Elden Ring Switch 2 preview shows a port that's actually pretty good

Elden Ring Tarnished Edition was supposed to be the Nintendo Switch 2’s killer app. Announced last year alongside the console’s full reveal, it looked like FromSoftware’s open-world action RPG was poised to be the game that showed us how powerful the new console was. That didn’t quite pan out. After a shaky demo at Gamescom in 2025, FromSoftware delayed the port, then went close to radio silent on both it and its Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods. The six months of unsettling quiet left fans plenty of open space to plant red flags.

The good news? Elden Ring Tarnished Edition is alive and well. At this year’s Game Developers Conference, Bandai Namco rolled out a newly optimized build of the game on Switch 2. I tried out the demo in both docked and handheld mode to get a better idea of how well FromSoftware is adapting to the Switch 2 era. Even with some compromises, I’m feeling much better about how well Nintendo’s console is equipped to handle FromSoftware’s grand style.

The 15-minute demo tossed me right into the beginning of Elden Ring, just long enough to beeline it to Margit and get my ass kicked in front of a room full of press and developers. It also let me try out both of the new classes coming with Tarnished Edition: a heavy knight with a chunky dodge roll and a lighter knight with much quicker striking capabilities. Both new archetypes seem like perfectly good canvases to paint on that fit in with Elden Ring’s current classes.

The big takeaway here is that the new build seems much more stable than what FromSoftware publicly showcased last summer. The image quality, for instance, is surprisingly strong in both docked and handheld mode. I didn’t notice any egregiously low-res or blurry textures, even in handheld mode. The iconic moment where my character first stepped foot into The Lands Between still felt as grand as it does on other consoles, with trees and a sea of yellow colors spilling out in the distance. I get the sense that FromSoftware is optimizing the experience for quality first over performance.

Thankfully, that doesn’t appear to come at the cost of huge sacrifices in frame rates, either. While the Switch 2 version most certainly won’t be hitting 60 FPS, it doesn’t seem too far behind handhelds like the Steam Deck anymore. At a glance, I’d wager that it was running in the 30 to 40 FPS range, depending on how demanding the scene was. I was able to take down an easy, early game boss without disruptive stutters. (And get destroyed by Margit without hitches to blame.)

The performance is far from perfect, mind you. The biggest dip in frame rate I saw wasn’t in a boss fight, but when it started raining while riding Torrent through the world. That’s what makes me a little hesitant to say that FromSoftware has totally cracked the Switch 2 code. I’ll be curious to see how stability holds up in visually busy areas like Crumbling Farum Azula, or what happens when I start using flashy spells.

There are still question marks, to be sure, but six months of optimization seem to have worked wonders for a game that seemed like it was hardly going to work at all on Nintendo’s latest system. I guess that’s what happens when you let FromSoftware cook. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if that also holds true for The Duskbloods, which we haven’t seen a second of since its initial reveal. But if an Elden Ring port can run on Switch 2 well enough, I’m far less concerned about an original game that was built around the console than I was last summer.