The developer Iron Galaxy Studios is fast carving out a niche for itself as a specialist in porting modern classics to the Nintendo Switch. Last year it partnered with Bethesda on the excellent Switch version of Skyrim, and this year it has joined forces with Blizzard to bring Diablo 3 to Nintendo’s hybrid system. This is the first time a Blizzard game has graced a Nintendo platform in 15 years – since the Californian studio brought its classic games Rock n’ Roll Racing and Blackthorne to Game Boy Advance, and before that improbably put StarCraft on Nintendo 64 – so there’s quite a lot resting on Iron Galaxy’s work. Happily, the studio had some great source material to work with. Blizzard converted Diablo 3 for PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013, a year after it arrived on PC, and did extensive work on the balancing, controls and interface then to create a comfortable console gaming experience. A year later it carried this version over to PS4 and Xbox One. And the Switch version is based on the recent Eternal Collection edition of the game, which includes the Reaper of Souls and Rise of the Necromancer expansions and every update, so it’s as content and feature-complete as it could be. But how well has it survived the transition to Nintendo’s portable console? Before launch, Blizzard said the game would run at 960p docked and a native 720p portable, while targeting the 60 frames per second that is a core part of… [Read full story]
Leave a Reply