Get ready to slay hordes of zombies as World War Z heads to the Nintendo Switch. Those who have played the game on other platforms might be surprised to hear the news because the game can be quite resource heavy, especially when four players are rushed by the literally mobs of zombies sprinting towards them on screen. Luckily, developer Saber Interactive is on the case.
The name should sound familiar, as this developer was responsible for the impressive port of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition. One might assume that The Witcher port would have been the hardest project that the developer has taken on, but it appears that this is a far more difficult and ambitious project.
Speaking about the project was CEO Matt Karch, who stated that, “The biggest challenge was finding which compromises could be made to the game which wouldn’t have a significant impact on the visuals. We needed to make sure the game looked great, fit into the Switch’s memory and ran at a solid frame rate.”
It will be great to see how the final product looks, because it genuinely sounds like an almost impossible task thanks to the hordes of AI units that can appear on screen. This same issue occurred in 2006 with another popular zombie game, Dead Rising. On the PC and consoles, the game ran quite well. However, once ported to the Nintendo Wii, players were met with the unpleasant surprise of only seeing five or six zombies on screen at a time because the less powerful hardware could not compete.
Obviously, hardware is vastly different now in 2020, but the same comparative limitations between the Nintendo Switch and all other platforms remains relevant. If anyone is up to the task of porting a game with non-stop action and the demands of spawning hundreds of units, it’s Saber Interactive. Check out the video below to see the type of gameplay people experience right now and why such a project is ambitious — but also exciting.
In terms of limitations, it would be perfectly reasonable for corners to be cut so the game can run well on the Switch. For starters, we can surely expect a cap of 30 FPS when playing in either docked or handheld mode. Second, many of the zombie units will probably see their textures reduced, and we will probably see many more duplicates in a charging horde, which is similar to how the Left 4 Dead series treated its hordes of undead.
Speaking of which, if World War Z can be pushed to work on the Switch, there seems no reason to not also have a port of Left 4 Dead II. We hope that World War Z arrives soon, but there is no official release date yet available.
Source: nintendoeverything.com