The September Nintendo Direct was a bit of a snoozefest compared to some of the past ones. It didn’t help that a lot of the trailers shown in the event were for ports of games that already came out on other platforms, and not all of them looked super impressive. While a lot of these ports looked fine, a few of them caught my eye for the wrong reasons: They looked bad. It has me curious about how long the Switch 2 will be able to support multiplatform blockbusters before the console is pushed beyond its limits.
During the showcase, Nintendo announced new Metroid and Kirby games as well as a bunch of updates for existing games. Cool stuff, sure, but it did feel like this was Partner Direct designed to fulfill marketing obligations to third-party devs and publishers. Hence all the trailers for upcoming Switch 2 ports. Some of these, like the combo trailer announcing the ports of the Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4 remakes on Switch 2, looked quite nice.
And then there was the choppy trailer for the Switch 2 port of Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. Holy laggy crap, Batman, look at that unstable framerate!
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is the kind of game that was always going to be a struggle for the Switch 2: a big, gorgeous, and seamless open-world game with tons of Lego objects popping off at all times as players break stuff. You can clearly see the Switch 2 version of the game chugging whenever blasts of Lego bricks and bits appear on screen. It’s not surprising the Switch 2 version didn’t arrive on time alongside the others.
And speaking of stuttery, open-world games with bad frame rates, let’s take a look at the short trailer for the Switch 2 port of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.
I can feel the Switch 2 heating up in my hand as it chugs under the weight of this massive medieval RPG filled with NPCs, quests, and other systems all happening at once in a grand simulation. Many of the comments below this trailer point out the poor framerate and how the Switch 2 version is clearly not running as well as some might have hoped.
I also spotted a few nasty-looking ports in the sizzle reel of third-party games that popped up near the end of the Direct. The Ascent is a cool, top-down, cyberpunk-y action RPG, but it looks like a blurry, stuttering mess on Switch 2. I was also not impressed by Hell Is Us running on a Switch 2, as the short bits of gameplay we got to see today showed this port looking quite rough, with some nasty performance issues.
So what does this mean? Well, I think the big takeaway is that while the Switch 2 is a lot more capable and powerful of machine than the original Switch, it is still behind the PS5 and Xbox Series X. I think it’s clear that the Switch 2 struggles with bigger, more advanced-looking open-world games, or titles that feature a lot of things happening at once in a detailed environment.
As we move toward the next generation of consoles, I’ll eventually be very curious to see how Switch 2 ports of those games will hold up. I suspect some will look great, as we saw today during the Direct. But others, well… remember how bad some of the last ports to arrive on the OG Switch looked? We might see a repeat of that in the future following the launch of PS6.