Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is now available on Nintendo Switch 2 & Nintendo Switch.
Experience the cinematic action-adventure that forced Lara Croft to grow from an inexperienced young woman into a hardened survivor. Lara must endure high-octane combat, customize her weapons and gear, and overcome grueling environments to survive her first adventure and uncover the island’s deadly secret.
Not tried the outer worlds yet, but if it’s anything like Bloodstained… yeah, I’m definitely not getting it on switch.
What a mess it was. I can accept a trade-off in visuals, but Bloodstained Switch went from completely unplayable to technically working but still unenjoyable, many months later. This thing was originally supposed to run on a Wii U and a freaking Vita. After that I think nobody can convince me to back a kickstarted game again.
Finally got a cheap PC version on gog, but, they should never have allowed that port to release in this state, nevermind making it a backer option.
Well, I wouldn’t call The Outer Worlds on Switch unplayable in any technical sense. It is playable, it just looks like smeared shit so it’s kind of hard to look at for long periods of time. All video games give me some degree of motion sickness, but one that’s blurry and janky is going to do it much much faster.
But yes, I would love to know how they justified saying Bloodstained would run on a Wii U or a PS Vita. My guess is they changed the engine partway through development, and the old version that we never saw would run on those platforms. But at some point they ditched the old engine for the newer one, and decided that even the Switch port would use the new version, performance hit be damned. My guess is, it was originally a straight up 2D game (maybe with some depth), but the addition of curves (like when you approach the castle, or the dragon towers) required a newer engine that would not run on Wii U or PS Vita. That’s just a guess, but it does check all the boxes, and it fits the narrative of Bloodstained being Iga’s passion project. So he probably kept adding to it, and adding to it some more, trying to make it the biggest Iga-vania he could, in case he never got to make another one.
The thing is, the engine not being natively supported on Wii U was already true and known from the beginning. It was part of the Kickstarter campaign. The version of UE they used had no official Wii U port (so no, it was also suposed to be 3D from the beginning too).
They even said that Armature studio, which had people formerly from Retro Studios, so who were supposed to know a thing or two about optimizing on Nintendo consoles, would do that mapping, and release their development for other devs who might need it.
The project took a bit more time than expected, the Wii U was a commercial dud and the Vita was long past its prime, so they cancelled those about a year and half before release, IIRC. And they told us, we’re doing Switch instead, if you don’t choose another platform now we’re transfering Wii U rewards to Switch.
In theory, it should have been easier. Switch didn’t have the unsupported engine problem, and it’s more powerful than a Wii U.
Then, very close to release, surprise KS update, we’ve upgraded all visuals! By the way, Switch is delayed. Not a year, not 3 months, no. One Week.
To this day, I’m still convinced they specifically delayed that version just so they could get the good reviews from other platforms running before shit hit the fan.