In a recent GameIndustry interview, Virtuos senior technical director Jonathan Boldiga talked about the challenges his team had faced while bringing Starlink: Battle for Atlas to Nintendo Switch.
Virtuos was given a simple but very difficult task from Ubisoft – ensure visual parity on Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One for Starlink: Battle for Atlas. Basically, the game has to look the same as much as possible on all three platforms.
Simple task … well
Boldiga told GameIndustry that lots of work had to be done in order to pull that off, but it was well worth the effort as Starlink is one of the best-looking games on Nintendo Switch.
It was extremely technically challenging.
Ubisoft had very high standards in terms of what they wanted on the Switch platform. Basically the mandate for us was, ‘We need parity between all three consoles’.Obviously, the Switch is a great machine but we had to do a lot of work to make sure we could keep visual parity between Switch, Xbox One and PS4. We did a lot of work on rendering optimisations, multi-threading, and trying to squeeze the most that we could out of the CPU. Lots and lots of data compression to fit into memory – you name every trick, we tried it.
It was definitely a challenge. There was a lot of late nights and hair pulling, but at the end I think what we were able to deliver is probably one of the best-looking Switch titles out there.
Well I think we can all agree that the outcome is more than wonderful to say the least. Starlink – Battle for Atlas is an awesome game. Be sure to check it our for yourself!
