505 Games has moved assure players that the long-promised patch to fix Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s troubled Switch port is still on the way, but it now isn’t expected until November, almost four months after the game’s launch.
Fans were understandably unhappy when Koji Igarashi’s long-awaited Castlevania spiritual successor arrived on Nintendo’s platform back in June. While the game itself is undoubtedly superb, the Switch version was beset with performance issues.
As Digital Foundry reported at the time, the game suffered from erratic frame rates, extremely blurry image quality, low resolution art assets, crashes, lengthy loading times that, in some cases, “becomes downright horrible”, and unpleasantly high input lag. The result, it’s fair to say, was not a particularly enjoyable experience.
In response to complaints, developer ArtPlay and publisher 505 Games pledged to fix these issues, telling fans that it was “immediately shifting resources to improve performance and stability for the Switch”, and that it would be addressing problem areas through a series of small updates. In August, 505 confirmed that work was still ongoing and that it would now “bundle performance improvements into (likely) one patch”, although no ETA was forthcoming.
Bloodstained Is Brilliant – But What’s Up With The Switch Port? Watch on YouTube
However, in a new blog post, the publisher has finally confirmed that it hopes to have its fixes released “by the end of November”. These will now arrive in the form of two separate updates, the first addressing the bulk of problems, and the second improving performance for “especially troublesome areas and enemies”.