Kingdom Come Deliverance: Royal Edition devs spent 2 years optimizing the Switch port

Kingdom Come Deliverance: Royal Edition came to Switch back in March of this year, finally putting an end to long-standing rumors of a port. The game had been rumored for Switch for literally years thanks to retail listings, but thankfully all the speculation turned out to be true. Now we can all hop on this experience and see why so many fell in love with it.

Saber Interactive is the studio behind Kingdom Come Deliverance: Royal Edition on Switch, and they’re a studio very familiar with the platform. The company has handled multiple high-profile ports to Switch in the past, but it seems Kingdom Come Deliverance: Royal Edition may have pushed them the most.

In an interview with Automaton-Media, lead programmer of Kingdom Come’s port, Anton Vasilev, shared a ton of insight into how the project went.

• the devs knew that they had an “extremely difficult challenge” before them
• the studio started out by examining the game’s source code and assets
• after getting the game to run, they entered the stage of optimization
• this was apparently the most difficult part of the process, which took roughly 2 years
• the Switch version runs at the equivalent of the PC version’s “Low” Image Quality setting
• the team used art assets from the Xbox One version
• some static objects were removed
• the team cut the highest resolution MIP level for all assets
• they team also removed some static objects with high LOD models
• devs partially simplified the terrain graphics
• the key frame rate of some animation sequences was reduced
• the devs gave up on having surround sound support for audio
• the most difficult part of optimizing was having it run at a sufficient frame rate
• the most important goal in porting a game is to achieve a good balance between performance, memory handling, stability, and final quality