How CD Projekt Red did the impossible and ported Cyberpunk 2077 to the Nintendo Switch 2
To learn more about how Cyberpunk 2077 for Nintendo Switch 2 on day one was made possible, we go straight to the source with an interview with CD Projekt Red.
It wasn't long ago that the idea of a game as graphically intense as Cyberpunk 2077 running on a handheld device seemed unfathomable. But then the Steam Deck came along roughly three years ago, leading players who prefer to take their games on the go to ask, 'will it run?' all over again while testing the limits of what's possible.
However, a portable PC device is one thing and a dedicated console platform another, hence why Nintendo fans were left equally surprised and curious about how Cyberpunk 2077 would run on Nintendo Switch 2 when it was revealed in April of this year. Well, now it's here, and it's safe to say that most players are enjoying their time exploring Night City on Nintendo's hybrid successor.
But how much work exactly did it take for CD Projekt Red to get Cyberpunk 2077 – including its critically acclaimed Phantom Liberty expansion – shrunken down to a single Nintendo Switch 2 cartridge? We recently visited the studio's head offices in Warsaw, Poland, speaking to Senior VP of Technology, Charles Trembley, to discuss why it was important for the game to be there at launch, how much Nintendo were excited about the prospect, as well as the game's legacy overall.
Why was it important for you to release Cyberpunk 2077 on Nintendo Switch 2 on day one?
We had a visit from Nintendo here in the HQ where basically they were talking about, 'okay, we have this new platform coming'. I think we all looked at each other in the room. No one actually said yes though. We all were looking at each other in the eyes and everybody was like, 'yeah, it'll be cool'. Everybody was excited [but] we didn't commit necessarily yet to make it for day one. Basically, what happened is since I was in the room I inherited the task to figure it out – if it was possible to make this game.
I was in the secret room and trying to figure out, 'okay, does it make sense to make Cyberpunk? Will it actually run? Will be a good experience?'. And we quickly decided that it was definitely possible. And then, after we discussed that with Nintendo and marketing, everything started to align. We decided to try and be ambitious. 'We'll try to be there at launch'.
A lot of studios weren't lucky to acquire dev kits so early. I trust this wasn't an issue for you?
For us, it was fine. We didn't need necessarily an army of dev kits. We just needed one or two to just get us started. And then when we needed more, we communicated with them and we aligned when, and we just scaled up as the project went .
What were the main difficulties with porting Cyberpunk 2077 to Nintendo Switch 2?
What surprised me is that it didn't take us that much time to get it running. So, from the inception of me working, making just the infrastructure to make it work, I had a triangle on screen. So it didn't take us like that much time. Of course, it was difficult to know the difference between the beginning and the theory. Is it going to work on when you're connected to the TV, in handheld or in docked? I think it took us a few months to get everything running. And then after that, the last challenge was the cartridge.
At first it was quite clear what the limitation of a cartridge was. [Nintendo was] quite upfront: this is going to be 64GB cartridge. With Phantom Liberty back then [the game] was at 90GB, and we wanted to have both together. As gamers, we all knew it's not very good to have the game as a code in the box, so we tried to figure out how it works. And one of my engineers, Adrian, is a physical collector, so it was what he really wanted.
There's a lot of assets that were duplicated for various reasons, so we could limit the number of duplications there. There are few movies that are high resolution. And we had to decide, 'okay, it's too high resolution', so we did reduce the quality there a little bit. We did a lot of experimenting to limit as much as possible.
Finally, the language was another big issue that we need to resolve because it's one of our unique selling points, right? We have a lot of languages, and we want to continue having other languages, but every language with all the voiceover is very expensive on disk. We needed to make a choice, and we decided to limit the number. On cartridge you have the default language, but then you need to download the language that you want [separately]. We thought it was a good compromise.
Cartridge constraints is a big Switch 2 talking point. Do you foresee this continuing to be an issue?
I think Nintendo is quite good at managing their hardware, so I'm expecting that for their product, they will still be fitting in cartridge. I don't think we'll have to be scared about that. I think the main issue is when you get to our universe a little bit, where we go forward, but really the new consoles will be coming in a few years, right? The PC.
It's never stopping and unfortunately sometimes the quality of assets is very hard to keep into 64GB for Cyberpunk and going forward it's definitely a challenge. I can imagine that in our next title if we want to get more ambitious, more quality, it would be extremely difficult to be on 64GB.
For sure, downloadable will always be an option. However, of course, having 256GB on drive, an SSD on the console makes it very difficult to have more than one game, right? We had the same issue also on the original Nintendo Switch. The Witcher 3 was 32GB, so it's difficult to download it. Hopefully the micro-SD express cards will be bigger and bigger so people will be able to have bigger games, but I can definitely imagine that in our universe, with third parties, if you want to have the game running it might be difficult to fit on 64GB card.
And finally, on the legacy of Cyberpunk 2077, how are you as a studio feeling about the game overall?
The main problem we had before was the mechanical hard drive, which was very, very hard for us to deliver all the content that needs to be streamed to the on the consoles. So when we moved to the next generation with the SSD, that really helped us a lot to now finally fix these issues. And I think that with lots of work when we got to the Edgerunners update, which was great because then we also had a lot people coming back to the game, you know giving us another chance in all fairness, I think the team really was appreciative to get back to the game.
Then we had 2.0, which again, gave another breadth to the game. I think that at this stage, we can think that, as a company, we were finally where we always wanted this game to be. Then when we get Phantom Liberty on top of it, which is also like, 'now we know exactly how to make this game, how to make those quests, how make everything to make it the best experience of Cyberpunk'. The reception was great from the community. We're pretty grateful for that community.
At the end side, if you think about it, if the success of the game would have been what we originally expected, would it be the same game that we're playing today? I don't think so. Which is weird when you think about it because of all the problems that we had, but then basically we ended up pushing so much energy in this game and I think now it's a much, much better game that it would not have probably been otherwise, so I'm pretty happy about the result. I think this game will pass the test of time.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available on Nintendo Switch 2, complete with the new Update 2.3, right now.
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