Nintendo’s next big Switch 2 exclusive, Donkey Kong Bananza, launches later this week and will finally deliver that big single-player binge-worthy game that the hybrid console currently lacks. When you finally get your hands on the new game, you’ll be destroying everything at 60FPS, and that’s because Nintendo believed it was necessary for this latest Donkey Kong adventure.
On July 15, Nintendo posted a lengthy and interesting three-part interview with Donkey Kong Bananza’s lead developers. Topics discussed in the interview include redesigning Donkey Kong, figuring out the game’s tone and mood, and more. But one part that caught my attention is when Daisuke Watanabe, the game’s art director, and Wataru Tanaka, another director on Bananza, discussed voxel technology and the Switch 2 hardware.
The entire discussion around voxel tech, which allows the ground and terrain in Bananza to deform and break apart dynamically, is surprisingly deep and worth reading. The key moment came at the end, when Tanaka explained that after experimenting with pushing voxel tech on the OG Switch, they discovered it wasn’t powerful enough to let them go as wild as they wanted. So the game hopped over to Switch 2 and suddenly was running at a smooth 60FPS.
“With the move to Switch 2, we gained not only more memory but also greater processing capacity,” said Tanaka. “That gave us the freedom to incorporate gameplay ideas we’d previously abandoned because they were too demanding. When we got down to trying it, we discovered that not only could it handle the heavy processing requirements, but it also ran at 60 FPS. Things we’d given up on, like explosions flinging large objects or causing them to collapse, were now possible.”
Watanabe further added that with Bananza running at 60FPS, smashing up the world became a lot more “satisfying” and was a big improvement over 30FPS.
“The physics of smashing involve lots of things all happening at once,” explained Watanabe. “Donkey Kong throws a punch, the terrain and objects break apart, and visual effects show debris flying outward. All of that is packed into a single moment. At 30 fps, we couldn’t fully capture everything that happens in that instant. But at 60 fps, we saw that sense of destruction coming through much more clearly.”
Watanabe added: “Not only did Switch 2 enable the game to run well, it unlocked the game’s full potential – no, it made the game possible.”
As a self-described video game tech snob who values high framerates, I’m very, very happy that the team behind Donkey Kong Bananza decided to focus so much on nailing 60FPS. Now, I just have to wait until July 17 to play the Super Mario Odyssey team’s next big 3D platformer.
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