Dark Souls Remastered on the Switch took a little bit longer to come out compared to its fellow PC, PS4, and Xbox One siblings. While those versions (developed by a Polish studio named QLOC), were released in May of this year, the Switch version (developed by Virtuos) didn’t release until last month.
In an interview with VGR, Lukas Codr, an Executive Producer at Virtuos, and Tang Mengjia, a Game Producer at the company, gave a little insight into how long the porting process took and some other challenges they had to overcome.
When asked how long the Dark Souls Remastered port took, Lukas Codr stated:
“A bit more than a year. At the beginning, it took us several months until we got a playable version running because we had to make sure that both code and data are fully compatible with 64-bit format. We’ve also spent quite a lot of time on polishing and performance optimisation. And since there were both physical and digital versions of the game, there was about a 6-8 week gap between submission and the game hitting the market.”
The developers were also a little nervous about how the game would play in handheld mode because of the nature of the game and how precise your movements need to be. Tang Mengjia stated:
“Knowing how important precise controls were in the original game (where a less-than-perfect move could easily kill you), we were really eager to try the first playable version in the handheld mode. At that time we did not really know if the game would be playable this way, but pretty much right away our QA and designers started killing monsters with some pretty sophisticated moves, so we knew we would be safe.”
When asked if there were any challenges to porting the game to the Nintendo Switch, Mengjia said that there is always going to be challenges. However, he did joke that making sure his team was actually working on the game rather than playing it.
“There are always challenges when porting a game to a new platform, but as we are now familiar with the Switch hardware, we were pretty confident we could tackle them. Apart from the 64-bit support in the beginning, there were almost none. Perhaps making sure our guys spent enough time working on the game and less time playing the game, because when we had our first portable build, a lot of people in the studio got very excited and wanted to try it right away. Nintendo Switch definitely has a ‘cool factor’ for hardcore gamers.”
As noted above, Dark Souls Remastered is currently available for PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch.