Those technology enthusiasts over at Digital Foundry have had a new game to test this week and that’s Rayman Legends Definitive Edition on the Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, they haven’t come away as impressed as they should be with something titled Definitive Edition. Read on for the following excerpts from NeoGAF member Toadthemushroom:
- 1080p on Switch like other console releases.
- New content includes tournament mode for Kung Foot and all previously exclusive characters from other systems in one place
- Load screens generally the longest of any platform with the game to date (both via SD card and internal memory) – load times were even 50% faster on Wii U off disc on average. John suspects this is due to the need for decompression as the Switch version only weighs 2.9GB (versus 6.7GB on Wii U and 9GB on PS4).
- Framerate mostly a rock-solid 60fps.
- Asymmetric multiplayer with Murphy now missing – no option to link two Switch systems either where Switch 1 had four players, and Switch 2 had player five as Murphy.
Stopped reading when i saw Digital Foundry.
So at the title?
I bet the comments section is full of people blaming the Switch.
If the loading times are a a result of extra compression/decompression – the “blame” is that of the game cartridges which go pretty expensive if you opt for the ones with more capacity.
That is, they found that it would be more cost effective to develop this compression process than it would be to print onto even bigger cartridges.
That is “sort of” the Switch’s fault. Though the issue will subside over time as the chips go cheap.
The Switch version didn’t need to be compressed down to 2.9 gigs or whatever. The Switch cards can hold way more than that.
I honestly feel like the last part of your comment is a repeat of the N64 days, where people kept saying to wait for the price of the chips to go down and I don’t believe they did. And while I really did want carts for a speedy load time on games, it seems that disc and install times aren’t as bad as waiting endlessly for the game to play of a memory card. Hopefully they figure out ways to fix up not only load times, but carts really do come down in price. That might be just wishes and not actually something to come though.
Larger capacity cards cost more to produce than the smaller ones. It’s not like the Wii U where all of their optical disks had a fixed 25GB size. Making the game smaller also makes it download faster and save bandwidth on capped internet connections as well as server bandwidth. It’s a great savings for a lot of people but it’s another reason why Nintendo should have gone for a custom SoC as they would have been able to include a hardware implementation of LZMA for example which would could have allowed the Switch version of Rayman Legends to have smaller file sizes AND faster load times. It also would have been more power efficient than running the decompression algorithm on CPU.
2.9 GB. Oh my. The Switch is impressive.
Mario + Rabbids is the definitive Ubisoft Switch release.
They need to make a new 3d Rayman already. Same drawn or cell shaded graphics but 3d
I am lost, so the only negative is loading times and a meh multiplayer mode?
Well… up to 4x as much load time as the Wii U version with performance drops that are not present in the Wii U version. They also got rid of the touch screen features and the ability to play 5 player multiplayer. They’re argument is that, if you’re going to call it the “definitive” version. You would super set of features and performance in the definitive version of something.