One thing that many gamers want in their franchises is consistency, not just in terms of graphical quality or narrative content, but in how it feels to play the game. Even when it comes down to the controls the gamers want to know they can just “pick it up and play it” like they did before without too many big changes. For Monster Hunter Rise, though, when it came to the Nintendo Switch, there were some big changes. Mainly in that the control scheme options weren’t as grand as they had been in previous titles on other systems.
In an interview Monster Hunter Rise director Yasunori Ichinose talked about this and noted it wasn’t because of a lack of desire to have such schemes in there. But rather, it had to do with the Nintendo Switch itself and how you had two options to play it.
“If you really think about it, we had to develop for two styles of play: docked and portable. In docked mode for example, you’re unable to use the touch screen, and we made sure the game was playable even without those things.”
He also noted that there were “remnants” of what was there before if you knew where to look. But they also made sure above all else that the game was playable and fun for gamers. Given the success of the title, we’d be fair in saying that they succeeded.
Ichinose also revealed that one of the biggest things they had to deal with was not the controls, but the engine. The previous mainline game they worked on was the mega-hit game Monster Hunter World. That title is credited with finally breaking down the barrier in the West for gamers to try out the franchise. The difference there, of course, was that it was on the PS4, which had a much different engine than the one that the Nintendo Switch had.
The game would use the RE Engine that many Capcom games now. But on the Switch, the processing power still had its limits, so the team had to do many different experiments to see how they could make things look, how beautiful it could be, and so on and so forth.
Rampage Mode for example had many tests so that they could figure out how many monsters they could put on the screen without slowing things down at all.
Which was not easy at first, apparently. They had issues with getting beyond 10 frames per second, which is absolutely horrific. But thankfully, Monster Hunter Rise was able to get to 30 FPS on the Nintendo Switch, and between that and the rest of their hard work, they were able to make another hit game in the franchise.
Source: Nintendo Dream
