Censorship is goo-
(media.communities.win)
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The lack of native coding is one of the reasons we see so few masterpieces these days outside of Nintendo. BotW was incredible and groundbreaking because it was coded natively for the Switch (and Wii U, which ostensibly used a fairly similar OS and hardware environment to the Switch). It wasn't a framework on top of an API on top of another framework so they could release it on every platform known to man for maximum profit. Every time you add a third party library, every time you use an existing engine, every time you increase portability, you're making the game slower and less stable. No exceptions.
If they had tried to make BotW in Unreal Engine and release it for the PS4 and Xbox One, it would have run like dogshit despite those consoles being much more powerful than the Switch.
I can think of some things you probably wouldn't want to reimplement yourself. Video encode/decode, for one. Cryptography.
A developer COULD use the time they save by reusing code in order to optimize the end result and end up with a better product. They may choose not to.
I would assume the console makers provide platform native APIs for that kind of functionality, though they might be relatively low level. This would seem to confirm Nintendo does for video decoding.
I definitely agree that it's not necessarily the use of third-party engines or APIs that results in poor optimization. And it's also certainly true that going the DIY route does not necessarily mean a well-optimized game, as Game Freak has demonstrated on the Switch.