Porting Ori to Switch required a lot of effort »Vortex
When we reviewed the Ori and the Will of the Wisps metroidery in March, in addition to the impressive visual processing, we highlighted the fluency and associated surgically accurate control. The game, which emphasizes good timing and quick observation, is vitally dependent on these aspects, and the developers from Moon Studios managed to build on the first part of Ori and the Blind Forrest in this way. But then came the announcement of the planned port for Switch, and there were concerns about the fluency and whether the game would lose its typical charm. And while the Moon Studios have done it and the Ori is running on a 60 fps hybrid console from Nintendo, technical concerns have been in place, according to a recent interview with developers for Nintendo Everything magazine, and the final port of the port cannot be taken for granted.
According to one of the founders of the studio, Gennady Korol, at the very beginning of the preparations for the mentioned port, the developers first had to spend a lot of time to find out where to take objectively the missing hardware performance. “Together, the production of the Switch version took three and a half months, and the developers put a lot of effort into it. They helped Porto [dříve vydané] patches for the Xbox One version that were related to optimization, “says Korol. Nevertheless, the people from Moon Studios had to go a relatively long way and at the final 60 fps they got from the level of about 24 frames per second, in which the game initially ran with heavily compressed textures and graphics in general.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps only runs on 720p on the Switch, if you play in handheld mode and 900p when you slide the console into the dock, it’s definitely not a big problem,
According to Korol, the game went through many versions and gradually solved problems related to the content, the way of rendering graphics, streaming data or optimizing the use of operational memory. Just for comparison, while the Xbox One offers developers 8GB of DDR3 memory and an AMD Jaguar eight-core processor for use, the Switch only has a customized Tegra processor from Nvidia and only half the amount of RAM. After all, this is the reason why Ori and the Will of the Wisps only run in 720p on the Switch, if you play in handheld mode and 900p when you slide the console into the dock, but it’s definitely not a big problem. As Digital Foundry experts pointed out at the end of September, this is an exceptional port that is stable and, as a result – despite many different adjustments and compromises – no significant shortcomings can be seen.
However, the result cannot be taken for granted, and Korol honestly says that it was the hardest thing Moon Studios ever worked on, and the reward in a similarly positive reception was the best reward.
