The long-awaited Bayonetta 3 is finally now available on the Nintendo Switch and it is another great game from Platinum Games. Digital Foundry have been playing around the finished game and while they love the game they have come away fairly unimpressed from a tech standpoint, even going as far as to say that they feel as though the game was made for a more powerful Nintendo Switch system which simply never materialised. The game’s resolution runs at a dynamic 810p when played on the TV and dynamic 480p when played in handheld mode, which means both modes are sub-HD. Here’s some snippets of the full article which you can read here
“Let me make this clear – Bayonetta 3 is a fantastic action game and one that should satisfy fans of the series. Its bombastic set pieces, varied stage design and wildly out of control storytelling all work in tandem to create something uniquely special. However, the game also reveals an aging technology base that crumbles under the weight of its scope and scale. This is a game where it feels as if the entire production is in search of more powerful hardware that has never arrived.”
“Textures are often low resolution and muddy in appearance, image quality is sub-par, and performance is remarkably unstable. It fares worse than every other Bayonetta release save for the PS3 version of Bayonetta 1 – and that’s a bummer. I suppose the best way to describe the presentation is simply – inconsistent. The visuals range from beautiful to downright ugly depending on the chapter you find yourself in.”
“Overall image quality is fairly limited as well – the series isn’t exactly known for high resolutions. Bayonetta 2, in fact, was limited to 720p even on Switch. Bayonetta 3 does improve upon this slightly with an increase in pixel count to 810p. Portable mode falls below 720p, however, unlike the prior games – pixel counts suggested a resolution just below 480p so it’s not exactly sharp there either. can forgive this given the frame-rate target but the low pixel count, large environments and low quality texture filtering aren’t exactly a great pairing.”
“I feeling is that Bayonetta 3 is a solid action game with some impressive set-pieces let down by underwhelming visuals and mild camera issues. As long as the frame-rate is solid, it would be easy to look past the presentation issues but, alas, the reality isn’t quite what I had hoped. Cutscenes do indeed retain the target 30 frames per second, as you’d hope, so nothing is amiss there. Surprisingly, for the larger set pieces, actual gameplay is updated at 30fps as well – it’s clear that the scale of these scenes made 60fps impossible, so they’re simply capped instead. That’s understandable but standard gameplay rarely touches the 60fps threshold and that’s a real problem.”
