The Fallout 4 Anniversary port runs better than you expect on Switch 2, loads fast, and feels best at 40 FPS, even if Bethesda leaves easy wins on the table.
Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition on Switch 2 may have been floating around your feed lately, and for once, the big talking point is not just whether it runs. The first thing you notice is the price. Bethesda is asking $60, full stop, and that’s the hardest part to defend. You are getting Fallout 4, all its DLC, and the Creation content, so it is not a small package.
It is a ton of content for the Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition, and it can keep you busy for a long time. Still, it is a 2015 release, and a lot of the frustration here is that the value doesn’t match the sticker price. If the game launched closer to $40, it would land in a much friendlier spot, with more fans being able to afford it.
What makes the conversation more interesting is that people are buying it anyway. It has been sitting near the top of the Switch charts this week, which says a lot about how hungry Switch owners have been for Bethesda’s library. This release marks the start of a larger Switch 2 rollout that began with Skyrim, continues with Fallout 4, and is set to include Indiana Jones and an Oblivion remaster later in the year.
The launch of Skyrim also likely made you approach Fallout 4 on Switch 2 with caution.
The Switch 2 version of Skyrim had delayed input and noticeable lag, and it did not even ship with proper frame rate targets at launch. It was the kind of port that made you wonder if Bethesda’s quality control was slipping even further, especially when you remember how Fallout 4 has been handled over the years.
The base game landed fine, but later updates did it no favors. The next-gen update made things worse in some places, and the Anniversary Edition changes did not exactly inspire confidence among fans either. If you have played Fallout 4 on PC and dealt with bloated load times and technical issues, you already know why a portable port sounded risky.
And yet, this is where Switch 2 Fallout 4 catches you off guard, because it performs better than you expect. You get three frame rate targets right out of the gate: 30, 40, and 60 FPS. Switching between them is easy via the display menu, though you cannot do so mid-session. You have to back out to the main menu, but the load times are quick enough that it is not a dealbreaker.
The load times are the first real surprise. You go in assuming this will be a slow, compromised experience, and instead it feels snappy. If you have lived through the worst of Fallout 4’s PC behavior, this release almost flips the frustration on its head. On console and now on Switch 2, the Anniversary Edition loading seems to be in a healthier place, which makes the PC situation stick out like a sore thumb.
The second surprise is how usable the Switch 2’s performance modes are.
The 40 FPS option turns out to be the sweet spot. You get a cleaner look than 60, better stability than you might expect, and it avoids the more obvious image compromises that show up when you push for the highest frame rate. Fallout 4 is the kind of game where the horizon matters.
You are not only reacting to what is right in front of you; you are scanning the distance and following the way the UI marks locations across the landscape. When you crank the game to 60 on Switch 2, you can feel that trade-off. The game runs okay-ish, but the visual downgrade is more noticeable, and the draw distance can make the world feel like it is shrinking in around you.
At 60 FPS, aliasing becomes noticeable quickly. It is not the worst you have ever seen, but it is obvious around objects and character models. In handheld mode, you can get away with more because the image is already compressed by the smaller screen, but docked play makes the compromises easier to spot.
The draw distance is more important to focus on. The idea behind Fallout 4 is that you can see something far away and start walking toward it. The UI helps with this by putting markers on your compass when points of interest are close enough. When the distance settings get tighter, you might get that strange mismatch where the compass says something is there, but the world doesn’t show it clearly yet.
In the 40 FPS mode, the image looks sharper, and objects draw in from farther out, so the world reads better.
If you still insist on 60 FPS, it is not a disaster. You will run around the Commonwealth smoothly, and during actual action, you may not fixate on distant flickers or minor shimmering. But if you care about the full experience of Fallout 4, especially the way the game uses distance and visibility to feed curiosity, the middle option just feels more natural.
Performance-wise, the 60 FPS mode can show a tiny hiccup here and there while you are jogging around the open world. It is not the kind of thing that ruins a fight or knocks you out of a shootout, but you can feel a brief stutter when the game is pushing hard to stay at 60. At 40 FPS, that is less of a problem, and you also get a better look at characters during dialogue. Fallout 4 has a lot of conversations, a lot of close-ups, and a lot of time spent staring at faces. The sharper presentation at 40 helps avoid that smeared look you get when performance modes get aggressive.
That blend of portability and competence is what makes this release feel like a small win. You have wanted Bethesda games on a Nintendo handheld for years, and Switch 2 finally makes that dream feel less like a novelty and more like a legit option. It is not the exact same magic moment that older ports sometimes delivered, but it is close to that familiar feeling you got when big open-world games started landing on handheld hardware.
At the same time, the game itself is still Fallout 4, and revisiting it for the tenth, twentieth, or eightieth time can change how it hits. The intro doesn’t land the same way every time. You start seeing how fast it shoves you forward, how quickly it hands you the early toys, and how swiftly it leans into training wheels.
You get your first weapon, your first companion, your first power armor, and the whole opening stretch tries to push you along a pretty specific path. Compared to Fallout 3’s early freedom and danger, Fallout 4 can feel safer at the start, and it becomes harder to stumble into real trouble early on. You might also find yourself wishing the game spent more time in the pre-war world because that slice of the setting still feels like an opportunity that could have been explored further.
All of that is part of why the $60 ask is such a tough sell.
Bethesda needs easy wins right now, and this is one of those times when taking care of the customer would have made a good port into a feel-good release. If the price had been lower, the conversation would have been almost entirely positive. Keeping the whole game on the cartridge would have been another easy win, especially if you care about physical collections.
That is where the comparison to Indiana Jones matters. Indiana Jones is set to ship with the entire game on the cart, and that makes you want to support a physical copy. Fallout 4 does not get that treatment, which means Bethesda leaves another obvious goodwill point on the table.
So the advice is pretty clear. The real value of buying Fallout 4 on Switch 2 is being able to play it on the go. When docked, it looks good and works well, but the whole point of getting it for the Switch 2 is that it’s portable. If you like playing games on the go, this makes more sense because you get a solid Bethesda-style open world that you can carry around without it feeling like a mess.
If you are a die-hard Fallout 4 player, or you just genuinely like the game and want an excuse to start a new run, this port is better than you would have expected after seeing Skyrim’s rougher rollout. The performance options are welcome, load times are surprisingly quick, and the 40 FPS mode strikes a clean balance between clarity and smoothness.
But if you are looking for Bethesda to truly do right by Switch 2 owners, the price mainly keeps it from being the slam-dunk win it could have been. The port itself is solid, and it is worth keeping an eye on Bethesda’s Switch 2 efforts before the Oblivion remaster drops on the Switch 2.
