News just broke about Ubisoft canning a planned Assassin's Creed Shadows DLC that would have been at the same scale as the recent Claws of Awaji expansion, but Ubisoft is still on track to launch Assassin's Creed Shadows on the Nintendo Switch 2 on December 2. Ahead of the projected launch, Ubisoft has published a deep-dive with two developers who worked on porting Assassin's Creed Shadows to the Switch 2 to give gamers an inside look at what it takes to port a game designed to run on PC to a relatively underpowered handheld gaming console. One of the developers, simply referred to as Bruno, said that "Bringing Shadows to Switch 2 was one of the toughest but most rewarding challenges I have ever tackled. We had to rethink almost everything, from the way the world is rendered to how systems interact, all while keeping the soul of the game intact." At the top of the list of priorities for the development team was preserving the game's visuals and maintaining a minimum frame rate of 30 FPS in both docked and handheld modes.

According to the developers, they implemented several of the same simulation systems on the Switch 2 as are in use for PC and console, but optimizations have been made to accommodate the Arm architecture and limited system resources. Namely, simulation data was downscaled to reduce GPU load. Assassin's Creed Shadows will also use the same baked Global Illumination implementation as is used for the Xbox Series S and low-power PCs, in order to conserve RAM. The team apparently spent a lot of time optimizing things like LOD, draw distance, texture resolution, and asset loading in order to hit the target 30 FPS while maintaining the world's immersion and dynamism. Ubisoft included clips supposedly representing the sort of visual fidelity to be expected from the Switch 2 port, and, while the image quality obviously isn't the crisp image of the 4K Ultra settings with RT we saw in our in-depth performance review of Assassin's Creed Shadows , the texture and detail levels look reasonable for the notoriously underpowered Switch 2. Ubisoft is using DLSS to upscale the image, a technology that is frequently being seen as a requirement for decent frame rates and image quality.