Hogwarts Legacy on Nintendo Switch – graphical downgrade and long loading screens guaranteed

The introduction of the Hogwarts Legacy game (Hogwarts Legacy in the Polish language version) took place in stages this year. First, the version for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series debuted, offering the best game quality. After a few months, we got a version for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, where severe graphical cuts were already visible, although the game still works satisfactorily. We finally have a release for the Nintendo Switch portable console. Were all the cuts worth such a premiere?

The Digital Foundry team took a closer look at the Nintendo Switch version of Hogwarts Legacy. In short, sharp cuts have been made.

Hogwarts Legacy on Nintendo Switch – the first screenshots have appeared. The graphics have undergone a major transformation

Nintendo Switch is not a very powerful console and we have already seen this many times. However, developers from Avalanche Software managed to port the Hogwarts Legacy game to this modest device. On the one hand, this is a commendable feat (after all, many other producers limit themselves only to cloud gaming), but on the other hand, it is clearly visible that sharp cuts were made to make the title work on the Japanese console. The graphical downgrade is very visible here, and even Oliver Mackenzie from Digital Foundry stated that this is one of the largest drops in graphical quality that is visible in multiplatform games, also offered on Switch. The quality of vegetation, textures, anisotropic filtering, shadows and geometry has been drastically reduced. The game looks much worse than on the Xbox One S console, to which the Nintendo Switch release was compared.

Hogwarts Legacy on Nintendo Switch - graphical downgrade and long loading screens guaranteed [2]

Hogwarts Legacy is selling like hot cakes – sales revenue has already exceeded one billion dollars

However, the cuts were extended not only to the graphic design. It turns out that in certain places, if you want to move on, you have to go through quite long loading screens. An example is the entrance to the wizarding village of Hogsmeade, near Hogwarts. Normally we move seamlessly between these areas, without loading screens. In the case of Nintendo Switch, this is one of the smaller hubs that must first be loaded through a loading screen that lasts about 40 seconds. However, there are more such separated areas. Even all these limitations and graphical cuts did not protect the game from performance drops, which usually appear in random places.