In 2018, the Switch got one of the worst and most unplayable ports in console history; this is a notable distinction given how challenging gameplay is on the platform. You know, because it’s a hugely popular first-person open world survival simulator. Ark: Survival Evolved. Now, four years after its debut, boat It features a new Switch port that uses a newer version of Unreal and may be one of the most impressive Switch game upgrades I’ve ever seen.
There have been some miracle ports on the Switch. games like Witcher 3 and apocalypse 2016 Not only does it look good on an aging portable hybrid console, it plays well. This is not easy to do, sorry. The Switch is old and not very powerful, so it’s hard to get modern, big, sleek looking 3D games running on it. I mean, even games released by Nintendo are like new Pokémon struggling over it. So it’s no surprise that big games have a dozen bleh ports for every miracle port. But then there are the really small ports, the ones that make you wonder why they were made. And maybe the worst of the worst are 2018s Ark: Survival Evolved.
boat It wasn’t just bad on the Switch in 2018, it was truly awful. many websites and critics called it If not one of the worst ports ever released for Switch. It had an incredibly low resolution and a horribly bad framerate, with tons of stuttering and stuttering.
Even when it worked well, it looked like crap with a lot of blurry objects and furry shapes flying around. It turns out that some of these were supposed to be dinosaurs or trees. It was hard to say. This Digital Foundry video from 2018 a great look at the port and how badly it played. Fast forward a few years and now a brand new version of the popular survival game is coming to Switch this month. And folks, it’s kind of impressive that things are this good.
Eurogamer and Digital Foundry took a look at this new port and spoke to the developers behind it. It seems that in Unreal 4 the entire game has been rebuilt from the ground up. In fact, according to the developers, nothing is left of the original game. Instead, this port is based on a newer Xbox build of the game. New port developer Grove Street Games (yes, the same people behind it) hated, crippled GTA Trilogy remasters from last year…) also uses dynamic resolution scaling to help everything look sharper and work better on the Switch.
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new port boat It includes better-looking shadows and less pop-ins, thanks to new tools available in UE4. Better still, infamously long load times have been reduced to just around 30 seconds. That’s still a lot, but consider it could take about three minutes on the original port. So yes, big improvements all around.
To be clear: this is still a hard way to play Ark: Survival Evolved compared to more capable platforms. Of course, playing the game on newer, more powerful consoles or a powerful PC will provide a much better experience. But for folks who prefer portable gaming or just own a Switch, it’s good to see a publisher go back and spend the money and time completely fixing a bad port and replacing it with something much better. This is not something you see very often, and even if the new port still has its own issues, the new version is a round-the-clock improvement that should be applauded.
Ark: Survival Evolved – Ultimate Survivor Edition It’s now out on Switch and available for free to previous owners of the old port. maybe The Outer Worlds can i get a better port from now on?
