When it comes to Nintendo’s Switch, it’s hard to see it as anything but a huge success for the company. It continues to have record breaking months in sales, and in general has seen a much better deal of support than the last few Nintendo consoles. It’s not without its limitations however as there is a pretty noticeable gap between it and the other consoles on the market. But it seems someone thinks it may not be as huge an obstacle as one may think. Developer Virtuos thinks it’s far more capable than many believe.
In an interview with My Nintendo News, Senior Producer Zhang Chengwei stated a pretty bold claim. He pointed to the current work the company is doing, which includes multiple collections of 2K franchises, as sort of proof that the machine has more juice than expected. He says the more work they put in, the more they become sure that any current generation title can be ported to the Switch with enough work.
“I’d say that we spent half a year just to optimise the memory, and we used many methods throughout this period, including using more efficient formats for files, removing needless memory usage, and even modifying and optimising the original console’s memory system.
“Off the back of our work on Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Dark Souls: Remastered, The Outer Worlds and the coming XCOM 2, we now have no doubt that Switch adaptations can be worked for games on any of the current generation of consoles…The more games we develop for Switch, the better we get and the more we can squeeze out of the hardware.”
While it is a pretty bold claim on Chengwei’s part, as he says, his company’s output for the device is pretty good. They aren’t the only ones saying similar things, either, as Saber Interactive has stated they think people will be surprised by the games the Switch will end up getting. Of course, regardless of the potential, it is always going to take a good deal of work, and whether third parties are willing to spend the extra money to do so is up in the air. With next generation consoles on the horizons, too, the gap is only going to get bigger. Hopefully, though, third parties will invest in the neat little hybrid.
