Nintendo Switch Reviews: 12 Critical Reactions You Need To Know
1. Technical Limitations Could Hurt It In The Long Run
"Breath of the Wild, which was developed simultaneously on the Wii U, seldom quite makes it all the way to 30 frames per second in TV mode, and it even dips far south of that when lots of particles or physics objects are on screen at once. That it suffers from these performance issues despite a lack of anti-aliasing does not bode well for the system’s long-term capabilities – or its prospects for landing ports of big-budget AAA games...Even the massive, sprawling world of Breath of the Wild is housed in a tiny 13.4GB file, and on a big, 1080p screen, it becomes fairly obvious that many of the textures have been heavily compressed." - IGN
"Breath of the Wild looks and performs noticeably worse when plugged into the dock than it does in handheld mode, a potentially worrying indicator of how the Switch’s graphics processing hardware will hold up over time...Any time I’m running in tree-shade on a sunny day in Hyrule, zooming in for a closer view, or moving quickly through the rain, it feels like things drop into at least the 20-25fps zone...It’s worrisome that Nintendo’s own developers have been unable to get their top-billed game running equally well on TV and in handheld mode...It’s not a reassuring start." - Kotaku
And finally, numerous outlets were surprised by how the hardware struggled to run Breath of the Wild at a consistent framerate, which given the hand-wringing over the poorly optimised Wii U footage of the game, just seems ridiculous on a brand-new console.
The point here is that the graphical ceiling for the console may be rather low and be unable to evolve much beyond what Zelda is capable of. Ultimately it's not a deal breaker as Nintendo consoles are rarely that fussed about top-tier graphics, but it's still rather worrisome that in 2 or 3 years' time the platform's games could look massively behind the curve.
Fingers crossed that developers find clever ways to make the most of the Switch's hardware and keep things running at a smooth 30 FPS.
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