In a recent Eurogamer interview, Monster Hunter series producer Ryōzō Tsujimoto and Monster Hunter Rise director, Yasunori Ichinose, explained how they managed to get the impressive RE Engine working and fully functional on the Nintendo Switch.
The RE Engine
The RE Engine powers a number of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One titles from Capcom such as the Resident Evil 2 Remake and Devil May Cry 5. Read on to hear how challenging it was to bring the game engine to the Switch platform.
It’s quite awesome that you’ve gone with the RE Engine as well – it’s a fantastic engine and that’s worked wonders on Capcom’s titles in recent years. How much of a challenge was it getting that on Switch?
Yasunori Ichinose:
It was definitely a new challenge for us. As you mentioned, it was indeed our first time bringing an RE Engine title onto the Switch. So a lot of background technical engineering work needs to be done just to achieve targeting a new hardware platform.
Of course, being an internal Capcom engine, that meant that we had the benefit of all the expertise and knowledge of our engineers to hand – they worked very hard, getting the engine working for us and ensuring that we could take the game content which involves these not strictly open world per se but large maps with no loading areas between them, having those work seamlessly whilst maintaining the graphics quality we wanted, to keep that stuff in without affecting performance and having the frame rate be something that could achieve our targets – a lot of all that stuff was a difficult balance to achieve but I think that the team has really pulled it off, targeting a comfortable 30 frames per second whilst also making the game look as good as it does and pushing the power of the Switch as much as we can.
It’s been a challenging but rewarding experience.
And obviously it’s the first time Monster Hunter has been in RE Engine as well. I know you won’t be able to talk to future titles so much, but does that mean Monster Hunter will be using that engine game now going forward?
Ryōzō Tsujimoto
Actually even putting aside Monster Hunter as a series, the RE Engine is Capcom’s latest up-to-date internal engine. And yeah, I think our goal overall is to have as many of our games as possible eventually running on our engine.
