Hazelight Studios recently hosted a Reddit AMA session for their fans on the PS4 subreddit, and one of the questions brought forward was to why their title, A Way Out, would not be hitting the Nintendo Switch with other platform releases on March 23.
One reason, explained by Hazelight programmer Lucas de Vries, was due to the Switch’s date of launch, which was “quite late in our development cycle.” The second reason from the programmer had to do with controller usage, or rather, the lack of an extra controller.
Players would be unable to use the Joy-Con controllers for split multiplayer because of the game’s camera control options, and Lucas thinks Nintendo Switch owners would be at a disadvantage through having to buy an additional Pro Controller just to play A Way Out.
Lucas goes on to explain:
As for Switch, we’re definitely fans of the console over here, but there were some factors preventing us from doing a Switch release. It came out quite late in our development cycle, and we’ve been very busy spending all our time getting the game to the highest quality we could make it.
Also, since both players require their own camera control, it would mean that you would be forced to buy an extra pro controller to even play the game, which seems like it would be a little unfair to the concept of the Switch. It would have been quite an effort to make an automatic camera system to make single-joycon play work.
A Way Out releases on March 23, and will be available on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One platforms. For more on the game, you can check out the recently-released launch trailer ahead of the game’s debut this week.