CD Projekt Red talks about how they got The Witcher 3 running on Switch, used 'sorcery' to lower the file size

Many thought bringing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition to Switch would be completely impossible. Lucky for all of us, CD Projekt Red didn't feel that way. They worked with Saber Interactive to bring the game over, and while it's lost a bit of visual polish, the overall project is ridiculously impressive. How in the hell did these two teams make it work? CD Projekt Red's Piotr Chrzanowski explains in an interview with Gamespew.

When we agreed we’d work with Saber, we set up a plan on how we want to see what’s feasible. So we started with making sure that we can actually run REDengine on the Switch dev kit. Then we had a smaller playable piece, which basically consists of most of the game’s mechanics. Then coming from that, scale by scale, area by area, we grew the game, moving from White Orchard and then of course to Novigrad, and Skellige, et cetera. From there, through optimisation, we can scale it up to other areas.

Equally as impressive is squeezing the game's file size down to fit onto a 32 GB game card. The game on other platforms is 45 GB, so how on earth did the team work things out?

Well, it’s a sorcery [laughs]. But one thing is textures – you want to make sure that textures work well within the resolutions that you have. Secondly, you can get rid of some of the very detailed models because you don’t need to have them for 720p. You can also recompress cutscenes for 720p. So step by step up, you get some space, and we also work with a bit of the audio and a few other of those areas.