Pillars of Eternity II - No Longer Coming to Switch

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Eurogamer reports that Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire will no longer be coming to Nintendo Switch.

[...]

Meanwhile, in 2019, it was revealed that Obsidian's original Pillars of Eternity would be coming to the Switch. However, in February of last year, the publisher announced it would no longer be releasing any more updates for its Switch version of the game.

Versus Evil cited the Switch's hardware as the reason for this decision, stating it had, "reached a limit on what we can do with our updates to the game and have exhausted the options left to us from the PC original in regards to the limitations of the hardware we are working with".
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That's truly a shame, as I believe the game would have been pretty good on the Switch, not to mention opening the franchise to another audience.
 
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I'm surprised they're claiming the hardware is the problem. There's even a Switch port of The Witcher 3 which is impressive even though it's downgraded visually.
 
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Cost of developer time versus original PoE II revenue vs [even less] expected revenue on niche console = MS pulling the plug.
 
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That's truly a shame, as I believe the game would have been pretty good on the Switch, not to mention opening the franchise to another audience.

I also think the game, especially in TB, is perfect match with Switch in handheld mode. I even had it preordered for a while, till I found out how awful PoE1 port turned to be. Obsidian was always terrible in performance optimization so I suppose it was nightmare to port their games to limted Switch hardware.

For example DoS2 received Switch port as well. I didnt play it myself, but also didnt notice disappointment about performance on Switch, so I suppose it was success.
 
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Same verdict as PoE, then, even if they don't give any details on the reason this time.

Unity may be part of the struggle indeed, it's easy to write poorly optimized code with it. Just an example: even on a recent and fast PC, the loading times are very long for the relatively small areas (and we see the same problem in Pathfinder: Kingmaker or Expeditions: Viking, for ex).

It's usually not impossible to improve those issues, but I see the Switch has only 4 GB of RAM, so that leaves fewer options. It's actually so small that the problem could be just that, not enough memory.

Finally, it could be that the graphics rendering adapts poorly to another platform. In that case, there is little they can do except rewrite a good chunk of the game.

PS: I see they left PoE on Nintendo store, not very professional...
 
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It's a shame Switch players won't get to enjoy one of the best CRPGs in history, up there with Baldur's Gate, DOS, and maybe the original Dragon Age.
 
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It just shows a serious lack of vision, in my opinion. I go by what folks here and in person tell me about games, not off what some bloke I don't know from Adam might say about a game, and I suspect many get their info in similar fashion. The whole turn-based system that Eternity brings to the table would have fit well on the Switch. Being so completely out of touch with your audience is not a good thing.
 
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It just shows a serious lack of vision, in my opinion. I go by what folks here and in person tell me about games, not off what some bloke I don't know from Adam might say about a game, and I suspect many get their info in similar fashion. The whole turn-based system that Eternity brings to the table would have fit well on the Switch. Being so completely out of touch with your audience is not a good thing.

POE2 was an unsuccessful game. It didn't sell well and Obsidian won't make any similar game so soon. So, perhaps we are not their current audience, especially now that they were bought by Microsoft.
 
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I didn't know so many people cared about what is on "switch" or not. I'm not even sure I have ever seen what that console looks like.
 
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I believe this will simply be a Game Pass push and allow Cloud Gaming on more devices.
 
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I didn't know so many people cared about what is on "switch" or not. I'm not even sure I have ever seen what that console looks like.

Its just one of the most successful consoles in history. Some people probably own them...
 
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I had a Switch yet gave it away some years ago, and often I regret it. I don't travel much anymore, yet there are times that I wonder that, if I still owned the console, might I actually use it out on the porch. And a game like this existing for the unit would have increased that probability.
 
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I had a Switch yet gave it away some years ago, and often I regret it. I don't travel much anymore, yet there are times that I wonder that, if I still owned the console, might I actually use it out on the porch. And a game like this existing for the unit would have increased that probability.

I often used it on my biz trips, which didnt happen for a while (thx covid). I also sometimes play it in bed before sleep. I cant read in bed anymore as I sleep like 5 min after I open book. And as I cant play while driving car, thats when I read (listen) the books Im missing on before sleep. Thats how youngsters do it these days :biggrin:
 
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