Panic Button’s great history of porting high quality games to the Nintendo Switch continued with DOOM Eternal.
Nintendo Everything had the chance to interview Senior producer Cody Nicewarner and lead engineer Travis Archer of Panic Button.
Their discussion highlights the challenges faced bringing the title to the Nintendo Switch, frame rate and resolution, DLC and how the experience of bringing previous titles to the hardware has helped the team successfully port the latest DOOM title.
Panic Button interview highlights
What sort of challenges did you run into when it came cramming this huge game down to make it work on the system?
idTech 7 is truly a next-gen engine. It takes advantage of hardware and driver optimizations on the other consoles and PC that don’t always translate to the Switch. It’s also extremely well optimized in general, and this presents particular challenges when porting to the Switch.
Our team has experience that spans many console generations, and typically when porting a title, we rely on that experience to find and exploit memory or performance optimizations the original developer either missed or didn’t have time to implement. With Doom Eternal, id Software left no stone unturned and we had to dig deeper to achieve our target performance.
What can players expect from the final frame rate and resolution on Switch?
The experience will be comparable to that of Doom (2016), Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, and Wolfenstein: Youngblood.
Are there plans to have the Switch version supported with all DLC?
Our goal is to bring The Ancient Gods DLC to Nintendo Switch.
Having completed numerous ports, how has Panic Button’s work on Switch been able to improve over the years? Has development been made any easier at all just by becoming more familiar with the hardware?
Experience undoubtedly helps.
We have multiple teams at Panic Button working on Switch projects and there is a lot of knowledge transfer between those teams. Also, as we grow as an organization, mentorship has been critical to the success of our work and the growth of individual employees.
