is one of the most beautiful games on the Nintendo Switch. Not many people manage to achieve such quality when porting projects from large platforms. In a new interview, Saber Interactive talked about how it came about.
Speaking to VenturBeat, Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch said initial attempts to get CD Projekt RED's fantasy RPG to work on the Nintendo Switch had ended in failure. Given that the entire project had to fit on a 32 GB card, the team had a lot to cut.
“When the port was first made, the game was running at 10fps, it took up 50% more memory than the Switch, and the build size was 20GB larger than the largest Switch cartridge,” Karch said. .
The next problem was that Saber Interactive couldn't simply reduce the number of surrounding characters, because that would make the towns and villages look empty. In the end, the team found ways to tweak the quality of the shadows, vegetation, and overall graphics so that the Nintendo Switch could play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt without losing key aspects. The solution even included completely building the solar system from scratch.
“Obviously, shadows are needed to add realism to outdoor locations, but the ready-made solution [did not suit the Switch], said Karch. “We had to combine a combination of a static shadow map, a bump map, and a dynamic shadow map to achieve a similar look and feel to the original.”
The team took a similar approach to foliage and rewrote the way it was generated and rendered. Karch told VentureBeat that it took a year to get The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to run at 30fps without losing too much on graphics.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released on October 15 on the Nintendo Switch.
Source: 3dnews.ru