It's not like Breath of the Wild ever looked outright disappointing, but comparing the 2017 game's original Switch version with how it runs on Switch 2 is like flipping through your middle school yearbook and thanking God you no longer need braces. The difference is immediately noticeable, apparently making the Switch 2 a pleasantly surprising upgrade to even some Nintendo executives.
Nintendo of America senior vice president of product development Nate Bihldorff suggests as much in a new interview with Nintendo Life. When asked if he'd been able to find any instances of frame rate drops with either Breath of the Wild or its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, on Switch 2, Bihldorff says "I haven't, to be honest."
Bihldorff continues: "Believe me, the first thing I did when I booted up the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of Breath of the Wild is, I went to the Korok Forest, because I knew the area previously had been the heaviest processing load."
"And as I walked around, all this foliage is finally being able to get rendered," he says. He still believes that it is "absolute wizardry" that the original Switch was able to handle a game as lush and demanding as Breath of the Wild. But Bihldorff also acknowledges "there's no question that [the Korok Forest] was the area that saw the biggest performance hit" on the first Switch. On the Switch 2, "I saw no dips" in Breath of the Wild's behavior, he adds.
"I will say, nothing's perfect," Bihldorff notes, "especially with Tears of the Kingdom. The amount of stuff that you can do in that game is impossible to predict because of the access they've given you to building things."
So when it comes to Nintendo's upcoming console, Bihldorff acknowledges, "there probably are still gonna be ways that you can go beyond the stress of the system. But I haven't found any."
I wildly underestimated the Switch 2, and after just getting a Steam Deck, I'm almost regretting it.
