“The Switch would explode” Saber Interactive on porting The Witcher 3 to Switch

We’ve seen a lot of games ported to the Switch that no one thought would be possible on the machine. Doom (2016), Diablo III, and of course The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The Witcher 3 was thought to be impossible on the Switch, even originally by the team who eventually made it happen. In a GTC 2020 conference presentation, that’s the GPU Technology Conference by the way. Roman Lebedev, a tech lead at Saber Interactive shared some thoughts that the team had about the port before E3 2019 and they weren’t optimistic about making it work.

In a slide among the comments from the team includes “Not going to happen”, “I refuse to believe this is possible”, “The Switch would explode”. The best one possibly is “if this actually happens, I will live stream myself playing all 8 hours of Desert Bus with my air conditioning off for authenticity”.

As we know they got to work eventually, and it runs quite well. The rest of the presentation is about how they got it to work on a technical level. You can watch that here.