This was pointed out by Ori and the Blind Forest game director Thomas Mahler, who was discussing the Ori and the Blind Forest Switch port in a Resetera thread. Mahler pointed out that the team at Moon Studios has been working on Ori for about a decade now, and so they have been able to improve on it with its re-releases and the like. Furthermore, optimizations that were done for the upcoming sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, were able to be applied to the Switch version of the game.
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The biggest way that the Ori and the Blind Forest Switch port performs better than its Xbox One counterpart is the sprite animations. According to Mahler, Ori’s sprites on PC and Xbox One run at 30 frames per second, but on the Switch, the animations have been updated to 60 frames per second. Mahler credits this to the optimizations that have been done for the Ori Switch port. " […] so technically Ori actually even animates a bit smoother on Switch than on other platforms," he said in the Resetera thread.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the Xbox One couldn’t run character animations in Ori and the Blind Forest at 60 frames per second, it’s just not something that the developers were able to implement at the time without the optimizations that were developed later on. Even so, it’s still interesting that a game published by Xbox Game Studios technically runs the best on a Nintendo console.
Ori and the Blind Forest is a critically-acclaimed game with or without the slightly improved animations, and so it’s a safe bet regardless of what platform players pick it up on. Being able to play it on the go is certainly a nice touch, though, and that advantage combined with the animation upgrade arguably makes the Ori and the Blind Forest Switch port the definitive way to experience the game.
Ori and the Blind Forest is out now for PC, PS4, and Switch.
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Source: Resetera
