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It was an incredible achievement for the talented team at Saber Interactive to get the impressive Kingdom Come Deliverance up and running on the Nintendo Switch family of systems. In a newly published interview, the lead programmer for the port, Anton Vasilev, has provided some insight into how they accomplished this. Saber Interactive knew that they had an “extremely difficult challenge” before 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 they had the game up and running on the system, they then set about looking at the all-important optimisation of the game for the platform. Vasilev describes as the most difficult part of the process “It’s not just about getting it to be 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 “Low” Image Quality setting. In development, we used the art assets of the Xbox One version, from which some static objects were removed, and then cut the highest resolution MIP level for all assets. We also removed some static objects with high LOD models, partially simplified the terrain graphics, and reduced the key frame rate of some animation sequences. In addition, we gave up on having surround sound support for audio.”
In the interview Vasilev says that the most problematic part of optimising the game on the Nintendo Switch was to get it running at an adequate framerate throughout. This includes when the player enters the packed villages and out on the busy battlefields. In the end, the team managed to get it running at 30fps in both handheld and docked mode. 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.’