Bethesda’s support for the Nintendo Switch has been absolutely incredible so far – both Skyrim and DOOM have managed to handle well at 30FPS (which is pretty amazing considering the limited hardware of the portable console) and Wolfenstein II gameplay footage looks almost just as good as the PS4 and Xbox One release.
Bethesda’s Pete Hines recently spoke to Gamereactor on porting games to the Switch and the challenges they’ve faced. So far it seems that the company has been pretty happy with the Bethesda’s performance on Nintendo’s console:
‘A game like Doom or Skyrim or Wolf II that there is an audience for those games on those consoles. We’ve seen that so far. Nintendo’s been really pleased obviously, and we didn’t have a crystal ball to know, ‘Oh this will definitely their best-selling thing’, but we saw it early, we felt like there was something we could support and our games would resonate, and they have, and obviously Nintendo’s crushing it with their hardware sales which is great.’
Pete Hines also commented on the publisher’s relationship with Nintendo.
‘From Nintendo, they’re thrilled as hell. Last Nintendo game I guess we did before this would have been like Star Trek Tactical Assault or something – we did a DS game. I can’t even keep them all straight, it was a long time ago, but we hadn’t done anything on Nintendo hardware in a long time. But we’ve always talked to those guys. Our philosophy hasn’t changed in all my time at Bethesda, which is we put all this effort into making these games, we’ll put them out on as many platforms as will support the game as the developers have designed it. Now in the case of Switch, okay we’ve gotta do a little work to make sure it runs right and gives the right thing. We don’t want to cut out half of the story or make sacrifices that change the game, but if a device will support what we’re doing, we’ll absolutely put it out because we want as many people as possible to play these great games that our developers make.’