No Man’s Sky is coming to Nintendo Switch. That’s awesome news, with Hello Games’ procedurally generated space exploration sim feeling made for a portable machine that encourages smaller play sessions either at home or on the move.
However, my positive feelings towards this announcement are lined with an aura of scepticism. No Man’s Sky doesn’t run especially well on PS4, and hasn’t done since its original launch back in 2016. Xbox One is similarly compromised as it drops frames and adjusts its resolution to meet the unpredictability of each new planet.
It wasn’t until the arrival of PS5 and Xbox Series X/S that the game ran without issue on consoles, offering us a number of graphical options to choose from that emphasised either visuals or performance. We could pick what we wanted, and so many games have offered similar options that take advantage of horsepower that, for games like this, are often in excess. Yet the opposite can be said for Nintendo Switch ports, with The Witcher 3, The Outer Worlds, Doom, Skyrim, and so many others arriving on the hybrid console with clear shortcomings and an increased price we’ve come to accept as the dreaded ‘Switch Tax.’
So many of these ports have received ample praise, but this is often in the context of the platform being able to run said games at all, not that it does a good job of it. If you happen to only be in possession of a Nintendo Switch and have no other way to play them, purchasing these ports is a perfectly adequate decision, but I’d struggle to recommend them otherwise. The Witcher 3 has clear performance problems, The Outer World’s open world is even harder to parse thanks to aggressive chromatic aberration and poor draw distances. Skyrim is the best example of a more ambitious port on the platform, but even that falls behind other current versions of the game with occasional frame rate drops and visual glitches.
It’s always a trade-off when it comes to larger triple-A games coming to Nintendo’s console, and that’s why No Man’s Sky worries me. It’s an ambitious title by nature, using procedural generation to piece together an endless galaxy filled with planets that only a few players will ever discover. Ahead of release we were promised one of the most engrossing experiences the medium has ever seen, and the end result was a fiercely underwhelming survival game that quickly began to repeat itself.
Hello Games would spend the next several years on free updates that would transform the game completely. These saw the introduction of vehicles, base building, mounts, multiplayer, and a greater diversity in pretty much everything. That’s the game we’re getting on Nintendo Switch, albeit without the multiplayer, and if it runs like utter garbage I want absolutely no part in it. It’s the procedural aspect of the game that scares me, and how the unpredictable nature of each new planet will lead to performance that fluctuates wildly and just isn’t that comfortable to play. It was an issue on the PS4 back in the day, and we will likely encounter the same problems on the Switch. Once again, it’s a port defined by its own unavoidable shortcomings.
I’m ragging on the Nintendo Switch, and we should be grateful that ports like this are being worked on in the first place and end up being playable at all. But it’s been over five years and developers are still jamming games on the hardware that will only continue to fall behind and fail to keep up with the competition. When it comes to ports, this means things are set to worsen as we move forward. It’s cool that No Man’s Sky is coming to Switch, but if playing it ends up giving me a migraine I’m unsure if it’s even worth the effort.