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Unravel Two devs go into greater detail on why the game's not on Switch, says don't blame EA
When Unravel Two was revealed, nearly everyone felt it would be a perfect fit for the Switch. Unfortunately the team behind the game didn't have a Switch version to launch, instead opting to bring the game to PS4 and Xbox One. We've already gotten a quick answer as to why that is, but now producer Michael Gill has shared a more in-depth response.
"We had the same reaction when we saw the Switch for the first time. Even those controllers on the side are the same colours as the Yarnies - it's incredible. It's a machine made for Unravel Two. But we run at 60 frames per second, that's really important for us and we want to keep that framerate. To keep that on Switch, and to keep the graphical quality [would have been difficult]
Although it may look like a simply platformer, some locations have around four million triangles on screen. There are a lot of details, complex landscapes, all the vegetation and stuff. We can do it, but it will take some time.
We're also using a heavily extended version of [Sony's] PhyreEngine, and we had to port it to Xbox One ourselves. It doesn't have support for Switch yet, so we would have to do that port and the engine work ourselves, and we're a really small team. We only have two engine programmers across the whole team, and they mostly work on updates for the game so we just didn't have time.
We really wanted to be able to release this week, but if we had to do a Switch port it would have taken another half a year or so.
We get the feeling that people really want this on Switch, and we understand how they feel. But it feels a bit unfair, because we've put a lot of effort into this. No, it's not EA pulling the brake. They really want to do games on Switch."
Jakob Marklund, lead programmer and co-founder of Coldwood Interactive, also wanted to get out a message to fans who want the game on Switch. It's not EA's fault it didn't happen.
"Don't blame EA, blame us."