Elden Ring New Release Slammed as a 'Disaster'

If you were excited for the next big Elden Ring release, then unfortunately I’m going to have to harsh your buzz, man… because it’s not sounding great for the upcoming port.

When the trailer for Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition was revealed, we all had the same reaction: how in the hell did FromSoftware manage to get this to run on a Nintendo Switch 2?

Turns out, they didn’t– at least, not in handheld mode anyway.

Gamescom is currently in full swing at the moment, and a bunch of demos for upcoming games can be tried out well ahead of their release dates, including the likes of Resident Evil 9, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and the Nintendo Switch 2 port of Elden Ring.

Someone probably should have warned either Bandai Namco or Nintendo that video game journalists would be in attendance however, because every single report regarding Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition on the Nintendo Switch 2 has been decidedly negative.

IGN’s Ian Higton branded the game as a “disaster”, and noted that “frame rate drops were significant when turning the camera whilst exploring outside of the tutorial area”.

Nintendo Life’s Felix Sanchez also noted that they believed it dropped down to somewhere around 15 frames per second, stating that “It’s really bad, and I understand why they don’t want you to see this, because wowie zowie, it is terrible… of course, you’re never going to see the light of this…”

In regards to Sanchez’s comment about how we’re “never going to see” the footage of the Nintendo Switch 2 port of the game in action, that’s because nobody at the Elden Ring booth at Gamescom was allowed to record footage of the game.

Obviously that implies that someone over at Bandai Namco’s PR team is aware of how bad it would look, but personally I kind of think getting the information second-hand almost makes it sound worse.

While it may be easy to blame the Nintendo Switch 2 for the game’s terrible performance, I don’t think that’s the case.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco are somewhat infamous for their terrible ports, especially when it comes to PC releases. Plus, the Nintendo Switch 2 can run Cyberpunk 2077 at a very consistent 30 frames per second, so I’m going to wager that this is just a case of Elden Ring being terribly optimised on the system.

There is of course still time for them to fix the issues before it drops, as Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition is targeting a vague 2025 release date. If we assume that it’ll drop in December, that gives them around four months to sort things out.

Or, y’know, delay it. It’s hardly going to get people excited for FromSoftware’s Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods if Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition ends up running at 15 fps on release.