The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event was an eventful one for Xbox boss Phil Spencer, who made it clear that Microsoft has lofty ambitions to break into the mobile and on-the-go gaming markets. .
In an interview at the conference, the Microsoft Gaming CEO talked about the company’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, saying he would “love to see” Call of Duty on Nintendo Switch (through the Tom Warren of The Verge (opens in a new tab)).
Spencer says that one of the main reasons Microsoft wants to acquire Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard is to tap into the mobile gaming scene. Call of Duty: Mobile still works fine from a financial point of view (opens in a new tab)so it makes sense for Spencer to be inspired to take it a step further by porting CoD games to Switch and expanding into mobile games.
But will one of the biggest FPS franchises be able to function properly on the Switch, given the significantly weaker engine?
Real Modern War
Call of Duty has long dominated the FPS scene. With a whopping 17 titles, the first-person shooter series has been praised for its crisp graphics, intricate gunplay, vast maps, and great co-op capabilities.
While these factors have cemented Call of Duty’s place as one of the most popular game franchises of all time, they could spell trouble for the Nintendo Switch. Because a Switch port can hardly maintain such high standards.
This is not a Call of Duty-specific issue. Time and again, we’ve seen the ports of popular PC and console titles crash and burn on the Nintendo Switch. Ugly-Ugly Ark Gate: Survival Evolvedit was so bad, for example, that it needed a total overhaul, and the WWE 2K18 wrestling simulator never came back to life after its Switch release suffered from game breaking bugs.
Little pranks
Another major risk when porting games to the Switch is that the Nintendo console simply isn’t built to handle games of this size. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2the latest entry in the Call of Duty series, weighing over 100GB on PS5which is a big That’s a huge jump from the average 8-10GB size a Switch game takes up.
Even games made for the platform tend to have a hard time; Bayonetta 3 weighs in at a modest 15GB and starts to slow down thanks to the slower loading speed of the device, in this case largely due to the fast-paced and frenetic on-screen action.
If the humble Switch can’t handle its own games, how will it cope with the demands posed by CoD’s heavy IW engine?
Hope on the horizon
That being said, it has been done before. One of the most successful PlayStation to Switch ports, Alien: Isolation, has gone from taking up 8.2GB of space on the PlayStation 3 to more than double the size for the Switch port, and it works like a charm.
Perhaps there is hope of a solid CoD delivery for the Switch, if, like what has been done for Call of Duty: Mobilea brand new game created with Switch device.
This will certainly take time and money to develop, but if Spencer and Microsoft are serious about bringing heavy FPS to mobile devices, they may want to play to the strengths of the Nintendo console rather than the console. expect it to follow suit with next-generation consoles and save Microsoft from possible embarrassment.
