Elden Ring is one of the most exciting third-party games coming to Nintendo Switch 2. Who among us doesn’t want to get our shit rocked on the go? Well, according to folks who have played FromSoftware’s action RPG at Gamescom in Cologne, the system is apparently struggling to run the game in handheld mode, and to make matters more worrisome, Bandai Namco is reportedly not letting people record footage of it.
Nintendo Life posted a video on its YouTube channel discussing the port and said that while they only played the Switch 2 port for about 15 minutes, the game looks pretty good visually, but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of performance. The tutorial ran pretty well at a locked 30fps. Once they reached the open world, everything changed.
“It’s really bad, and I understand why they don’t want you to see this, because wowie zowie, it is terrible,” Nintendo Life video producer Felix Sanchez said. “Of course, you’re never going to see the light of this—maybe it will just release in that state, but I can’t imagine they will do that—It was like playing Ocarina of Time. It was like 20 frames per second, sometimes I was like, ‘This has dropped [to] 15 frames per second.’”
Sanchez says that in the Switch 2’s handheld mode, the game was “incredibly unstable” in the open-world segments, even in surprisingly static areas where few enemies were on screen at once. You can hear his full impressions below:
So if you’re wondering why Elden Ring footage is conspicuously absent from the internet’s Gamescom coverage, now you know that Bandai Namco has prohibited it. The game is supposed to launch on the Switch 2 this year, but it doesn’t have a release date at the moment. It’s entirely possible the game could be delayed into 2026 to fix things up, or that things could turn around by the time it finally comes out. Whatever the case, it sounds like Elden Ring on Switch 2 has not made the best first impression.