Switcher Perspective

How CD Projekt Red has adapted the world that made it famous to fit inside Nintendo’s flagship console

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There’s arguably no genre better-suited to Nintendo’s home console/handheld hybrid than the open-world RPG. Breath Of The Wild was the ideal launch game for Switch, demonstrating how a vast adventure could scale according to a player’s needs: all-consuming on a TV, yet even more magical on the go, the world’s breadth and depth perfectly preserved and always available. Then again, it was built specifically for it. Retrofitting a technical powerhouse of an open world – a seminal one at that – is another matter.

CD Projekt Red, with the help of porting veteran Saber Interactive, is partway through a Switch port of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – the game that made it a household name. Over the course of a year, the Polish studio has joined a rush of developers looking to reach a fast-growing, often entirely new audience by offering portable versions of its most iconic titles. It’s clear from our demo that concessions have been made in order to fit The Witcher 3 onto a 32GB Switch game card: we’re only offered the chance to play on handheld, where the resolution tops out at 540p (it’ll run at 720p when docked). There are jaggies around certain edges, textures appear less detailed than in the original, and the draw distance out in the Continent has been greatly reduced.