The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: review on Nintendo Switch

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

Release date: 15 November 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 as the witcher Geralt of Rivia and hunt monsters. The game received more than 250 "Best Game of the Year" awards.

Arm yourself with sharp swords and silent crossbows, and call on deadly alchemy and powerful combat magic to help. Travel through a world torn by war and overrun by monsters to find the Child of Destiny - the fate of the world depends on this living weapon.

This complete edition includes all downloadable content released, including two massive story expansions: Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. This is the perfect opportunity to delve into 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 program version 1.6.0. When purchasing a game in a store Nintendo downloads it to a MicroSD card or internal memory.

The total size of the downloaded game is about 27 gigabytes, which is 2 times less 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 PCs. The first part of The Witcher was based on 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Of course, even by the standards of 2007, the Aurora Engine was an outdated graphics technology and it is clear that the new part of the series The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings needed an updated graphics engine. And it 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 constrained the game in terms of technology, although it made it inaccessible to previous generation consoles. The new version of the REDengine 2 engine made The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings available on Xbox 360, albeit with a lower level of detail and quality. This game was never released on PS3; apparently the developers were unable to adapt to the architecture of the Sony console.

 

In February 2013, CD Projekt RED officially introduced its new engine - REDengine 3, on which their two new games were created - Cyberpunk 2077 and the then-unannounced Witcher 3. REDengine 3 is a technology that was specifically designed to create non-linear story-driven RPGs with a system that allows large-scale open worlds to be streamlined. The advanced technology of REDengine 3 allows RPGs to be compared with top shooters, both in terms of the presentation of the world and the huge events 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, giving us the most believable worlds ever created in a video game. A living ecosystem filled with objects that are like works of art, allowing the player to become part of the environment. New facial and body animation systems implemented in REDengine 3 provide realistic conveyance 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 accurate lighting without losing detail. Flexible rendering, ready for delayed or advanced rendering, features a wide range of cinematic post-effects, including depth of field bokeh, color gradation, and light source flares. High quality terrain allows for multiple words of seamlessly merging materials and uses tasseling to achieve maximum 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 across the open world with a simplicity not found in any other editor.

 

CONTROL

The control settings are standard, as for other consoles.

 

There is not much variety in control settings.

SETTINGS

There are practically no graphics settings in the game; you can only turn blur on and off.

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

MODES COMPARISON between Nintendo Switch and PC

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

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

COMPARISON OF TV AND PORTABLE MODE

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

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

OVERALL GAMING IMPRESSION

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the most demanding games of this console generation, so it's no surprise that the graphics have been simplified so much. For a TV or monitor, it is better to download 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 in some moments.

GAME PROCESS

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

Disadvantages:

- price is the same as all games for Switch

- the picture is a bit soapy

Advantages:

- one of the best games of this generation on a portable device!

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