I only wish they made their games for PC as well. I'd love to play Zelda and Bayonetta, but for three games I'm not buying another piece of hardware. Considering how optimized and centered around gameplay VS graphics their games are, they would work in almost any computer, which would drive sales.
* Finally - I understand gamers' anger about price-gouging, DLC, and so on - but most developers don't make these decisions. Publishers and gaming executives do. Most devs really do make games for the love of the art form, and it would help if gamers could try to understand that we're people too.
* All of this costs money. It costs a company $100k per tech employee or more per year on average, between salary and benefits. And there is no magical charity that takes care of us if we fail to recoup costs and go out of business.
* Modern assets already take a *long* time to make. A HQ character asset takes a week to sculpt generally, even for someone with a degree in character animation. Rigging and animation pushes that to a month, or several months for a main character.
As a developer, a few notes:
* Jo is right. It is NOT trivial to rework a project intended for the PS4/Bone/high-end PC's to the Switch.
* You have to perform what is called retopology on any high-polygon asset - reworking the entire model to try to eliminate as many polys as you can.
Doom runs at 30 fps instead of 60, and has some lower res textures. Which...means literally nothing to me. It's a fast paced action shooter, with motion blur, one that could be made to noticeably slow down on the more powerful consoles anyway. The switch is for pick up and play, and dooms works well
@Christopher Dennis: I'm fine for consoles having timed-exclusivity, but only if it lasted for a limited time (like the Tomb Raider reboots). I personally would love to play Until Dawn, but honestly I'm not going to buy a PS4 system just so I can finally be able to play it.
@Snoipah: Smaller, less secure, cant carry as many people, more efficient, less upkeep, cheaper, doesnt look as mature as having a car or a truck; plenty of analogy you could also include.
The switch really shouldn’t be compared to the other 8th generation consoles, the reality of it is that is a cleaver play in the handheld gaming market with the ability to play kind of like a console. Nintendo itself doesn’t use high end graphics all that much, Wikipedia calls it a “hybrid.”
@Bart Stabwound:
Still waiting for Last of Us. And then there's games like Arkham Knight when that abortion of a port hit market. You are right, there is some whining, but, some of it is valid.
Sick of console exclusivity anyway. If it's not a mascot for the company, like Mario, I just see no damned point. Swear to god, I'd pay money to play 'The Last of Us', but, I'm not going to buy a console to play it on, even if they seem to think I will.
Port Begging has become one of the worst things about Video Game Discussions in the past year.
Trying to get hyped for Monster Hunter World was a chore, with the discussion always turning to "When's the PC Port?"
Luckily, they're all afraid of spoilers, so they ran away at launch, but fuck man.
The graphics are fine, people are just looking for an excuse to bitch about things. In all honesty, it's more about how much effort is put into the port than it is "but good graphics". If all you do is redo the inputs and don't tweak the engine then no shit you're going to have bad performance.
Honestly, I would have be fine with it if we had just stopped the graphics arms race late last generation or so. We can tell that that weird shape is a person and their mouth moves when they talk and they don't walk like a 1950's robot. What more do we really need?
@BlackRoseAngel: There is a big difference between a first party company paying for exclusivity and a first party company paying to have a game developed.
Bayonetta 2 and 3 and the entire Xenoblade franchise would not exist without Nintendo, because they paid to make them happen.
If only we were talking just about visuals, but there is a LOT you can't do on recent Nintendo consoles as opposed to PC/PS4/Xbox. I friggin' loathe nintendists mentality as well. "Why isn't this on Switch you mercenary dickbags" but God forbid any game from their consoles gets ported...
As much as I'm a guy with graphics as dead last priority, this really is annoying because we're not talking about just graphics. See Monster Hunter World, it's such a huge leap from 4 or XX. No loading screens in mission, an entire working ecosystem, turf wars, etc.
Honestly, I've never really understood the whole "muh graphics" obsession in gaming.
I'd rather have game that's fun to play (and cheaper) than an expensive borefest that's only expensive because of the "performance".
But even with that limitation, it has the games I have spent THE ABSOLUTE MOST TIME ON IN YEARS on it's system. And I'm talking more than one game. Underpowered, yes. But I've gotten more fun for my money on the switch than any other current Gen console. Computer excluded.
@Jo: Agreed. The fact that Switch Doom even runs is remarkable, but it is a weak experience.
In addition to the weaker CPU and GPU, the storage constraint is a huge problem too. You can't have a game like Monster Hunter World run on Switch *in an enjoyable way*.
My issue is they HAVE games like say Monster Hunter XX in Japan that are doing gangbusters...and the sit on it for the NA/EU market. Okay, I get it, you can't port that to the Switch, but you have a version we CAN play. And you don't bother porting it. Okay?
