It’s always the elephant in the room whenever a AAA title – even older ones – make their way over to the Switch. How well will they run?
The answer, as far as Diablo 3: Eternal Collection is concerned, is surprisingly well. A demo build of the game is playable at Gamescom this year, with attendees given the choice of four-player co-op or single player in a Greater Rift.
The demo gives you a level 70 character from one of the seven classes, and because I wanted to hurt the Switch as much as possible – with explosions and lighting effects, of course – I picked a Wizard.
The gameplay was surprisingly smooth, holding up at 60 FPS with minimal drops from my experience. I played the game in co-op as well, although for the most part only two or three players were on screen (because people kept wandering around the levels).
It’s best seen in motion, so I captured a couple of short over-the-shoulder videos to illustrate.
There’s also plenty of footage online for extra clarity. Here’s a chunk from GameXplain to help illustrate the game in motion further.
The quick gameplay was enough to answer the biggest question I have with Diablo‘s Switch launch. I’m all on board for a co-op trip to hell once more, but not if it’s laggy, the frame rate doesn’t hold up in huge fights, or if the visual quality is too blurry to properly enjoy.
But none of those things were a problem in the Diablo Gamescom demo. It looked good in handheld mode, ran perfectly fine, and that was with a few other players firing off spells and explosions of their own. Good job, Blizzard.
The author travelled to Gamescom as a guest of Nvidia.
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