It’s been an absolute joy to check out Square-Enix’s Switch port of Dragon Quest 11, a game highlighted by our audience as a title we needed to take a look at in the wake of its September release. It’s a highly successful conversion of Unreal Engine 4-powered game that even challenged the GPU power of the PlayStation 4, and yet somehow, the Switch conversion is very, very similar – and in some ways, actually .
This is as a result of content changes, updates and improvements along with a very smart approach to paring back the visual feature set in order to sit more comfortably on Nintendo’s console hybrid. And it’s the care and attention to the conversion process that the developer deserves kudos for. Yes, side-by-side, there are clear graphics compromises between Switch and PS4, but the way that Square-Enix has gone about packing this huge, sprawling game into a handheld is absolutely fascinating.
When DQ11 first launched on PS4, I was impressed, but also noted that achieving its vision required a lot of horsepower. This resulted in a 900p game on the base PS4 system, rising to 3072×1728 on PS4 Pro using checkerboard rendering. On Switch, however, the team has opted for dynamic resolution scaling, resulting in variable pixel counts. Docked I’ve seen 720p and 792p up to 810p, but it could go higher or lower in more extreme cases, but these values are common. In handheld mode, the average resolution is 20 to 25 per cent lower on average with results around 540p – sometimes a tad lower, sometimes higher.
There’s no doubt that the results are rather soft and a tad blurry at times but it’s a far sight better than many other Unreal Engine games on Switch and even first party titles such as Xenoblade Chronicles 2 – which runs at a much lower resolution overall, but the changes made to Dragon Quest 11 go way beyond pixel count alone. Based on developer presentations, the changes are widespread, beginning with the use of Simplygon and hand-tooling to reduce geometric detail across the board from characters to environments, reducing mesh complexity to better fit with performance and data size targets.
To better aid with loading times, and to reduce an original 30GB PlayStation 4 game to a more manageable 14GB, the Switch version also features pared back texture assets. Owing to the style of the game (it’s not exactly striving for realism), both the geometry and texture cutbacks look absolutely fine – especially when playing in handheld mode. The same goes for the shadow detail, which is lessened on Switch, with character self-shadows all but gone. The same also applies to ambient occlusion (reduced) and screen-space reflections (gone). The point is that the game still holds together beautifully, and it’s only when stacked up side-by-side with PS4 do you notice the game has changed.