Ori and the Will of the Wisps on Nintendo Switch would be an “extremely difficult port”

Six months into the hell-year that is 2020, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps exists as a brief glimmer of hope that made some of the last six months that little bit more bearable. The game is stellar, its challenge is tight and it happens to be put together with love and care. As an expression of art, Ori’s latest venture is a visual and an audio masterpiece on the Xbox One.

Just don’t expect to see it make the hop over to Nintendo Switch anytime soon…or ever. In a recent Reddit Ask Me Anything session, Moon Studios lead engineer Gennadiy Korol was quizzed on if Ori and the Will of the Wisps would head on over to Nintendo Switch like the first game, Ori and the Blind Forest, did in 2019. “Right now we don’t have anything to share when it comes to Ori and the Will of the Wisps port,” Korol wrote.

If it were to ever happen though I can tell you that it would be (an) extremely difficult port to make run at 60fps.

That’s not exactly surprising news. It may look a bright 2D platformer at first glance, but Ori and the Will of the Wisps is anything but that. As Digital Foundry explained back in March, even on Xbox One X Ori and the Will of the Wisps still experienced heavy frame drops on launch and a few other performance issues. On Xbox One, the game ran at 900p and still regularly dipped on the frame-rate side when the action got too hot.

Moon Studios has ironed out most of those wrinkles so far, but if the latest Ori game experienced performance anxiety on the most powerful console of this generation? Imagine how it’d fare on Nintendo’s more modestly specced system. Further on in the AMA, lead designer Chris McEntee also commented on a potential Ori 3, but for now it looks like the door has been closed on that series. “We really felt that we told the story that we wanted to tell–Ori’s story–across the two games.”

We’ve left the door cracked open a bit for a potential continuation, though we don’t have anything specific to share at this point and time.

Moon Studios has another game in development, one that is said to radically different from Ori and leans far away from the fantasy roots where they made their name known in the industry. “Using a fantasy setting certainly helps us tell stories that we otherwise couldn’t tell in this way. An interesting experiment would be to take the Ori story and just try to tell that through humans,” studio founder Thomas Mahler said to Gamespot.

Kuro kind of commits genocide. Right? Holy shit, that’s crazy. But using fantasy creatures and doing that, it allows us to tell really harsh emotional stories without people questioning it.  We’re dealing with that right now, our next game is about humans and so on. It definitely makes it easier with these fantastical creatures. I’m amazed how much stuff I get away with that’s actually quite shocking if you think about it.

Last Updated: June 29, 2020