on Switch, and – as with most Switch ports – while it isn’t necessarily the best way to experience Geralt’s biggest adventure, it also isn’t nearly as rough as some may have feared.
In handheld mode, The (S)Witcher 3 runs at 540p and maintained an admirably steady 24/25FPS throughout my demo, even when I was battling multiple enemies simultaneously. The visuals – particularly the lighting – still manage to impress, even with the console’s limited bandwidth. While it definitely won’t fool anyone into thinking they’re watching Geralt slay monsters on a high-end PC running the game on max settings, I was surprised by how good it does look on the small screen. The way his signature silver locks still bob and sway in the breeze along with Roach’s tail, or how beams of sunlight float through tree branches on a misty trail in Velen all capture the sense of natural beauty that makes the world of Wild Hunt (and its two massive expansions) feel so lived-in.
Of course, given the hardware limitations of the Switch, there are certain sacrifices that have been made in the name of getting The Witcher 3 up and running on the less powerful console. The LoD distance, for example, is considerably shorter on Switch than on console or PC – maybe just 30-40 feet for high detail on assets. This is most noticeable, I found, in cities like Novigrad or Oxenfurt, where the bricks and stonework on buildings would quickly fade into focus as I ran down their crowded streets. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely unnoticeable out in the forests of Velen or Skellige, but the movement of the trees and brush as you ride past make the overall experience appear more fluid than amid the static architecture of the larger cities and towns.
While these tricks work fairly well to conceal the technical limitations of the game on Switch in handheld mode, they’re decidedly more noticeable when the console is docked and displaying the image on a television or monitor. The Switch’s Witcher can only output at 720p while docked, and since most TVs or monitors these days display (at least) 1080p as their default resolution, the imperfections inherent in the visual downgrade for Switch will be far more apparent than they are in handheld mode.
That said, the real draw of The Witcher 3 on Switch is the ability to play it on the go (or on the couch, or wherever you do the majority of your Switch-ing), and the biggest issue I found during my demo in handheld mode wasn’t a graphical one, but simply a matter of size. The Switch’s screen is only six inches across, meaning that while the enlarged dialogue and menu text are easy enough to read, some aspects of the screen’s UI can be difficult to track, and some gameplay moments can be difficult to navigate.
For instance, melee combat is a huge part of The Witcher 3, and while the camera’s overly-sensitive default movement speed can be fixed in the settings menus, you can’t do anything about the actual world itself. As an example, in Breath of the Wild, most of the enemies you face throughout its world will be roughly 1.5 times the size of Link, or at the very least his size. This makes it easy to keep track of them while engaging in melee combat, even when you’ve got to keep repositioning your character and the camera. In The Witcher, however, many of the enemies you’ll face are your size or smaller – Nekkers or Ghouls are the first ones that come to mind – which are immensely more difficult to keep track of on the Switch’s small screen, especially when there are many of them or in dense brush.
Still, for its few faults, the fact that they’ve managed to get The Witcher 3 up and running on the Switch’s hardware is an impressive feat. While I doubt that it will be the best way to experience CDPR’s fantasy epic, it’s another option for those who haven’t been able to yet, or who want to run through it again but don’t have access to a more powerful console or PC – both of which are good in my book.
The Witcher 3 on Switch will release on October 15, 2019.
JR is a Senior Editor at IGN, and will almost certainly play through Wild Hunt again now that he’ll be able to on his way to work. It’ll certainly be more enjoyable than his current routine of skulking around on Twitter for an hour a day.*We even included it in our April Fools Nintendo Direct – I guess the joke was on us!
