Digital Foundry has chimed in on whether Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was running on the Nintendo Switch.
Now, some of you may think that this question is pretty silly, and we would agree. We have seen impressive looking titles from Nintendo themselves, from smaller details in games like Super Mario Odyssey, hardware pushing performance for The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and graphical showcases like Pikmin 4.
We have also seen the unusual phenomenon of ‘impossible’ ports, of third parties making ports of games that should not work on the Switch. For this category, you can put down ports of newer games, such as Doom Eternal, The Witcher 3, Nier Automata, and most recently, Kingdom Come Deliverance.
We suppose it is understandable that people would question if it really came to the console, because there are also certain titles that did not turn out well on the platform. The notorious case everyone looks at right now is Mortal Kombat 1, but this was also the case with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection, and The Outer Worlds.
Given these other examples, we know that the issues these games ran into are not insurmountable, but for a variety of reasons, they were not pulled off correctly and it isn’t likely that they will be fixed, at least outside of that speculation that Nintendo’s next console can improve performance of Switch games.
In any case, Digital Foundry has made their case for why they believe that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is running on the Nintendo Switch. In fact, as they pointed out, they found performance issues that were present in the trailer, and counterintuitively, they took this as a good sign. Of course, the reason for that is because they could believe that the trailer really was running on the Switch.
Digital Foundry doesn’t have access to the hardware to do tests up close, so they made their observations with the same trailer we all saw. And they found very small frame drops, jaggies, and aliasing issues. As for the trailer’s stats, it was running at 900p, at 60 FPS.
Digital Foundry did not point this out as well, but it certainly helps that the trailer was made in such a way that they did not show any human faces. For most CG graphics, it’s the failure to breach the uncanny valley that breaks immersion, in video games, as well as movies and shows.
Digital Foundry did point out it looked a lot like Metroid Prime Remastered, and if you played that on your Switch, you would recognize that Retro Studios adopted a particular aesthetic that makes it ‘easy’ to make attractive graphics, even without pushing performance that much. Overall, it should make players excited that they are going to get a really great looking Metroid Prime 4: Beyond in 2025.
