Starlink Battle for Atlas is Ubisoft and Virtuous' new space third-person shooter action game, released for the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One on the
16th of October.
While sales for the game have not been as satisfactory as Ubisoft would have wanted, the Nintendo Switch version of
Starlink: Battle for Atlas turned out to be quite the commercial success; and much of this is owed to the fact that Ubisoft and Nintendo teamed up to bring Star Fox to the game as a console exclusive.
Starlink: Battle for Atlas on the Nintendo Switch suddenly became the definitive version of the game, but Ubisoft has recently mentioned that developing the game on Nintendo's handheld hybrid system was no walk in the park as it was quite the challenging experience from a technical standpoint.
In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, senior technical director of Virtuous Jonathan Boldiga stated that
Starlink: Battle for Atlas on the Nintendo Switch was "
extremely technically challenging" since Ubisoft "
had very high standards in terms of what they wanted on the Switch platform"; this is mainly because the developer demanded the team that they needed "
parity between all three consoles".
"
Obviously, the Switch is a great machine but we had to do a lot of work to make sure we could keep visual parity between Switch, Xbox One and PS4. We did a lot of work on rendering optimisations, multi-threading, and trying to squeeze the most that we could out of the CPU. Lots and lots of data compression to fit into memory - you name every trick, we tried it".
This obviously proved challenging since the Nintendo Switch, while an amazing console in and of itself, is still fairly underpowered compared to Microsoft and Sony's home consoles. Luckily, every turned out fine for the development team at Virtuos, who managed to deliver a stable experience on the Nintendo Switch; which also went on to become not only the definitive version of
Starlink: Battle for Atlas, but also the most financially successful.
Lead a group of heroic interstellar pilots who use modular starships to mix and match their unique gear and skills on the fly. Travel the star system to unite the galaxy against villainous destructive forces.
Starlink: Battle for Atlas is currently available for the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.