Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a 2D platformer developed by Moon Studios under the umbrella of Microsoft Game Studios. Ori was a nominee in a few categories at this year's The Game Awards and although it didn't take home any accolades it has been an extremely well-received game. The game's art direction, music, and gameplay stand out on both Xbox and Nintendo hardware, but apparently that wasn't always the case on Switch.
Moon Studios co-founder Gennadiy Korol said porting Ori and the Will of the Wisps to the Nintendo Switch took an intense effort in a recent interview with Nintendo Everything. First launching on the Xbox One and Game Pass in March, Ori and the Will of the Wisps received great reviews. The Switch version has also been a success, but it took wasn't easy getting it there.
The standard version of Ori and the Will of the Wisps runs at a 60 frames-per-second, and this was the goal for Switch version as well. According to Korol, initially it ran at just 24 FPS "even with heavily compromised visuals." It took three-and-a-half months to port the game over to the Nintendo hybrid, and much of that time was spent on optimization and reaching that 60 FPS target.
"As usual, game development is tough and being able to make a game like Will of the Wisps really shine on the Switch required taking quite a few risks and making heavy changes in order to be able to achieve the visual quality we felt Ori deserved," Korol said. "Luckily those risks really paid off and things really came together towards the end."
It took many iterations until Moon Studios got it right with Ori and the Will of the Wisps on Switch. The team changed content, rewrote rendering pipelines, fixed streaming, worked on memory optimization, and more. Korol said the team took risks during the process, but in the end the Switch version of Ori and the Will of the Wisps released as one of the best Nintendo Switch games of 2020. Nintendo fans should be appreciative of what Moon Studios was able to pull off.
One of the things that made the process easier for Korol and his team was the various Xbox optimization patches it had already worked on, which also could have helped with optimizing the best version of Ori and the Will of the Wisps on the Xbox Series X/S. It is impressive to see Moon Studios was able to launch Ori and the Will of the Wisps on many different platforms of various power.
The team behind Ori and the Will of the Wisps has already talked about art, the pressures of a sequel, and more in previous interviews, but understanding the technical side is intriguing as well. Especially with a new generation of gaming having just arrived, the hard work of development teams who manage to create an experience that can be enjoyed by many players should not go unnoticed.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is available now for PC, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Source: Nintendo Everything