Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2, too big for Switch? Digital Foundry thinks so

It was 2017 when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released on Nintendo Switch. The game had been originally designed as a Wii U product, but it was ultimately a cross-generational game. More than five years later, the sequel is in development and will be released in 2023. Digital Foundry, Eurogamer's tech outlet, has suggested that the game may be too powerful to perform well on current console models.

Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia have analyzed the footage Nintendo shared when it recently announced the delay. Through this dissection process, they have pointed out some aspects that suggest that the Switch hardware is not enough to run the title with good performance.

“This trailer was interesting because the image quality seemed quite good, I think,” Linneman said “I was a little bit surprised by how sharp and clear this looked compared to the original in general.” Meanwhile, Battaglia pointed out that the "volumetric clouds" they have presented are really complicated to implement, while the camera cuts with the anti-aliasing are even complex to achieve on an Xbox Series X.

Next Switch or tweaked trailer?

"It could be the next Switch, it could be just that they rendered out a trailer on higher resolution and higher settings," he added. Anyway, as recalled in Digital Foundry, Nintendo does not usually resort to these practices, although they claim that they did it to show a greater drawing distance in the videos of Breath of the Wild.

The sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (still without a definitive title) was announced at E3 2019. Although it was scheduled for release in 2022, producer Eiji Aonuma reported that they needed more time, so the goal is to release it sometime in 2023.

Source | Digital Foundry, IGN