Explaining why Batman Arkham Knight is broken on Nintendo Switch | Game Dev Analysis

[@sungrandstudios]

Does the Bat Signal still make sense or should Batman just get a cell phone?

[@MorrowindES17]

He could use both lmao

[@thedude8128]

The point of the bat signal isn't just to call batman but as a symbol for criminals to fear when it's lit... Like bro... seriously? Do you even Batman bro?

[@_ghostly_]

The bat symbol is more than a call for aid. It's a threat to those who see it, to drop what they're doing and run.

[@Chounak]

To be honest the bat signal isn't meant to alert just batman, but it's also meant to show criminals that the batman is coming and they shouldn't try to do anything.

[@sungrandstudios]

​@@thedude8128just wanted to open up conversation in the chat

[@brokenhdd9291]

Coffee cup is jittering because its attached to the guy's skeletal mesh (probably the hand), and they have cranked up the animation compression to save on memory, so there is less precision in the keyframe data to keep the cup stable on the table.

[@trevorpearlharbor5171]

This should be an entire series. This is good for future devs or current devs that could help educate about and avoid these issues, and it costs nothing but a like and our attention. Thanks Jerrel for the content! No throw some knives!

[@Tigerman1998]

Arkham Batman, next to TAS Batman, are two of the most definitive portrayals of Batman in terms of comic accuracy and characterization in the visual medium.

[@sungrandstudios]

It's so hard to match TAS Batman.

[@danielcraig9666]

​@@sungrandstudiosLmao, I read "match" as "watch" and thought wtf is wrong with you?!?

[@HandOn-c40009]

Adam west Batman is technically the most faithful comic book adaptation

[@LordFren]

Arkham Knight, the game that is notoriously badly optimized on PC, Consoles and just about anywhere is on Switch. WHO thought this was a good idea? Who greenlit this? :D

[@fattiger6957]

WB Games is notoriously greedy and incompetent.

[@razlad2523]

whoever saw, that switch sold 100 million units

[@sungrandstudios]

WB greenlit it.

[@sungrandstudios]

​@@fattiger6957yeah.

[@deniskobza5092]

I was so confused why they choosed Arkham Knight over Arkham Origin, when they made this collection

[@whollymindless]

The devs aren't the only ones responsible here. PMs, Leads and Directors, along with business probably had unpleasant ideas making life miserable for devs.

[@Bajoomboe]

Expensive - we used to call Resource Hogs

[@Boopadee]

Expensive is more of a developer word. There's a performance budget you have available after all.

[@PhantomGB]

a good example of a swtich port that was done well would be alien: isolation. You can tell the devs put some time and effort because it still looks amazing for it being on switch and kept really good performance on top of that.

[@sjneow]

That game was from PS3 gen though

[@PhantomGB]

@@sjneow it was on also on ps4. In a lot of spots on the game. It had better quality then the ps4 produced at the time and kept the performance.

[@xenomorphlover]

I agree. The worst thing about the game is the horrible antialiasing which makes it unplayable for me on consoles. Thank God there's a mod for PC which fixes the problem but I'm still hoping for a remastered version before the sequel gets released.

[@Xeno_Vega]

I think most devs should take notes from monolith soft when it comes to maximizing game assets and optimization.

[@JayceCH.]

This is a port dude..

[@monado1761]

Xenoblade 3 is the only one that ran good on switch....

[@Xeno_Vega]

@JayceCH. don't forget xenoblade chronicles was remastered for the switch and it ran fantasticly with all the quality of life improvements.

[@Xeno_Vega]

@monado1761 all 3 xenoblades ran great on the switch for me.

[@monado1761]

@@Xeno_Vega that's the problem they ran good FOR YOU not for everyone else

[@logicalfundy]

Depth of field (and other effects based on blurring the image) is one effect I would gladly give up if it's going to cause problems. I don't feel its necessary, and is often done to an unrealistic amount. It's also one of the reasons why I would like to have graphical options even in console games.

[@SebastianSkadisson]

Great video, we older gamers know this, but younger ones might've never had the chance to learn.

[@SENATORPAIN1]

This is one of those "We were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Moments.

[@sungrandstudios]

I swear I could hear Jeff Goldblum's voice as I read this comment.

[@Gambit2483]

I'm hoping this is one of the games that can be updated/patched on Switch 2. Especially since they will have more CPU and GPU to work with.

[@bigdigclutch]

Yeah right after the ps5 and series x, update. Wouldn't bet on it

[@kingdingii2034]

My hope for that is the reason why I haven't played it yet.

[@JayceCH.]

This is an old ass WB game. Thats like hoping for a plane to crash on a specific house.

[@Gambit2483]

GTA Trilogy drfinitive edition got updated 3 years after launch. The game is still on sale and available to purchase. No reason the devs can't update and patch the game later once it's available on stronger, more capable hardware ​@JayceCH.

[@kingdingii2034]

@JayceCH. I do own it on PS4 Pro. But I kind of want to be able to play it mobile and I am getting the Switch 2 anyway for its Nintendo exclusives.

[@SabrPath]

4:11 I just love your reaction to the coffee cup 😂

[@Anti_Woke]

Depth of Field is evil. Along with motion blur, chromatic abberation, et al, it doesn't make things look 'real', it makes things look like cheap film which photographers and film-makers try hard and spend lots of money to get rid of to make things look real! We do not 'see' depth of field, because our eyes are constantly adjusting as they skip around the visual field. Same with background (not diegetic) music - it's there to make a game like a film, not like reality. All these things break immersion for me; instead of thinking "I'm in this world", at best I think "I'm watching this movie".

[@logicalfundy]

Yeah, I'm a bit tired of every game going for "this is what a cheap camera would see" rather than "this is what my eyes would see."

[@semplar2007]

i turn it off in most games. if game would track my eyes and apply depth of field accordingly, then yes, it would make sense, otherwise just leave a clean picture for me pls

[@Anti_Woke]

@@logicalfundy Exactly that.

[@Anti_Woke]

@@semplar2007 Me too. Turn off nearly all the extras, get better immersion, AND the fps and performance increases.

[@theraymunator]

I hate games trying so hard to be like movies. They're GAMES, if you want to tell a story through the medium, you need to communicate it through the gameplay, not through a bunch of cinematics that in the case of AK you can't even skip half the time. And you specially don't need to make everything look so realistic, when computer animation, even in the much more limited context of a videogame, just looks way better.

[@Minoseth]

Honestly "Depth of Field", "Chromatic Abberation" and "Motion Blur" are always shit for me. I don't see ANY reason why we should have these in games (execpt when the character is drunk or so). A game should not only be cinematic, it should also be crisp clear. It's a fantasy and I want to see my fantasy in max details, not blurred and unfocused with weird color on the edges! The same for "lens effects" and "auto exposure"; It's okay in narrative games (for example: Detroit: Become Human) but in Cyberpunk, it's SO ANNOYING!

[@superbros64deluxe]

Riddle me this batman- how much budget and Crunch did these devlopers have for this switch port? Probably very little budget and intense crunch because Warner brothers doesn't care about games...

[@fattiger6957]

The most ridiculous thing is, if they would have allocated the appropriate amount of time and money, they probably could have gotten a decent port of the game. It might have required remaking the game from scratch, but it would have worked. And that would have netted them much more sales since it would have good word of mouth. As it is, they are banking on luring in customers who are unaware of the game being in such a sorry state and who will regret buying it.

[@StupidMarioBros1Fan]

The real issue is that they _ported_ this game to the Switch when they should've _remade_ it. Arkham Asylum & Arkham City look and run great because they were 7th Gen games (PS3, XB360) so the assets are roughly the same as what Switch games tend to have. This game though was built for the 8th generation with assets & graphical effects that still look next-gen a decade later so it required a lot of down-scaling for the Switch which were mainly done automatically. So many textures are blurry because shrinking them is the best that can be done without completely redoing them & overhauling the models to use the new textures. If you remade everything to look like PS3 graphics, and redone a lot of gfx systems like make the rain particles not spawn so many droplets, this game would look & run a lot better. The problem is that it would literally be a remake (or "demake") which would require a much larger budget & development cycle and that was not going to happen. Should've held off on porting the game to the Switch 2 because this was not worth it.

[@goldmemberpb]

Arkham Knight definitely should have been a Switch 2 release only. We should have just gotten Asylum and city on Switch. Knight is a great example of just because you can port a game to Switch doesn't mean you should.

[@shinababes]

Brother going to replace DF specifically for the switch at this point 😂

[@shodanargie1574]

Sir, Id rather they rely on LOD generators rather than the shitshow that is nanite. The problem is LOD generators in modern engines are shit and not context sensitive, but Nanite is worse.

[@GreatestGames777]

He is vengeance, He is the night, HE IS JERELL, AND HE IS HERE BRINGING THE TRUTH.

[@DaedLizrad]

I remember when this was released, I had the thought that an easy fix for the car would have been to alter the vision while in the batmobile to remove all the extraneous elements that bog the system down. Maybe redshift and then remove everything except the shapes and just explain it as a special vision of the batmobile. As for the general overworld, removing the rain effect would have likely helped, but I'm not sure by how much.

[@WilyZinogre]

I’m not having coffee at 11pm. I value having a healthy sleep schedule

[@sungrandstudios]

Good call. I was just drinking water out of my Bat Mug.

[@wii58739]

I enjoy your videos and would just like to add to what you said, transparency is indeed expensive thats why many games especially on Switch instead uses something called dithering which is akin to puncturing pixel holes in a checkered pattern. It somewhat makes it look transparent especially on farther distances and avoids additative calculations on the same pixel over and over again that transparancy does with overdraw. Regarding the specular/lighting couldnt that just be a shader with fake cubemap reflection that has a very low mip level to make the texture more optimized loading into the gpu? And I agree distance/z-depth fog would have been much better...

[@TheStowAway594]

The stream/vortices coming off the rear tires while driving the batmobile is crazy bad lol, it looks like the batmobile is shifting into another dimension.

[@jfsps15]

This game on Switch made me remember Cyberpunk 2077, not because the poly count, resolution, etc, but the way it struggle to load the city because the whole quantity of objects the PS4 (or Xbox One) was trying to load at the same time not just because of their memory bandwidth, plus the HDD bandwith too. That create too that sometimes the logic can get stuck on some instances and the thugs can get there and do nothing until it loads not the model, textures but the logic, its not so frequent like the 1.0 Cyberpunk 2077 but it can happens. The cup bouncing, does it is because the cup is not an individual object rather part of the human model, or at least is attached to some mesh of the model, (?), in God of War 2 there was a giant cyclops if i remember, that it kinda jittered and the cup made me remember that, in that case it was because they were running out of memory for the float values. Even at this state (Batman Arkham Knight) i find it amusing that the Swich Pokemons (Scarlet and Violet) runs and looks like it does.

[@Pandemona01]

Loved this video. It was nice to recognize terms once I knew when learning 3D, eons ago. Really intereting subject.

[@_spartan11796]

More of these videos would be great!

[@sungrandstudios]

Thanks. I'll work on that.

[@johnboling7426]

It made sense back in the day but with oracle the signal is outdated

[@sungrandstudios]

Yeah that's a very good point! Wait, didn't she get her legs restored in a recent comic?

[@johnboling7426]

@sungrandstudios they did unfortunately I haven't read any of the new comics because of the recent times with dc comics new hires because of diversity hiring

[@fattiger6957]

@@sungrandstudios Back in the 2011 reboot, they cured her and made her Batgirl again. Like most changes in that reboot, it ruined her character.

[@mrsleep0000]

Jerrel is a menace in the Batmobile.

[@crestofhonor2349]

Just remember the switch has notoriously slow memory, and it only has 4gb of it. Tears if the Kingdom’s biggest limitation isn’t even the GPU or CPU, it’s the memory speeds. Driving around fast causes lots of stuff needed to be streamed in no I wouldn’t be surprised if the slow memory was a big factor in the frame drops. The game also uses UE3 on all three games in the collection and I bet some of the issues are because that engine never supported the switch officially. Even with UE4 it wasn’t supported in older versions so it wasn’t uncommon to update the version for switch like with the case of Dragon Quest 11s which ran on a newer version of UE4 over the version in the original Dragon Quest 11

[@liaminwales]

The art direction of the game was so good, even this switch version with all it's cuts and problems still looks good. Still with the FPS problems id not want to play on switch, more a comment of how good art direction matters more than graphics quality.

[@NekuKodoku]

i really would like a small tour on your cup collection

[@Gerald_YouTube]

There are racing sections in this game from what I recall, I would imagine the performance would make completing any of them very difficult if not unplayable.

[@TheStowAway594]

This game destroyed the last goodwill I had towards large developers. The way they handled this game was so abysmal. I've been waiting for someone to do a documentary on what the hell happened.

[@pillagius]

It's an interesting breakdown. Thanks for the video :)

[@teenybopper598]

I loved this video! Very informative. I'm going to notice so much more on the games I play, I almost feel silly for not catching this stuff lol.

[@zer0doughnuts]

Love these optimization analysis videos! The switch does make for many case studies on the subject. Witcher 3 or Mortal Kombat 1 ports anyone? Regarding texture resolution not having a great impact, many gamers don't realize that this is the case. Textures are among the cheapest ways of increasing visual fidelity. Now, while broadly this is true, just like everything there is a price for higher resolution textures and that price is an impact on disk & memory bandwidth and a higher memory footprint. Once you run out of either memory or bandwidth the impact to performance is considerable. The switch simply just doesn't have the hardware budget for either high poly-count or high resolution textures.

[@john_hunter_]

Disney Speedstorm is one of the best Switch ports I've seen. The port originally looked blurry but over time they put in the effort to optimise it Now the visuals look sharp & it retains the essence of the PC version. I think it even has some volumetric fog effects where you can see the sun shafts.

[@DarthChrisB]

The only game where you can sip on your coffee inbetween frames.

[@sungrandstudios]

It's good to have breaks built in like that.

[@roiwtto0919]

I hope switch 2 run this on 60fps and return the original graphics cause the low quality hurts my eye and its hard to see on handheld low quality

[@No-Ink]

Do you think you could make a video why devs should have inverted camera control options in their games day one? Theres a surprisingly large amount of games that dont have these options making these games virtually unplayble for me and for others and its a feature that is easy to implement.

[@roflBeck]

Seriously? What games don't have this? I always use invert, only games that don't have inversion settings from I've seen is extremely low effort shovelware lol.

[@No-Ink]

@roflBeck You'd be surprised of the lack of consideration. Recent example was the Sly Cooper series releases on the PS5. No option for inverted control for the camera. And the PS5 also does not have a controller setting to invert y axis like the Xbox Series does.

[@vincev4630]

Common technique for high res looking clothes is tiled textures. As for loading, the switch cant load all the assets at once. Batman heavily relies on texture streaming. The only solution to fix performance is to atlas textures, pack them & to keep LODs low & static & maybe making character animations vertex-based instead.

[@JoseQuintanilla88]

I just redownloaded this on my switch. I just wanted to play as Red Hood in combat levels.

[@DavidArcher_]

This is just sad. I replayed AK 2 years ago on my PC maxed out at 1440p and it was gorgeous. If I didn't know I would've never guessed it came out in 2015.

[@logicalfundy]

Pokemon is particularly annoying because those are games designed from the ground up for the Switch by developers with experience on Nintendo consoles. They should really know what the limitations are of the system. Arkham Knight is a bit more understandable, having been designed for other systems first.

[@ELTABULLO]

Tf you mean experience on Nintendo consoles? Gamefreak!?😂

[@logicalfundy]

@@ELTABULLO Exactly.

[@ELTABULLO]

@@logicalfundy The switch is where they launched their first console pokemon (not counting their mini spin off )

[@ELTABULLO]

@logicalfundy And it shows, they suck

[@GamingMyWholeLife]

Another one of these awesome videos ^__^

[@lukilladog]

Back in the day I put this game on the Freezer, It is fine now but It took several patches and hardware generational Advances. Today, Im doing the same with Spiderman 2. :X

[@Riseofziggy]

I think my third ever video game was Batman Arkham city armored edition on the Wii U and to this day that game and that specific version is my favorite game of all time and I still play it at least once a year on the Wii U. And as a side note I believe arkham origins is immensely underrated.

[@jairramirez1595]

It would be cool if you please can make the same type of video but with Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch and why the game has so many issues when we have other fighting games that run really well on Switch

[@Jakco808]

"I hope you found this interesting" bro I was laughing the whole time lol. That performance is rough

[@MunuM77]

Hopefully devs will optimize better now that handhelds are very popular.

[@ドリフト180X]

Some games just aren't meant for switch, granted it's impressive what the tegra x1 can pull off, but at the end of the day it's a streaming box chip from 2015. Also the ram limitations is hard to work around too.

[@Kaijudomage]

I'm willing to bet part of the reason is also why the port was so bad on pc in the first place, to the point where it was removed from sale on Steam for a time.

[@MorrowindES17]

How did there get kingdom come on switch as well

[@zoltanschweifer4304]

I have a question what settings are the most impacting reducing the performance in a game, that is not so visible decease of quality?

[@fattiger6957]

Sounds like what they should have done is do a top-down remake made specifically for Switch. Maybe completely change the art style to something less realistic so it demands less on the hardware. But that would have been too expensive for AAA publishers (especially after WB Games was busy blowing half a billion dollars on Suicide Squad)

[@Grandmastergav86]

Ngl that's pretty funny. I still remember the horrors of Doom on the Saturn....man that was painful. I really don't understand why they'd attempt to develop games as resource intensive as Arkham Knight or KCD to run on the Switch. I'm not saying those players don't deserve to play them (they absolutely do) but they do deserve to be treated with respect not just thrown garbage ports like this. The lack of anti-aliasing really stands out to me as well. The framerate is abysmal, especially in the Batmobile.

[@sungrandstudios]

I find it very fascinated looking at games like these on consoles that just flew too close to the sun. On older consoles, they were even more satisfying.

[@asmopera]

I remember this game had renound really poor performance on PC (RAM issues I think) when it first launched. If you own this on Switch just keep telling yourself that it looks pretty good for a PS1 game. A lot of studios for the Wii/Wii U seemed to bump their ports work over to a dedicated studio specialising in those ports.

[@El_Peje2]

Great intro

[@sungrandstudios]

Haha thanks

[@emmanuelgonzalezcaseira9141]

In the end it was getting nauseating seeing the driving x_x Seeing how much experience you have developing games and shipping them, I was wondering if you could share the process you follow from pre-production to pos-production to ship so many games? I... would love to have a process to emulate, with stuff like timelines, do you work with deadlines and everything in between. Maybe it could be a video on its own. Hope this idea pikes your interest :)

[@maeshg1969]

I wonder if you could such an analysis on nier automata for the switch, I'd like to have your opinion as a dev

[@norbert9568]

Thank you so much for explaining. Do you think that this exact same game will work significantly better on Switch2 with backwards compatibility? Btw I love the fitting Batman mug 😆👌🏻

[@bananachild1936]

Even with the Switch 2's back compat I don't think this port is gonna run well on that system due to the nature of Arkham Knight's game engine (which is a heavily-modified UE3 engine according to the folks at DF if I'm not mistaken) that was never designed with the Switch in mind and a very outdated one at that. Unless of course, WB would commission a "Next-Gen" Switch 2 patch for the game to whoever's willing to do the job. Which I highly doubt they would.

[@goldmemberpb]

Knight needs a full on Switch 2 native version. This looks like a bit of a lost cause.

[@EvEnMoR]

I got the trilogy for Switch. I played through Asylum and City and am waiting for Switch 2 to play Knight. lol. Performance has to be abysmal for me to consider it unplayable. I think this is the only game I've had that with on Switch.

[@stevenbishop1782]

Borderlands 2 on the Vita was an interesting one lol

[@CyberDunk2077]

The main problem is that they even shipped it in this shape. Who played tested it and said “yes, this is a fun experience that we can charge people money for”?

[@TheHollowBlade]

Srsly. This looks like a “lets push this out and hopefully we can trick people into paying for this garbage” There is zero reason for this to exist on the switch outside of corporate greed.

[@theraymunator]

Warner. IIRC, originally they wanted to release Arkham Trilogy around Black Friday, but complications with Arkham Knight's development led to them instead releasing it in december.

[@RaxonXVI]

The contrast between games like this and something like Xenoblade is insane

[@micheljolicoeur6094]

Would be interesting to see a side by side when the Switch 2 releases and see how much more GPU power the Switch 2 has over the Switch. It would also test the backwards compatability of the game as well.

[@Jul-66]

*Backward compatibility

[@DeathMetalThrasher]

I have the Arkham trilogy on switch, that's one of the first things I'll try when the switch 2 is in my hands

[@ilari90]

Was the studio developing Concord at this time already (iirc they made Concord). Would've been more profitable to put few more guys to optimize this than making Concord. EDIT: it was Suicide Squad Killed the Justice League, my bad, but same issues.

[@Mackeriv]

Very nice analysis! Would you consider doing one for Cyberpunk 2077 on base PS4, physical and unpatched? I know this is asking a lot. 😅

[@platibyte]

Would it work if they just disabled loading hires when the speed is high?

[@coolman229]

The game definitely has issues but outside of dumbed down graphics I rarely had any real problems playing Arkham Knight on my Switch. I had way more problems playing the PC version when it launched.

[@sungrandstudios]

What else was wrong on the PC version? The game is certainly trying to do a lot of things.

[@coolman229]

@ When I played it on launch the PC version ran at like 15 FPS and was like 5 FPS in the Batmobile. It was literally unplayable. It’s certainly better now but at launch it was a complete mess.

[@DrOmni]

This game is legitimately one of the most beautiful games ever made, even to this day. As much as I sympathize with how difficult it had to be to port this game to a potato, the sacrifices make the end product absolutely unbearable to witness. The scene in the café looked like a third party ps3 game, if not worse. This game has no business being abused by this hardware.

[@knightterror8489]

Disagree that the lighting is worse than the other batman games, but good video

[@AlbedoAtoned]

I played this game on PC right around when it released, though it had to have been after at least one patch because literally on release you could not change the fps without changing an ini file and I had the option. Even at 60 where the game stuttered, my experience was more playable than this. Unfortunately this just looks completely unplayable imo. If it were me, I would have ported Arkham Origins. It could have performed about the same as Asylum and City given it was designed with the same platforms as those two in mind (it even had a Wii U port that ran okay). Knight should have been saved for the Switch 2. I get why AK was ported instead, but I don't think the game would have really worked very well. On one extreme, you get a port that tries to keep as much of the presentation as it can, but this of course will not perform well. On the other extreme, you may get a port that performs well, but there are so many cutbacks that the presentation is seriously harmed, and on the next gen console it will probably not look particularly good either without a next gen patch specifically designed to take advantage of the better hardware. Unfortunately, I think the Switch got the worst of both worlds. Clearly there's severe cutback that hurts the presentation. Extremely muddy looking textures and models that just look really bad. But it was not enough and so the game really chugs trying to do too much at once. In order to make the game work on Switch, it would have probably required a lot of the game to be redesigned for the Switch, which costs way more than what WB probably wanted to spend given that the Switch port was supposed to be a quick cash grab. The kind of work it would take to make the proper cutbacks and potentially try to retain as much of the original presentation and STILL perform better, was probably never going to be considered. For what it's worth, this game's PC release has been more or less fixed for years and on the Steam Deck it runs quite well at even 60fps, though in my playthrough I reduced the refresh rate to 40 or 50 to save battery power and it also practically eliminated stutters, which were occasionally there at 60. I'm not sure if the Switch 2 will necessarily fix the Switch port of this game so there's always the Deck and other Handheld PCs if one wants to play the game on a portable device. And on a full desktop it can go much higher than 60fps at high resolutions.

[@LPetal86]

You have no idea how cathartic these videos have been for me. Been gaming for over 30 years at this point and thinking back to the 8-bit and 16-bit eras as opposed to now, I think sometimes to myself, "Why?". We have more powerful GPUS and CPUS and loads of RAM and high speed Internet and fancy-shmancy modern game engines. Devs are always boasting about the high polygon counts and the latest water effects the latest and greatest machines can produce. And yet, underneath all that speak of the latest sparkle, ripple and shine, the latest pore tech for your high-resolution texturing, and meshes and bump mapping and mipmapping and normals, etc.... There are almost always performance issues. And I don't know about you, but when I think back to my childhood when watching yet another massive memory leak or lack of latency, I reminisce about how the SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive, for all their limitations that modern devs laugh at, sure did seem to suffer a lot less from constant slowdown and day-one patches. Thank you for clarifying a bit for me questions I've had for over 25 years now about how optimization is supposed to work.

[@kcadventures1454]

What scares me is the switch 2 is rumored to only be as powerful as the ps4 pro. For the love of god the ps5 is already almost 5 years old!

[@WeegeeDX]

You really expect the PS5 to fit in a switch 2 shaped container? Trust me, if the Switch 2 is PS4 Pro power, the gap between Nintendo and Sony will be pretty much non existant (graphics-wise, at least)

[@Cute_Clord]

Issue with allowing game to load more ahead of time with loading screens is that Arkham Knight is an open world game... Sure the open world is not that large but it's there. I don't think Switch has enough memory to keep the whole open world loaded at once. So really they would have had to develop a version of the game t hat wasn't open world to solve it that way. Aside of not releasing game in hardware that can't really support it while looking good would have been to just it have always use lowest quality assets only and make it look even more terrible. Including removing various effects and replacing them or not. So game would be really crappy looking but run well.

[@johnboling7426]

I'm guessing they did the same thing to Hogwarts legacy on switch

[@fattiger6957]

Same publisher

[@angelomattei2304]

Almost the Best Nintendo DS game I have seen!

[@guybrush3000]

I want to remind everyone that this analysis may be completely incorrect. You cant just look at the game and identify the bottlenecks in code and fx relative to the given hardware. Some of his assumptions may be correct, but without inspecting the code and running test builds on the switch, you cant be 100% sure there arent other large bottlenecks that are less visually apparent

[@philfriethegamingguy7759]

Is there a way to turn down the expensive effects to get the game to run well on the switch?

[@idindunuphenwong]

Am I the only one who doesn't remember always noticing these kinds of performance issues back on the PS1, PS2, N64, GameCube, Xbox and Xbox 360?

[@WeegeeDX]

That was Ye Olden Days where games were made with love in mind, not profit.

[@ciscofire99]

I prayed for this

[@SebastianSkadisson]

Going a bit on a tangent: I think that the reason we are seing a decline in fidelity is that most executives don't see the benefit of employing engine techs if they could just aswell use mere implementation of existing engines. Because if you have a pro at an engine implementation, for example for Unreal Engine, in your studio you theoretically don't need an engine tech who could build his own or modify an existing one. But as always with "prebaked" stuff, the quality overall just suffers, no matter how much expertise everyone has - you chose prebaked over building an engine fit specifically for your goal. But i wonder if game designers these days even know what their goal is technically before starting anymore either. The only ones who seem to put technical and aesthetical goals first seem to be first party Nintendo game studios themselves. And even them - looking at Pokémon Scarlet and Violet - seem to start struggling with setting their goals. That's why i adore the KEX engine by Nightdive Studios and what they've been able to achieve with it (ignoring the upscaling issues of the Blade Runner remaster). Or the insane feat that Retro Studios pulled with the Metroid Prime Remaster on Nintendo Switch, using and heavily modifying the engine that was originally built for GameCube. I wonder what would happen if somebody took the original Quake engine, i don't know if they made it open source yet (i think at least the Q3A engine is open source?) and upgraded that engine, as is, to a modern level with modern shaders. Because as most of us know - the Quake code, for a very long time, was the basis for new engines - some modern engines still have a few lines of code by Omnescient Space Being, Creator of Worlds, John Carmack inside them.

[@fattiger6957]

There are a lot of horror stories of studios and publishers building their own engines, so it does make sense why they would use a one-size-fits-all engine like Unreal. But in doing so they have to basically put their fates in the hands of Epic and hope that they can provide the support required. But some studios do make their own engines and it becomes their workhorse. Look at Capcom and RE Engine or Sony and Decima. I don't know what it's called but Larian used their own engine Baldur's Gate 3. Even a small studio like Nihon Falcom made their own engine to replace the aged Sony Phyre Engine. So at least Unreal's domination isn't absolute.

[@SmashyBamswell]

I'd go so far as to say selling this game on that console should be illegal. I guarantee single digit frame rates are not clearly advertised. That's really shameful.

[@PhycoKrusk]

Just asking here, since I have no dev experience, but would it make sense or even be possible to alter the algorithm used to determine the level of detail so that when driving the game uses simplified meshes for objects that aren't as expensive (even if they don't look quite as good) to improve performance? I kind of assume this is something that the game engine probably wouldn't allow, but it's a thought I had.

[@DarthChrisB]

Panic Button would have made this game run like butter.

[@birdmansenpai7508]

So if the switch had 8GB of ram would it run either better than ps4/xbox one or on par with them? Since both GPU and CPU are a bit more modern than those consoles?

[@kinetickyber]

I would be curious to see you explain how a game like Monster Hunter Rise can achieve really good performance and visuals when compared to a game like this. Curious what tricks they used to get such good performance with that game

[@spartanq7781]

Hopefully Switch 2 can help clean this up. Thing is the hardware is not really the problem. The problem is the laziness in porting the game. Switch 3rd party support varies heavily. It's either perfect as can be on Switch or absolute trash like with Arkham Knight. Also why would someone get it on Switch 9 years later anyway?

[@razlad2523]

arkham knight was developed in UE3 btw

[@Totavier]

Actually that is important aspect since the Switch wasn't compatible or supported that version of the Unreal Engine, only UE4 and up. I remember an indie game called A Hat in Time that also was struggle with that problem in the porting aspects on the Switch version.

[@crestofhonor2349]

All three games in the trilogy use UE3

[@Oryon7]

TBH, I'm surprised this game even runs AT ALL, on the Switch. But yes, surely, a greater focused - given the budget allows it - could have been invested to make the right nips and tucks, and optimizations.

[@sungrandstudios]

Yeah. This topic is always interesting to me. The development team really needed someone with specialized skillset for optimizing on this hardware.

[@DaedLizrad]

Considering the Switch 2 is backwards compatible, would popping the game as is into the stronger hardware just fix the issues via brute force?

[@roflBeck]

Doubt it. Nintendo's consoles run backwards compatible in its own "mode." It reduces the clock speeds and memory pools to match the old console's specs, to maximize compatibility. What you would need is to homebrew the Switch 2 (hopefully that's doable) and create a loader app that can run the old games in the faster mode, like the Nintendont app for the Wii.

[@DaedLizrad]

@roflBeck That's unfortunate, so unless Nintendo switches up their mo or the devs patch the games to deliverately run on the switch 2 console, the few games that were a bit too ambitious to run properly will remain broken or substandard.

[@bakavakuumwuhlmaus8145]

Devs did not know how to deal with bandwidth limitation

[@eSKAone-]

But the atmosphere in this game is tops

[@CrimeGaming1337]

I recently tried to play the remasters on PS5, they seem to run way below 60 FPS which is just a show stopper for me.

[@guybrush3000]

I beat this game at 5 fps on my new pc when it first came out!