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Nintendo Switch 2 rumors have been circulating for quite some time now. It’s always exciting when a new console drops, especially from Nintendo as it tends to be the company with the most “experimental” ideas when it comes to console designs and features. The lead-up to the Switch successor console has been particularly aggravating for fans, though, as they continue to feel like a new console with updated specs is necessary in the face of the Switch’s poor performance with current-gen titles. There are very few cases of this being better exemplified than with the recent Switch port of Hogwarts Legacy.
The Unexpected Hogwarts Legacy Switch Performance
All things considered, the performance of Hogwarts Legacy is actually a bit of a surprise to most. A game of this size running on a console that has consistently struggled with so many new generation ports had many fearing the worst. This isn’t to say that Hogwarts Legacy has good performance overall; the quality is fairly low by modern standards. Thankfully, there aren’t massive framerate drops every time more than a handful of NPCs are onscreen or consistently unloaded textures like with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
The fact is, Hogwarts Legacy sets a great precedent for AAA games when it comes to its level of polish, and the industry is only going to continue to push the impressive visuals from here. However, if the Nintendo Switch is struggling to keep up with Hogwarts Legacy, and only barely manages to cross the finish line to have a working port that somehow isn’t a broken, it likely won’t fare well with what’s coming in 2024 and beyond.
Nintendo Switch 2 Rumors
With Nintendo Switch 2 rumors circulating more than ever, many were hoping to get an announcement about the new console before the end of 2023. Now that the holiday season is firmly here, it definitely seems certain at this point that Nintendo has no intention of doing that. On the contrary, the company has been denying many of the rumors and has confirmed that it will continue supporting the Switch for the foreseeable future. From Nintendo’s perspective, this is definitely a smart move. If the Switch 2 isn’t ready for release, beginning to promote it just before the holiday season would only hurt their current console, which will undoubtedly be receiving a significant sales boost over the Christmas period.
Still, there are a lot of questions surrounding the Switch successor, ones that will hopefully be answered sometime in the first half of 2024. The specs are certainly the most important. Nintendo has never been known as a hardware beast in the 21st century. At best, the company remains a step behind the competition when it comes to graphical performance, which works fine for their typically non-graphics intensive first-party titles, but as the Switch becomes increasingly third-party friendly, something clearly needs to change.
Many are hoping for a Switch successor that can, at a very minimum, properly run everything currently on the market and everything that will be coming in the near future. It would be great to see a Nintendo console that can receive proper ports of Elden Ring and Final Fantasy 16. There were also recently rumors that the Switch 2 could utilize some kind of dual screen technology similar the the Nintendo 3DS. If that were the case, and the console is backwards compatible with both original Switch and 3DS/DS games, it would certainly unlock a world of possibilities for fans investing in the new Nintendo hardware.
Is it wishful thinking? Almost certainly. But a Hogwarts Legacy Switch port that isn’t completely broken felt like wishful thinking not long ago, too, and now gamers are just happy to have received the bare minimum.
