Rockfish trying to bring Everspace to the Nintendo Switch

Co-founder Michael Schade explains how they're trying to work around CPU hardware constraints.

We caught up with Rockfish Entertainment's co-founder Michael Schade at Gamelab Montevideo as the German developer was sharing tips on indie marketing and talking about the challenges of adapting a game like their roguelike space shooter Everspace to VR, but talking of adaptations, we wondered whether the game would also land on the Nintendo Switch.

"Well I cannot promise anything right now (laughs). But we're looking into it," admits Schade in an upcoming video interview with Gamereactor. "It's really challenging to port it over to the Switch because Everspace is not GPU-bound so the graphical power is less of an issue; it's the main processor."

"Because in Everspace there's too much going on," he continues, "like enemies flying around, shooting at you with projectiles, and every projectile needs to be calculated if it hits anything, so to reduce the CPU load we might have to change the weapons of the enemies, which would have an impact on the overall balance of the game. So it's going to be more on the gameplay side of things than on the graphical things to optimise it. Because we support also low-end gaming PCs, which is why I'm pretty comfortable that we will have a good frame-rate generally on the Switch because of the graphical load, but it's really the CPU that concerns us."

"We will definitely look into this, and we hope that we'll have more news early next year, then we can say definitely yes or no, but it's definite we're looking into this."

CPU load is precisely the same hardware limitation that's currently preventing PS4 Pro (which is getting a 4K patch) from running Everspace at 60 FPS. In the interview Schade explains the game is performing "slightly better [on Sony's console] than on the Xbox, but we expect it's going to be the best on the Xbox One X, which is also scheduled for early next year". Without going into specifics (as the studio is migrating the project from Unreal Engine 4.60 to 4.70), "it will be better because it has the fastest CPU, but the biggest improvement is on the GPU."

Last but not least Everspace will get a physical release for PS4 in Q1 2018, including all its DLC in a sort of retail definitive edition. If finally released on the Switch, it's expected to include all the content as well. Would you like to see the game on Switch?