Dead Cells dev promises better Switch performance

Dead Cells is an amazing game, but the Switch version struggles to maintain a smooth frame rate. Motion Twin, the game’s developer, didn’t think it was that big of a deal during its own internal testing, and the idea of delaying the Switch release to optimize performance seemed worse than launching it in the current state, it said on Reddit.

The fans have made enough of a fuss about it, however, that priorities have changed.

“We’ve learned that just because we’re the developers, doesn’t mean we’re always right about our own game,” the developer said in a statement posted to Reddit. “So now we’ll put what we learned into practice, listen to your feedback and get to work fixing the problem right away. We’ve allocated all available resources to the issue (remember we’re a small team) and improving the performance on Switch it our main priority as of now.”

It doesn’t sound like patch is going to happen quickly, though. The obvious and surface-level tweaks to improve performance have already been done.

“This leaves us with the big time consuming changes as well as exploring new possibilities which might really help, or not, we won’t know until we start,” the developers wrote. “Of course on console all updates must be certified before reaching you guys, which adds extra time between now and a potential fix. So to be clear we’re looking at November at the absolute earliest, if the god of game dev comes down from the clouds ad blesses our guys right now. This is however as soon as it is physically possible for us right now.”

Motion Twin is going to reschedule its Ask Me Anything session for next week so fans can ask about porting and optimization, and the team has stated its commitment to staying transparent during the development of the update.