Digital Foundry Analysis: "What's Up With The Switch Port?"

I really wonder how some people weren't noticing input lag when he measured the Switch version to have it at 140ms. That's incredibly high!

Good video as always, as a subscriber of their channel I'm happy to see that at least not everything is bad news on the technical side of things.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but as the video points out, that's very unlikely to happen.

It's just not about whether the developer is experienced in Switch ports. Games with better textures on Switch were designed from the ground up as exclusives for the platform. When this happens, and the developer has a target frame rate,  they design both the assets and the levels around these constraints, making sure that they look good and play well on the system first and foremost.

This was clearly not done (impossible to do, as the system wasn't out yet!),  and thus you could put the best developers in the world on this, with the most experience on Earth on Switch, and it won't happen.

See that jump that takes 10 seconds to load? There are two basic ways around it: reducing the geometry and texture quality, and eliminating the jump completely. If the game had been built for Switch from the ground up, they would have either reworked the map, or they would have changed the look of the map so that the textures can look good enough despite being lower-res.

As for the texture quality, raising it increases the memory footprint (load times) and the number of pixels processed (performance). This can be offset by cutbacks in other areas, but that'll raise other issues.

I hate to sound ranty, but one recurring theme when discussing the Switch version is how the game should be able to run at 60 fps on the platform and you just need more time or better developers, because you've seen better looking games on the platform run smoother. NO, I can't stress this enough: that's not how it works.

EVERYTHING, from the size of the game areas, to the art style, to the number of different areas, enemies, weapons, and their design (both look and features) is decided based on a console's technical limitations. You'll say "the number of weapons? what does that have to do with performance?" Well, because each weapon has it's animations for regular attacks and special attacks, and those animations take up memory. This is where you decide things like whether or not your game features weapon switching on the fly. If it does, then the animations for all the weapons you're going to be switching mid-combo need to be always loaded, cutting back on your memory pool; and if they're not, you have to do something like shortcuts - fast, but not as fast - to allow you a least a bit of a breather to load those new animations. Every wonder why developers don't incorporate those "simple" features that in hindsight would appear to make the game better?  Because they already made a trade-off decision in the early stages of development, and designed everything on the game with the constraints they'd settled on in mind.

Now, this is just an example, mind you - it may or may not be how Bloodstained's game engine manages assets - but what I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of design constraints in games that are there because of the lead development platform that people are not aware of when they judge a game's performance and visuals.

It is not, I repeat, it is not about hunkering down and optimizing with really good devs. The game was never going to perform well technically on Switch. The only question is how well it can be reasonably made to run.

Also, about the input lag...if it's roughly twice as that of the other consoles, and it's running at half the frame rate, there's a good chance the two are fundamentally tied together in the game engine. Would not expect great things here, either, but then again, this is not my area of expertise, so I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

I'm sure it will be improved - what I'm not sure is that the input lag will ever be on par with the other versions, if they are able to significantly improve it at all.

What you can expect as far as improvements are shorter load times and a more stable frame rate. Textures are not going to get better, and as for the input lag... honestly, if it could be significantly improved, my guess is they would have done it already. They might be able to tweak it, but I doubt it'll ever be to anyone's satisfaction. The UE4 Engine is notorious for causing input lag in fighting games that run at 60 fps - again, I'd love to be proven wrong, but unless they manage to somehow achieve parity in the frame rate itself, I'm not sure we can hope for improvements in this area.

I think people are eventually going to have to face the fact that promising the game on Wii U and Vita, and then designing the whole game without taking into account those consoles' limitations, and then assuming that porting to the Switch would go smoothly, was a huge, tremendous mistake, bigger than all those other stretch goals put together.

I've seen very capable developers make more asinine decisions first hand, so I'm not surprised, but still... and by the way, the blame for this falls on IGA's, Inti's, and Ben Judd's shoulders, too. They thought adding Wii U and Vita versions was a good idea, after all, and when they cancelled them they had to provide an alternative in the form of the Switch.

So yeah, I was hopeful they'd somehow designed around the limitations of the consoles on the lower end at least in mind, but now it's clear they didn't.

Doom devs are god like. They fixed Creation Engine, to an extent.

Good stuff

I feel they put in good work behind their analysis, as I would say for pretty much all their videos.