DOOM Eternal it is undeniably one of the most impressive ports on the Switch. Brought by experts on Panic Button doors, the gameplay runs successfully at a solid 30 frames per second. When compared to the PS4 and Xbox One editions, however, it had a significant visual impact.
As part of this performance compensation, scenes were also affected, limited on the Switch to 20 frames per second. In a conversation with Digital Foundry, Panic Button chief engineer Travis Archer discussed why these commitments were made, confirming:
As is typical of most games, the scenes are sometimes the most graphically intense scenes in the game – lots of dynamic lights, lots of shadows, lots of complex geometries animated on the screen and therefore in this case, the importance for us was not missing that detail for the scenes. It is like a great time of reward. It should look really cool and we decided it was better to run at a higher resolution in this case, because it didn’t affect the gameplay – it didn’t affect your ability to move smoothly through the game when you’re in the middle of a scene. It was less critical.
Now, in terms of the final result, I think there are still improvements that we can make to these scenes, and we intend to make some improvements to the scenes to improve their performance. But that was the decision based mainly on how high the quality bar is for these scenes.
You can watch the entire hour-long video interview, which offers some intriguing insights into how the Panic Button managed the DOOM Eternal “impossible” door. Digital Foundry previously released an analysis of Eternal’s technology last month, confirming better performance over Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
If you are curious to know more, you can always check our own review, where we reward the Switch port with 8/10 stars.
Did you buy DOOM Eternal on Switch? Want the Panic Button to face other games? Share your ideas below.