The much-anticipated Doom Eternal launched earlier in 2020 on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia, but while it was promised that the game would get a Switch port, it has yet to come out. In fact, not even the release date for the Switch port has been announced, leaving fans feeling a little antsy. Since the first Doom reboot got an exceptionally high-quality port for the Switch, expectations are high for the sequel, even though a release date for such a port still hasn’t been announced. But according to Doom Eternal’s devs, this is set to change very soon.
It was in an interview with Gamereactor that Id Software’s Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin promised that more news regarding the Doom Eternal port, which is in the delicate care of Switch port specialists Panic Button, will be revealed very shortly. “We’ll be talking about the release date pretty soon,” Stratton said. “We haven’t announced that yet – I can’t do that now. It’s really made great progress.”
Stratton, who has dubbed the other versions of the game for consoles a “feather in the cap” of Id Software’s tech team, believes that the Switch port will be just as impressive as all of those other versions, even though the port will be using the somewhat inferior capabilities of the Nintendo Switch. “I think it’ll be every bit as good as Doom 2016 was, and I’m super excited for people to get it,” he says.
It’s a little ironic, considering that Stratton has also claimed that the first Doom Switch port “felt a little bit like an experiment.” Still, he believes that the port of Doom Eternal will hold up against other versions. “We’re really not watering it down at all,” he says. “People can expect the full experience.”
To this day, Doom still holds the title of most (or at least one of the most) impressive ports on the Nintendo Switch, and due to its success, other port studios are growing more confident in their ability to do the same thing. XCOM 2 Collection studio Virtuos recently said that nearly any game from the current generation of consoles could reasonably be made to work on the Nintendo Switch, albeit at slightly lower quality. If that’s to be believed, there’s really a whole lot of possibilities as to which games may eventually come to the Nintendo Switch. After all, we’ve seen some interesting additions already, in the form of other AAA games such as Catherine: Full Body, The Outer Worlds, Burnout Paradise Remastered, and BioShock: The Collection.
Of course, legal issues are the most likely thing to stop particular ports from happening, but it would be nice if we could see some more titles make it to the Switch. That said, if those games already exist on other consoles and you own both that console and the game, maybe there isn’t much of a reason to get a Switch version too, but that comes down to personal preference.
