A week ago, Koji Igarashi’s highly-successful Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night reached its conclusion, as the versions for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC began rolling out to the public – and the project's backers. It received a very positive reception on those platforms, and as someone who played the PC version on Steam, it’s quite an amazing title, possibly one of my favorites so far for 2019.
That said, it did worry some of the backers on the Nintendo Switch when developer ArtPlay pushed back its release date to July 25, which was yesterday. That's a week after the launch on the other three platforms. It now seems that there is reason to worry for owners of the Nintendo handheld, as the Switch version takes a really bad dive performance-wise compared to the other platforms.
In the few hours since it’s release Switch owners of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night flocked to various forums like Reddit to discuss it’s heavily unoptimized performance. Among the issues listed were:
- Severely downgraded graphics
- Bad framerates despite the fact listed above
- Weird textures
- Huge input delay
Video comparisons between the Switch version and other platforms have been released on YouTube, and they tell the same story – Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night on the Switch feels like a very bad port, and is certainly unplayable in some aspects. Check out a comparison video below.
While all of this has been pretty disappointing, the developers have released a statement on the game’s Kickstarter page, addressing the issues and concerns. In a Switch Release update post, 505 Games community manager Jason Ryan stated that the developers are “listening to the feedback regarding Switch performance,” and that they ultimately want “everyone, regardless of platform, to be able to enjoy the game and have it run smoothly.”
“Throughout the QA process we have been addressing performance issues in the game,” Ryan continued. “Update 1.01 was published to Switch prior to launch to add content and improve performance. It did not accomplish as much as we had hoped and we need to do more.”
It's unfortunate that the Switch version was neglected, particularly when you consider that many of Igarashi’s classic Igavanias were released on handhelds, which in turn drew more people to back the Nintendo Switch version. We can only hope that this gets fixed so that Switch players can start enjoying Bloodstained, although if the bugs on the other versions are of any note, it’s going to be a long and rough road ahead.
