Bloodstained's Switch port is now in a "nearly identical state for content" as PC and console
"This is an important step leading into the upcoming Zangetsu release."
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night's troubled Switch port is now in a "nearly identical state for content" as its console and PC siblings, says publisher 505 Games.
As spotted by our pals at VGC, 505 shared an update on the official forums, update 1.04 brings stability improvements - such as crashes experienced while interacting with bookcases - as well as fixing an issue with corruption during dialogue which could lead to crashing. It also addressed some vague "performance improvements related to animations" and "general bug fixing", and acknowledged that SE Asia and Korea still remain one patch behind, but can now upgrade to patch 1.03.
"While we will continue to work on overall performance improvements for Switch, this update brings the game's platforms to a nearly identical state for content," the post concluded. "This is an important step leading into the upcoming Zangetsu release, which we will talk more about in the near future."
As Matt reported last year, 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" and update 1.03 reduced loading times by up to 70 per cent, as well as hoping to eliminate input lag entirely.
