I’ve been looking forward to picking up RiME on Switch since it was announced as a multi-platform title. However, after yesterday’s AMA with the developers over on r/NintendoSwitch and some of the early performance reviews I’ve seen on YouTube, I don’t think this game should be picked up on Switch because they’re charging a premium for what is essentially a worse experience.
First of all, the game isn’t terribly optimized on any platform to begin with. It runs like shit on a high-end PC, on an Xbox One, on a PS4. It doesn’t matter where you play the game, it seems as though poor optimization is a problem. But that’s even worse on the Switch version, which stutters to the point of single digit frames per second sometimes. That’s unacceptable for a $40 game.
What’s worse is that in yesterday’s AMA the developers seemed to gloss over the issue saying that it was unfixable for Switch owners, so they went ahead and released the game anyway.
The developers clearly state that they chose to release a game that has these “small hiccups” to users because they didn’t want to take the extra time to add loading screens to the stages because they’re not present on any other platform. I understand game development is a hard task when you’re supporting multiple platforms and you have a small indie team, but the level of stuttering that happens in RiME on Switch is inexcusable.
If you want to play this game, get it on any other platform but Switch because if you buy it anyway, you’re telling developers you’re okay with games being released in this state.
