Capcom talks about bringing RE Engine to Switch for Monster Hunter Rise

Monster Hunter Rise marks the first time that Capcom is making a game for Switch with RE Engine. But based on new comments from the company, it wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish.

Yasunori Ichinose, the director for Monster Hunter Rise, said to Eurogamer that putting RE Engine on Switch “was definitely a new challenge for us.” A big part of the task was balancing the game’s large maps with no loading, graphics quality, and frame rate.

According to Ichinose:

“It was definitely a new challenge for us. As you mentioned, it was indeed our first time bringing an RE Engine title onto the Switch. So a lot of background technical engineering work needs to be done just to achieve targeting a new hardware platform. Of course, being an internal Capcom engine, that meant that we had the benefit of all the expertise and knowledge of our engineers to hand – they worked very hard, getting the engine working for us and ensuring that we could take the game content which involves these not strictly open world per se but large maps with no loading areas between them, having those work seamlessly whilst maintaining the graphics quality we wanted to have oriented is known for its beautiful lighting and shadows and we want to keep that stuff in without affecting performance and having the frame rate be something that could achieve our targets – a lot of all that stuff was a difficult balance to achieve but I think that the team has really pulled it, targeting a comfortable 30 frames per second whilst also making the game look as good as it does and pushing the you know the power of the Switch as much as we can. It’s been a challenging but rewarding experience.”

Monster Hunter Rise is due out for Switch on March 26, 2021.