The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Review on Nintendo Switch

BASIC INFORMATION ON THE GAME

Release Date : November 15, 2019
Genre : Action, Adventure, Open World, 3rd Person, 3D
Developer : CD Projekt RED
Publisher : CD Projekt RED

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an adventure game set in an open fantasy world. You will play the witcher Geralt of Rivia and hunt monsters. The game has won over 250 Game of the Year awards.

Arm yourself with sharp swords and silent crossbows, and call on deadly alchemy and powerful battle magic to help you. Set out on a journey through a world that is engulfed in war and overrun by monsters to find the Child of Destiny - the fate of the world depends on this living weapon.

This definitive edition includes all previously released downloadable content, including two massive story expansions: Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. This is the perfect opportunity to immerse yourself in a dark fantasy world for the first time or replay the game in handheld mode.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition has software version 1.6.0. When you purchase a game from the  Nintendo Store, it is downloaded to a microSD card or internal storage.

The total size of the downloaded game is about 27 gigabytes, which is 2 times smaller than the size of the PC version.

GAME ENGINE

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was developed on the REDengine 3 game engine, which was aimed at current generation consoles and PC. The first part of The Witcher was based on the Aurora Engine technology, a game engine developed by the Canadian company BioWare and first used in the computer role-playing game Neverwinter Nights, which was released on June 18, 2002. 

Of course, even by the standards of 2007, the Aurora Engine was an outdated graphics technology and it is clear that the new part of the The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings series needed an updated graphics engine. And they became RED Engine. This engine focuses not only on graphics and physics, but also on building a non-linear quest system, allowing you to make the gameplay even closer to real life. RED Engine supports dynamic shadows, normal mapping and parallax. 

The first version of the RED Engine in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings only supports DirectX 9, which somewhat hampered the game in terms of manufacturability, although it made it inaccessible to previous generation consoles. The new version of the REDengine 2 engine brought The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings to Xbox 360, albeit with a lower level of detail and quality. On PS3, this game never came out, apparently the developers could not adapt to the architecture of the console from Sony.

 

In February 2013, CD Projekt RED officially unveiled its new engine, REDengine 3, on which their two new games, Cyberpunk 2077 and the then-unannounced Witcher 3, were created. a story and a system that allows you to feed large-scale open worlds in a streaming manner. The advanced technology of REDengine 3 allows RPGs to compare with top shooters, both in terms of the presentation of the world and the events of a huge scale in which the player participates. 

 

The engine was natively compatible with current generation consoles, allowing it to blur the line between pre-rendered CGI movies and real-time graphics, revealing the most believable worlds ever created in a video game. A living ecosystem filled with objects, which are a kind of works of art, allows the player to become part of the environment. The new facial and body animation systems implemented in REDengine 3 provide realistic rendering of emotions, cinematic scenes and character interactions.

 

The technology uses HDR rendering with 64-bit depth, which produces the highest image quality with more realistic and reliable lighting without loss of detail. Flexible rendering ready for delayed or advanced rendering has a wide range of cinematic post-effects, including depth of field bokeh, color grading, flares from light sources. The high-quality terrain allows for multiple words of smoothly merging materials and uses tassellation to achieve the maximum amount of detail. The technology also includes seamless linking of animation and physics and a number of other features.

 

REDengine 3 uses a new version of the REDkit editor with tools designed specifically for creating RPG games. The editor allows you to create complex, branching quests and distribute them throughout the open world with a simplicity not available in any other editor.

 

CONTROL

The control setting is standard, as for other consoles.

 

There is not much variety in the control settings.

SETTINGS

There are practically no graphics settings in the game, only turning blur on and off is available.

Well, then let's see how the game differs from the PC version.

MODES COMPARISON Nintendo Switch and PC

Now let's compare with the PC version of the project. The "low" settings of the PC version and the console were taken as the basis. 

As we can see, the graphics for Nintendo Switch are lower than the minimum quality settings for PC, which is due to scaling to a lower resolution.

COMPARISON OF TV AND PORTABLE MODE

In this review, we presented comparisons of rendering quality between stationary and portable modes:

As we can see, when switching to portable mode, we lose some objects in resolution.

OVERALL GAMING EXPERIENCE

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the most demanding games of this generation of consoles, so it's no surprise that the graphics have been so dramatically simplified. For a TV or monitor, it is better to predict the version for PC or older consoles. This version of the game is designed to be played in portable mode.

 

 

 

In the game videos themselves, the picture resolution is slightly higher than in the game itself, but the FPS is also slightly lower at some points.

GAME PROCESS

Well, below are 40 minutes of the game on the console itself:

Flaws:

- price, like all games for Switch

- the picture is still a little soapy

Advantages:

- one of the best portable games of this generation!

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Rating 84% [13 Votes]