Will Dragon Quest 12 make it onto Switch?
The next main series installment in the critically-acclaimed JRPG series, the upcoming Dragon Quest 12 looks set to shift the series in a darker, more mature direction. This is suggested by the initial teaser trailer, the only official information released for the title, which, despite giving basically nothing away, looks markedly darker than what we saw in the runup to its predecessor. This is in a similar fashion to the greatly anticipated Breath of the Wild sequel. The creator of Dragon Quest, Yuji Horii, has also teased the inclusion of ‘Walking Dead’ style player decision-making in the game which, while not everyone’s cup of tea, is an exciting innovation that is hopefully indicative of the inclusion of other new features.
One more thing that we know about Dragon Quest 12 is that it will run on Unreal Engine 5, the latest game engine from Epic Games that is heavily optimised for the PS5 and Xbox One X to provide truly ‘next-gen’ experiences on these platforms. This is great news for fans owning these consoles as the improvements of Unreal Engine 5 will mean that the Dragon Quest universe will look and run better than it ever has before. Does this mean that the game will become too graphically intense for the Switch to handle, though? Although Dragon Quest 11 is one of the most technically impressive ports on Switch, the compromises required to port the game to the system are still very much evident compared to the original PS4 and PS4 Pro versions. If the game doesn’t make it onto Switch it won’t be through a lack of trying on the developers’ part, Dragon Quest games have a stronger history on Nintendo consoles than any other – every main series game can be played on the 3DS in Japan, for example. So the primary question is, will it be technically possible for the developers to port the game onto Switch with an even bigger performance gulf between consoles?
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If the scale of its predecessor is anything to go by, we can undoubtedly expect Dragon Quest 12 to be a massive game that, running on Unreal Engine 5, will undoubtedly present a huge technical challenge to be playable on Switch. However, the improved scalability (whereby the performance of the game can be conveniently optimised for a range of hardware) of Unreal Engine 5 could act in the Switch’s favour by facilitating the development of a Switch version without the investment of time and money faced when porting games such as Outer Worlds and Doom Eternal. Unreal Engine 5 also features some clever resolution tricks that make a game appear to be running at a higher resolution than it actually is natively on the console, all of which could enable the development of a Switch version that looks decent, runs at a minimum of 30fps and wouldn’t break the bank to develop. With games like Hogwarts Legacy reportedly releasing on Switch as well as next-gen consoles, we can hope this is the case and that the Switch won’t get left behind in this ‘next-gen’ console era.
The release date of Dragon Quest 12 might also play a factor here as well, and with no more information besides the teaser trailer at the time of writing, we would expect a 2023/24 window. Could the Switch’s successor or an upgraded Switch pro be released by then and offer a power boost that makes intensive games like Dragon Quest 12 a lot easier to port to the system? By 2023 it looks unlikely, but another year or two down the line we’d expect to see Nintendo coming out with what we’d expect to be a Switch 2 – a console similar in design to the current Switch but with performance to closer rival the PS5 and Xbox One X. At the very least then we’d expect to see Dragon Quest 12 being ported onto this hypothetical console following its release.
Our conclusion then is that the developers will pull out all the stops to release the game onto Switch in line with other consoles thanks to the number of players that it will become accessible to but if it proves technically impossible then we hopefully won’t have too long to wait before a port comes to Nintendo’s next-gen console, whatever and whenever that will be.
