We all know that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom will both sport improved frame rates and resolution on Switch 2 with their added Upgrade Packs, but according to our recent interview with NoA’s Nate Bihldorff, it sounds like both games will pretty much run flawlessly – for the most part, at least.
When asked whether Bilhdorff had encountered any moments in either game in which the frame rate would drop, he simply said “I haven’t to be honest”. He then confirmed that the first area he visited in Breath of the Wild was Korok Forest, a location infamous for its poor performance on the original Switch.
Notably, however, he was careful to add that some of the ridiculous builds fans have been creating in Tears of the Kingdom may potentially push the game to its limits on Switch 2, though he confirmed that he hadn’t found any instances himself in which performance took a hit.
“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. I still think it’s an absolute wizardry that the Switch hardware was able to still run it well. But there’s no question that that was the area that saw the biggest performance hit. I saw no dips.
“I will say, nothing’s perfect, I think, 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. I mean, the mechs that people build that go striding through the environment and launching a gazillion missiles. There probably are still gonna be ways that you can go beyond the stress of the system, but I haven’t found any.”
We imagine fans will be eager to try a few experiments for themselves with Tears of the Kingdom and see if they can produce some fancy contraption that might produce a few drops in frames here and there. For the average player, however, it sounds like we can look forward to flawless performance in both games when they launch alongside the Switch 2 on 5th June 2025.
During the same interview, Bihldorff also confirmed that the new Joy-Con 2 will not feature Hall Effect sticks. The original Switch suffered exponentially from stick-drift, so it’s disappointing to hear that Nintendo hasn’t embraced the Hall Effect technology for its new system. The controllers have, however, been designed from the ground up and should hopefully provide improved performance and durability.
