COG Considers: Portable, But At What Cost?
News has just broken that DOOM Eternal is finally coming to the Nintendo Switch. Awesome stuff, right? Who doesn’t want to see the entire library of video games subsumed by the cavernous maw that is Nintendo’s portable hybrid? Such was my position for years. It’s only recently that my enthusiasm for ‘every game a Switch version’ has started to cool off. Don’t get me wrong! I still hold a fierce love in my blackened little heart for that plucky system. It’s just that a tiny bit of evidence has started piling up. You know, little hints that maybe this upstart tablet isn’t the portable powerhouse we want it to be.
Bloodstained: Ritual of The Night came out for multiple platforms, including the Switch. It took the devs months to get the game working on Nintendo’s platform. Even now, updates come to the other platforms a month or so before they hit the Switch version. And Bloodstained isn’t exactly a graphical juggernaut. Your computer can probably run it, is what I’m saying. So what about a more AAA title?
The Outer Worlds is a prime example of a Switch version that went terribly wrong. Certain sacrifices had to be made in order to get the game running on such a tiny system, and it showed. Eventually there was a series of patches to try and rectify the situation, but the initial shock remains. They also attempted to put Crysis Remastered on the Switch. Some would even say they succeeded. Of course, there were some frame rate and resolution troubles, which roughly translates to ‘technically playable, but lord help the one who tries.’
What I’m saying is that publishers and developers the world over need to splash some cold water on their faces and accept some hard truths about the Nintendo Switch. It can play a ton of games. But not all of them! We need to stop cramming modern technical behemoths onto that tablet with a touch screen before someone releases a game that literally melts its processors. For every game like DOOM or DOOM Eternal, there’s a truckload of ports that stutter, stumble, and fizzle out. Let’s cool our collective heels until Nintendo stops teasing us and announces this hypothetical Switch Pro. Maybe it will use the Nvidia Tegra X1+ instead of the X1? Maybe it’ll be able to display in 1080p instead of 720, or 900? We should be so lucky.