Ark Survival

The success of the Switch has been brought back down to earth by a number of publishers and developers who do not intend to release popular video game franchises on the system. One of the most common reasons cited other than the associated financial risk is how Nintendo's latest system is simply not packing the required technical power to handle current generation titles. Of course, there have been plenty of arguments for and against this - with developers like Panic Button demonstrating what can be achieved.

According to a transcript by Nintendo Everything, the head of Abstraction Games, John Day, recently touched on the subject during a talk show appearance focusing on Ark: Survival Evolved. He provided a rather blunt statement about the overall power of the Switch, and then suggested smart developers could overcome its limitations by making the necessary compromises:

Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube789k
Watch on YouTube

The Switch does not have the horsepower of a high-end [PC]… or even a PS4. It’s not actually particularly close to that. But as I said before, we are an engineering company. We have extraordinarily smart people who do very technical things very, very well and so by doing things like procedurally reducing meshes on assets and dynamically scaling the resolution in intelligent ways and things like that, we can manage some of that performance.

The head of Abstraction Games went on to explain how the Switch port of Ark: Survival Evolved would not have any significant features or content removed to compensate for the system's lack of power and was instead attempting to ease demand on the system without compromising the quality on the player's end. In terms of resolution and frame rate, he noted how The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild even had performance dips:

You have to understand, even Breath of the Wild dipped below 20 frames at certain points in the game. It’s just that you don’t notice because of the way that they’ve handled it. So I think that we’re trying to rather than be like, ‘Okay, here’s a frame rate benchmark – hit this or else,’ I think it’s more like, ‘We’re looking at this thing holistically from a qualitative standpoint.’ I guess there’s a range of parameters within there that seem to work depending on what the context is.

With certain companies demonstrating how current generation games can, in fact, be released on the Nintendo Switch, it's evident big-name third-party developers and publishers will remain under fire despite the provided reasoning. 

What are your thoughts on the matter? Do you think the head of Abstraction makes some good points about the current third-party troubles on the Switch? Do you sense particular companies have a lack of faith in Nintendo hardware? Tell us below.

[source nintendoeverything.com]