Early Gamescom impressions of the Nintendo Switch 2 port of Elden Ring's Tarnished Edition have not been positive, with IGN reporting that the frame rate chugged and gameplay recording wasn't allowed at the booth. Publisher Bandai Namco has now uploaded its own video of the port in action, but inaction feels more accurate.
A new clip posted to the Bandai Namco Facebook page – and from what I've checked, only this page – shows a few seconds of the Switch 2's Tarnished Edition, recorded externally with a phone or vertical format camera.
This being a non-capture recording, the footage quality ain't great. It's hard to tell whether the hitches in the camera movement are a result of frame drops or simply the Switch 2 operator briefly pausing the camera, but the stuttery result is less than glossy.
That said, there's a short panning shot of the new Tarnished Edition starting class (one of a few bites of minor new content), the Heavy Knight, standing in front of the tutorial section's jail cell, and it definitely looks to have performance snags to me.
This whole video only shows a character standing or slowly walking around the tutorial area – a small, cordoned-off section. There's no combat, and none of the actual open world of Elden Ring – you know, the things that are going to tax performance – is included. The video ends right before the player approaches the Grafted Scion boss of the area.
Granted, I haven't played this port myself, but I don't doubt the reports coming from the show floor, and I do know the pain of struggling to find usable footage for a quick post. All I'm saying is that if I were a social media editor desperately trying to present an increasingly notorious port as something half-decent, like Andrew McCarthy trying to gussy up a corpse in Weekend at Bernie's, I would probably record a section exactly like this.
The comments, you'll be surprised to hear, are not enthused. "Now running at a crisp 20fps on the latest retro equipment," writes one user. "15 fps nice, imagine fps when boss fights," another adds. "They cut it right before the fight so we don't see the fps drop," says a third unimpressed Tarnished.
Performance has never been FromSoftware or Nintendo's strong suit (with the arguable exception of the GameCube), though the Switch 2 has actually run many other games, including former frame drop icon Cyberpunk 2077, pretty darn well. The two may have combined forces for one of the most disappointing ports in recent memory.
