Bayonetta 3 is a great game but even in my review, I bring up major concerns surrounding the game’s performance and lacklustre visuals. It seems that Platinum Games struggled with the game’s development cycle and creating Bayonetta 3 resulted in a few gameplay features being scaled back due to the limited power of the Nintendo Switch.
According to Imran Khan, the development of Bayonetta 3 took longer than expected due to a few factors. For starters, the journalist claims that Platinum Games announced Bayonetta 3 way too early in development. In fact, the game was hardly in development when the announcement took place. At the time. Platinum Games was still working on Astral Chain and a few other titles.
He says that Bayonetta 3 was meant to feature a semi-open world to explore. Players would explore a large island, encounter enemies and branch off into the various worlds to encounter the other Bayonetta universes. This design was inspired by the likes of Nier Automata. Platinum Games experimented with this approach for a few months.
READ MORE – Bayonetta 3 Review – The Multiverse of Bayonetta
The current release version of Bayonetta 3 does still feature the island but players are dropped into different parts of it during certain chapters. These parts are linear and not open-world as originally planned. Khan says that Platinum Games decided to scale back on the original open-world in favour of the linear chapters due to pacing issues and the limited Switch hardware. He says that the Switch simply couldn’t handle the ambitious task of world design.
In his Patreon post, Khan also details how the covid-19 pandemic caused major delays for Bayonetta 3. He says the pandemic really slowed things down and it didn’t help that the project lost its initial directly early into the development.
Sadly, this is an ongoing issue with the Nintendo Switch at the moment. The dated console might still be a sought-after platform for gamers and developers but the limited hardware performance is no doubt holding back games from shining.
Source: Patreon
