham mentioned the team didn’t want to make sacrifices with the Switch version, he acknowledged that they weren’t unavoidable.
“The main compromise we had to make is we’re running the game in 720p rather than 1080p, even on the TV,” he said. “It’s our opinion that it’s much more beneficial for the game to run fast at 60 frames per second than to look the absolute best. We’ll ship at 60 frames per second for the docked version and the undocked version.”
Rocket League will also support two-player splitscreen in all modes. It can also do four-player splitscreen when docked and connected to a TV. For the former, the game will run at 60 fps, but it will drop down to 30 fps in the latter mode. That’s similar to Mario Kart.
But overall, Dunham explained that optimization was zooming along and that the game was running better than they expected at this point.
“We’re actually ahead of where we thought we’d be,” he said. “We didn’t think we would have it running this smooth, this early. For a while we were concerned about whether we’d have anything to show at E3 at all. We have a very talented team at Psyonix. Our engineers have done a lot of hard work to make sure this runs as well as it does already. We’ve already discovered things in the last few weeks that we weren’t aware of a few weeks ago. It’s already made the game perform incredibly. We’re very encouraged.”
Dunham expects that even Rocket League pros will love the Switch version and having the option to play it anywhere without needing a gaming laptop.'
