Skyforge developers discuss the tech challenge of bringing the game to Switch, no cross-play or massive PvP events planned

The MMORPG Skyforge is coming to Switch sometime in Fall of 2020, and the port has been in development for about 8 months. The team behind the game has had quite the challenge bringing the title over, and in an interview with Nintendo Life, development lead Dmitry Lisichkin opens up about some of the struggles.

The biggest challenge was resource constraints: CPU, RAM and video memory. For example, Switch has only three cores, and one of them during early development stages was completely engaged in audio processing. This was not an optimal way to use limited resources, so we had to change the audio compression algorithm for this platform, but it led to a significant increase in the size of the game client (up to 9GB for sound only), which did not suit us either. Therefore, we decided to use a codec with better compression, but a higher load on the CPU in those parts of the game where the load is not very high (there are not a lot of characters, monsters and battles in the scene), for example, in game dialogues. There were also complications with RAM, the hybrid console only provides a little more than 3GB including video memory. This is very little for modern PC games. Even on 32-bit systems, you can get more performance thanks to a separate video memory. We had to do a lot of work to optimize memory consumption, so that each level in the game would fit in memory with a margin.

These limitations and their workarounds will lead to a few minor differences in the Switch version of the game, as Dmitry described below.

Players on Switch will enjoy a fresh start on a new server, so the progression won’t be transferred from other platforms. There is no cross play planned either because players’ progression differs across platforms. In terms of content, it’s likely that we won’t be conducting massive PvP events, Pantheon Wars, on Switch server, because the hybrid console is not exactly suited for such activities in terms of performance.