im thinking of impacting but then i see games like witcher 3 and imortal fenix running on switch, basically a super old nvidia shield, I'm not sure there will be.
games seem to scale real well in terms of graphics.
SS has that Ssd and cpu, so the core game design will run the same
I would say though that there's a distinction with Witcher 3, that "it" is not running on a Switch; a version of "it" is running on a Switch.
They ported it down and changed it drastically, at a different game studio, across a year in development just on that version (albeit with a fraction of the team needed to build and optimize the original.) It's a great and accurate facsimile, but I think most people would point to the CDPR builds of the game as being the "original" (even if there are 3 different platform variants of the CDRP work, plus a ton of scaling options in the PC version,) and the Switch version being its own fork.
Things do get kind of hinky with modern game engines in discussing ports and optimizations and scaling. (Back in the day, it was pretty clear visually and in gameplay that two versions of a game were made differently for each platform, but now you just build a game in like Unreal Engine and kind of don't even think about the hardware it'll play on* until it is time to put it out...) With something like Witcher 3 though, the enormity of the conversion seems to mark a clear break from it just being the same game running on much worse hardware with a few dials turned down: "
When the initial port was done, the game was running at 10 frames per second, was taking 50 per cent more memory than the Switch has, and the build size was 20GB larger than the biggest Switch cartridge". Lots of ground-up work had to go into making some kind of Switch version of the game, and given some very smart choices, it feels like a lo-fi version of the same game even though it has been changed a ton.
The Wither 3: Wild Hunt is out on Nintendo Switch, and it is an impressive port considering the hardware. Here's how Saber Interactive made that happen.
venturebeat.com
(*BTW, probably I just made some developers throw a pen at their screens in anger over a gross assumption of the engine compiler process, but it's not like back in the PS1 days where you had to plan on Day One for your game to star an "orange" character because the console rendered orange better than other colors!)
Of course, the Switch hardware is still much, much, much less than the Xbox Series S, and XSS should be able to handle even advanced next-gen games for a while. But the discussion here is about the worry of when a game engine might come along that pushes that threshold. And when that happens, what will the developer do with Xbox Series S? Will they give XSS a full year of redevelopment if it needs it like Witcher 3 Switch did? Will Xbox gamers accept
any gap in release? (Imagine you buy an Xbox Series X game and plug it into your S and it says, "
This game is coming soon to Xbox Series S...") Will they hire an external studio or build a small internal team and have them port an XSS version alongside the main XSX version? (That's the way a lot of multiplatform games were done in the 360/X1 transition, and still are done today for a number of multiplatform titles, but cost and time and quality would be factors.) And will Xbox Series game discs let you put two builds of the game in the box? (Many of the assets should be shared, I don't believe there's a renderer yet that would totally change how you'd texture a scene, but it could? Audio is already changing with next-gen tech, maybe graphics will too.) How long do you maintain patches for the two different platform versions? It's all a question.
Again,
hopefully, Xbox Series S will be just fine, and it's all a lot of worry over clouds that never roll overhead. But there's never been a console gen quite like this one, and the future is not yet determined.