It was an incredible achievement for the talented team at Saber Interactive to achieve impressive Kingdom Come Deliverance up and running on the Nintendo Switch family of systems. In the newly published interview, lead developer for the port, Anton Vasilev, provided some insight into how they accomplished this. Saber Interactive knew they had an “extremely difficult challenge” ahead of them, so the team examined the game’s source code and assets to ultimately decide if a Nintendo Switch port was possible.
Once they decided it was and got the game up and running on the system, they set about looking for the most important game optimization for the platform. Vasilev describes it as the most difficult part of the process: “It’s not just about making it playable, we had to make it enjoyable, which is why optimization was the most challenging task. It took about two years to complete.”
“The Nintendo Switch version runs at the equivalent of the PC version’s picture quality setting. In development, we used the Xbox One version of the art assets, with some static objects removed, and then cropped the highest MIP level for all assets. We also removed some static objects with high LOD models, partially simplified the terrain graphics and reduced the key frames per second of some animation sequences. Additionally, we have dropped support for surround sound for audio.”
In the interview, Vasilev says that the most problematic part of optimizing the game on the Nintendo Switch was getting it to run at the right frame rate. This includes when the player enters crowded villages and exits to busy battlefields. In the end, the team was able to get it to run at 30 frames per second in both handheld and docked modes. Vasilev told the site that ‘the most important goal in porting a game is to achieve a good balance between performance, memory handling, stability and final quality.’