The fact that the Nintendo Switch has been around for almost eight years now is striking. It feels like just yesterday that we were all watching the massive presentation that The Big N did to welcome the Switch officially into the world. Now, the system is almost done with its run, and we’re waiting for its successor to arrive. However, there are still some new games that players will be able to enjoy before the Switch 2 arrives. Plus, some stories still need to be told about the OG Switch. After all, a lot of people have worked on the system over the years.
Automation Media did a special group interview with a bunch of Japanese developers and asked them about some of the difficulties that they faced when working on the Switch; one of the more popular statements was about working within the hardware specs to make optimization as good as possible:
“We had to compress textures to the absolute limit to save memory, but the trade-off was that the more memory we freed up, the better the game would look, making the process feel like solving a puzzle. When I think about it that way, it was actually fun.”
It’s nice to hear that because one would hope that these teams weren’t “working endlessly and tirelessly” just to “get the game to work.” It’s true that the Switch wasn’t the most powerful system around, but when you got the optimization to work, you made magic, as teams like Monolith Soft, Atlus, Platnimum Games, and, of course, the main teams of Nintendo proved endlessly.
Now, as for what those developers asked for with the Nintendo Switch 2, you might be surprised that they sounded just like the fanbase itself when they asked for a “more powerful system” or a “more durable controller.” On the first topic, most agree that while the OG Switch was a great console with great games, those games would’ve been that “little bit better” if it had a bit more power.
The Switch 2 will definitely “up its game” hardware-wise to provide better graphics and processing power, but how much it’ll have is currently heavily debated.
That being said, even though it undoubtedly is not as powerful as the Xbox Series X/S or PS5, if it has even a “significant boost” in graphics and processing power, it’ll be enough for many third-party developers to add their games or create something special exclusively for the Nintendo console.
