Oh, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Switch owners want to love you, they really do. Why do you have to be such a tease? Telling us what you’re going to fix is all well and good, but can’t you get to the fixing already?
As you’re no doubt aware, the Switch has been doing super well lately. It’s all but erased those sad, dejected memories of the Wii U. As with most of the best consoles, solid sales can be attributed to two key things: quality first-party titles and robust third-party support. With the latter in mind, the Switch has been seeing some fantastic ports. Nintendo's cosy new friendship with Microsoft has even seen Cuphead and Ori and the Blind Forest ported to the system.
It’s great to see a whole range of multi-platform titles coming to Nintendo’s console as well as Sony and Microsoft’s. Historically, lots of games have tended to miss Nintendo’s stop. A lot of this tends to be the result of the big N’s philosophy regarding tech specs (to wit: not caring about tech specs). There are certain titles, then, that the Switch wouldn’t be able to accommodate. If The Witcher 3 isn’t one of them, then Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night certainly shouldn’t be.
Nevertheless, the Switch edition was having some major issues on release, and it still is. It’s been blighted by technical problems since launching, and patches to try to start rectifying the many issues unleashed potentially game-breaking bugs. Back in July, the team promised that getting the Switch version up to snuff was their top priority, over and above DLC and the like. Now, as October approaches, they’re… well, still promising.
In a new Kickstarter post, Koji Igarashi proudly let us know that the backer rewards are starting to be shipped out, before getting to the nitty-gritty of the Switch performance issues.
“Work on the Nintendo Switch graphical and performance update continues,” the post states. “We apologize for the long development cycle. Most of the changes are on a room-by-room, enemy-by-enemy basis so there are a significant number of assets being reworked and it’s taking more time than initially expected.
We are pleased with the progress that has been made so far and look forward to getting it into your hands.”
Igarashi further explains that the improvements will focus on four key bugbears that players have with the game in its current state: loading times, particle effects, input lag and visual fidelity. As for when we can expect the improvements, the post claims that these updates should be released by the end of November. There are expected to be two: a first, bigger update that contains the bulk of the improvements, and a second one that deals with “a couple of especially troublesome areas and enemies.”
Sure, it’s good to hear that they’re taking this crucial work seriously, but ‘the end of November… maybe’ isn’t exactly what a lot of fans wanted to hear. You know how patient gamers aren’t, right?