Nier Automata is one of the most celebrated last-generation action titles, marrying Platinum Games’ signature stylings with inventive, varied gameplay and a mind-bending narrative. From a technical perspective though, the situation was far from ideal: the game was beset by frame-rate and image quality issues on last-gen machines, with wobbly performance coupled with plenty of aliasing. This is why the Switch port came as a bit of a surprise when it was announced a few months ago: there’s a huge performance gap between the Switch and even the base last gen consoles with precious little room to cut resolution before image quality becomes unacceptably poor. This seems like one of the so-called “impossible ports” – a technically demanding title downscaled for Nintendo’s hybrid console, often with somewhat mixed results.
The challenge is clear – and it’s all down to just how difficult this game was to run on PS4 and Xbox One. Despite relatively pedestrian visuals, the title targeted 900p without any anti-aliasing, with somewhat messy performance on both machines. The typical run of play was 40-60fps, with combat and open-world traversal causing issues. It’s important to keep this relatively poor showing in mind, because the Nintendo Switch falls far short of those machines in raw number-crunching performance. So what kind of compromises are we seeing here?
Relative to base last-gen consoles, the Switch release is comprehensively downgraded – though the overall image still looks surprisingly comparable. Measuring the game against its Xbox One S counterpart, the first thing that stands out is a significant reduction in texture detail. Across the board, textures are degraded, with lower resolutions not to mention simplified layers and material properties. In some areas, the textures look soupy, with no fine detail to speak of, though most of the time it’s not quite as severe.
