Virtuos: It Took One Year To Port Dark Souls Remastered To Switch

In a recent VGR interview, the outlet spoke to Virtuos, the company that brought Dark Souls Remastered to Nintendo Switch.

There were many things discussed during the interview, so we’ll highlight a few important and interesting points. First, Virtuos revealed that it took “a little more than a year” to port Dark Souls Remastered to Nintendo Switch. To make the game playable on the Switch, it required Virtuos to optimize and polish the game for “several months”.

In order to tailor Dark Souls Remastered’s graphics and performance to Nintendo Switch, both Virtuos and FromSoftware agreed to lock the frame rate to 30 fps, and prioritize frame rate over visual improvements. Technical artists and engineers also spent a lot of time rearranging assets to ensure boss fights ran well.

Virtuos encountered two difficulties in implementing online multiplayer for Dark Souls Remastered on Switch – the first was “changing the multiplayer technology to a modern server-based solution”, that includes enabling 6 player multiplayer, and making sure the game works well with Wi-Fi networks. The studio leveraged on existing code from other platforms, but also had to do lots of optimization work.

Finally, Virtuos revealed that they expanded the number of native Japanese production staff on their team to make communication with FromSoftware smooth. This was extremely beneficial for the game, as decisions that could take days to reach by consensus were immediately made on the spot by FromSoftware and Virtuos engineers who worked together at an office location for a period of time.

Read the full interview here.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.