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Virtuos says it was 'extremely technically challenging' to bring Starlink: Battle for Atlas up to parity with PS4/XB1 versions

by rawmeatcowboy
22 November 2018
GN Version 5.0

Starlink: Battle for Atlas is definitely a nice-looking title on the Switch, and it seems that only came about due to the intense dedication of the dev team. In an interview with GamesIndustry, senior technical director Jonathan Boldiga talks about the challenges of getting the Switch version to shine like the XB1/PS4 versions.

"It was extremely technically challenging. Ubisoft had very high standards in terms of what they wanted on the Switch platform. Basically the mandate for us was, 'We need parity between all three consoles'.

Obviously, the Switch is a great machine but we had to do a lot of work to make sure we could keep visual parity between Switch, Xbox One and PS4. We did a lot of work on rendering optimisations, multi-threading, and trying to squeeze the most that we could out of the CPU. Lots and lots of data compression to fit into memory - you name every trick, we tried it.

It was definitely a challenge. There was a lot of late nights and hair pulling, but at the end I think what we were able to deliver is probably one of the best-looking Switch titles out there."

[Link]