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ARK: Survival Evolved devs discuss the technical challenges of bringing the game to Switch
The following comes from a GamesIndustry interview with Abstraction CEO Ralph Egas...
"Switch is not as powerful as a PS4 or Xbox One. Everyone knows that. Having said that, the difference isn't as big as the general perception would have you believe. In some locations you need to downsize a bit on the distance you're able to view. But not as much as you'd think compared with Xbox One and PS4. Obviously, in terms of Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, that's a different story. But compared with the base platforms, Switch is not that bad.
Performance is not really the issue. The issue instead is in the size of carts. The 32GB carts are expensive, you shouldn't be wanting to do that. So we need to fit everything on 16GB, whereas the standard game on PS4 is much, much larger. It's a crazy ratio we're talking about. However, thankfully, there are a lot of opportunities for reduction without changing anything anyone will notice. Another thing we can do is do a cartridge version and then do staggered downloads to make the game complete. That's probably the hardest part. Finding all the new technicalities and quirks that you get with a new platform.
Of course, with the runtime memory footprint, there's not as much as PS4 or Xbox One, so that means you need to reduce the content that is being used at any one time. Partially that's a case of having fewer dinos here or there, and downsizing on actual content experience. But that's only a bit. The rest is just from clever compression algorithms."