As much as I love my Nintendo Switch, it’s safe to say that it has some technical limitations when compared to my PC. So earlier this month, when Larian announced that it was bringing its massive RPG, Divinity: Original Sin 2, to the platform, I was a little sceptical.
Thankfully, however, it seems as though the company has had plenty of help in bringing the new version of the game to life, most notably from the people behind the platforms themselves. In an interview with PCGN, Javier Moya, software engineer at port developer Blitworks, said that their team “had support from Nintendo and Steam, who helped us with any technical problems that we faced.”
Those problems ranged from syncing up the game’s cross-save capabilities, to getting Steam logins working on the Switch’s web-view, but that’s far from an exhaustive list of the challenges faced. Moya also says that “one of the biggest challenges was to make the cross-save as transparent as possible for the players.”
“Also, since the Switch has a limit about how much data the game can store but we didn’t want to apply a limit to the cross-save users, we needed to make some adjusts to how the game handles this,” using the Steam cloud as a backup container to get around the Switch’s save-game limitations.
While there have clearly been a few bumps in the road, Steam’s relatively easy-to-understand API helped Blitworks manage many of the more complicated backend elements of the port’s development. But I imagine it was also handy to have both Valve and Nintendo on hand as well.