The Nintendo Switch is starting to show its age now and a successor is widely expected to be announced next year. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, has chatted to IGN about a range of topics and one of them is about the hardware. While Mr. Fujibayashi wouldn’t talk the system down, he did talk about what they have been able to accomplish with the system. He explained that they are doubtful that they would have been able to have the game’s three different layers (the sky, the land and the depths) work so seamlessly together with minimal loading on their earlier systems. He concluded by saying that they had some special people working on that aspect of the game.
At what points did you feel like you ran up against the Switch’s technical limitations, and how did you overcome them to create this, frankly, astonishing technical achievement on the Nintendo Switch?
Fujibayashi: Well, as you’re aware, one of the key features to this game is the ability to travel seamlessly from between the different layers of the world that we’ve made. So from traveling all the way from the sky down to the surface, and then beyond that into the depths below. And this was something that, I think, that type of thing, that type of movement, was something I had previously envisioned or thought it would be very great to achieve, but knew that this was something on previous hardware that was likely impossible. But when I knew we were going to take that on as a challenge, I thought, we’d really be able to do this without loading. I mean, there is some loading that occurs as you’re doing it, but it’s hidden in the background. And when I saw we were able to really pull off that seamless travel between the layers of the world, I thought, wow, the team we have working on this are really, really something special. We’ve got some special people working on this.
I hate these kind of interviews because they’re not being fully honest and won’t admit any deficiencies or criticise the hardware.
“He explained that they are doubtful that they would have been able to have the game’s three different layers (the sky, the land and the depths) work so seamlessly together with minimal loading on their earlier systems.”
Fujibayashi is being dishonest here. Of course it would have been possible on the Wii U. The Switch is a minimal upgrade of the Wii U, and in handheld mode it’s slightly weaker than than the Wii U. Therefore, anything that runs on Switch can run on Wii U. And TOTK uses the BOTW engine, a Wii U game.
Pretty sure the Switch is stronger than the Wii U (if only marginally so). The only thing the Wii U has over the Switch is that it has higher graphical capabilities (that includes the docked Switch), which is why Xenoblade Chronicles X is still the best looking Xenoblade fidelity-wise.
The Switch has double the RAM, which I would assume plays a role in making TotK work as it does on Switch.
It’s not as cut and dry as the Switch is slightly more or slightly less powerful than the Wii U. It is better in some regards, worse than others. What if the ways in which it is objectively superior are exactly the specs that support the quick loading? And yes, TotK obviously runs on the BotW engine, but having the various layers of the world is completely new to this game and was never done on Wii U so no, there’s no guarantee they could get it to work, and certainly no guarantee they could get it to work as well.
Plus you’re reading way too much into a translation. Don’t take translations from Japanese too literally, because nearly always the English translation takes away some meaning from what they’re saying, and adds subtext that never actually existed in the original Japanese either.
Surprise, TotK is not running on the same engine as BotW. BotW is an older bespoke engine that was partially reused for Mario Odyssey, but stopped use when they got better tools from Nvidia for i.e. Luigi’s Mansion. It came to a head with what became a full game engine in what’s called “LunchPack,” which bears almost nothing in common with the engine used for BotW besides what all game engines have in common. This is what was used for TotK. The reason they look similar is not engine reuse, just asset reuse.
Yikes. I say yikes, because your comment contains factual inaccuracies that really are a shame given how much we know today.
No, everything possible on Switch in handheld mode, is not magically possible on the Wii U.
As an example: The Switch literally has an entire extra CPU core – something that matters when going from 3 to 4. It also has TWICE the amount of ram. The Wii U ran on old, technically abandoned, power PC archetecture, which didn’t play nice with modern engines, let alone modern coding techniques. Wii U’s ram speed was half the speed of the 360/PS3’s ram, while the Switch, in handheld mode, has the ram running at the same clocks as the 360 – while having twice as much available to use as the Wii U. This means from a pure technological standpoint – no – everything that runs on Switch couldn’t “quite literally” run on Wii U.
What TOTK does, as an example, is highly unlikely to be capable on the Wii U. During gameplay, it maxes out all 4 CPU cores and almost fills the entire 4GB of ram. The cutbacks needed to make this work on a Wii U, would be as such that they likely would abandon certain gameplay elements to pull it off.
As for the game engine, Nintendo used a combination of their own in house engine along with the widely used Havok physics engine. This was for Breath of the Wild, mind you. This exact combo and the literal engine Breath of the Wild was built on, was never used again in any other game. It was completely customized to a point of not making sense for a stand alone Switch title, hence all the performance issues compared to the Wii U version of the game. For Tears of the Kingdom, they actually used a new engine entirely. They used a brand new engine Nintendo built during the Switch era specifically for Switch called LunchPack. LunchPack does not use any part of the Havok physics engine and is a fully customized engine specific for Switch. It is also used by other games such as Splatoon 3, Switch Sports, and Tears of the Kingdom. This is why those 3 games also use FSR, something that wasn’t available to use in the prior engine.
While Tears of the Kingdom gameplay and world look, feel, and behave like Breath of the Wild – that’s a credit to the development team, not because they used the same engine. See, people often criticize TOTK for taking 6 years to make “DLC” in the same world and how easy that is – not even realizing they had to basically rebuild the entire concept and world, into an entirely new game engine – and it’s likely half the damn games development was spent perfecting that transition away from the engine built specifically for Wii U. This enabled them to do more, hence why TOTK does well, more.
LunchPak as is, wouldn’t run on Wii U. Because it was custom built for more modern hardware arch. It is incompatible with Power PC. In fact, so is every engine on Switch.
It’s tiring watching people boil down “Switch is just a slightly better Wii U” – while ignoring all the defeciencies and shortcomings of the arch they used. TOTK is just not possible on Wii U from a technological perspective. It doesn’t have enough ram or CPU power to do it. they would have to cut major features of the game to make it work due to those limitations.
I usually TLDR such a long comment, but yours is such an interesting read that I just kept reading till the end. We need more comment like this and less of troll2metroid’s worthless comments.
Look at this 🤡 copying and pasting. Do you have any game development experience? Didn’t think so. ALL Switch games could have been developed for the Wii U had the Switch not been released. That is the fact. Not only that but any game on the Switch could just as easily been developed for smart phones & tablets from damn near a decade ago. The Switch is by no means a powerful console, not in the least. In fact the hardware used in the Switch was outdated before it ever released. Just because on a piece of paper something may be more powerful does not mean that translates to the real world. Just because some developer tells you something because he’s trying to move a product doesn’t mean it translates to the real world. You are gullible. Just as gullible as the people that buy into ray tracing and seamless loading being new technology even though it’s literally been around for decades. You buy to much into marketing bullshit.
Wow… so much seething. Did Nintendo kill your dog or something?
Some of these interviews are understandable in my point of view. But some of them I don’t understand. It’s hard to understand people who are not being honest despite the next gen machine.
I want Nintendo to give us themes from our favorite video games, they still haven’t given us themes for the Nintendo Switch, come on Nintendo company give us we want, if you agree with my post please comment on it