The fine folks over at Digital Foundry have provided a full tech review of Skyrim on the Switch 2 and, well, when you look at some of the figures presented here, it really makes you wonder what the heck Bethesda is even doing right now.
Naturally, as highlighted in our original review, the input lag is potentially the biggest sinner here. Digital Foundry measures the lag on Switch 2 at an astonishing 293.8ms, while the original Switch fared better at 204.5ms, and the PS5 at 118.3ms. To really illustrate how poor this is, DF states that the lag is perhaps worse than "most, if not all" cloud streaming services.
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Bethesda has, to its credit, already stated that its looking into the issues, so we can probably expect a patch to smooth things out in the near future. However, the team recommends that players disable the gesture controls to potentially alleviate the issue right now, but according to DF, this does absolutely nothing. In fact, the test footage presented in the above video was all without the gesture controls, motion controls, and mouse controls.
To make matters worse, Skyrim is still running at 30fps on the Switch 2, which is especially ridiculous when you consider the age of the game and its performance on the likes of the PS5. To be fair, the frame rate is very stable for the most part, but for goodness sake, this is the absolute minimum you would expect.
In terms of visuals, yes, the Switch 2 version is drastically improved over the Switch. However, there are still as couple of troubling issues. Reflections on bodies of water will glitch out when moving the camera up or down, while DF notes that there's a strange blue hue to the trees found in the Riften region.
We could just about live with 30fps if Bethesda can smooth out the input lag here, but we'd nevertheless urge the studio to try and push the performance up as high as it can reasonably go. Regardless, what's been delivered at launch is not what the fans deserve, and Bethesda really needs to get it sorted as a top priority.