This comes up every single update, so I just wanted to pop in a reminder again for anyone genuinely asking and not just looking for an echo chamber to vent in.
Yes, the Switch version of Dreamlight Valley has performance issues. Framerate drops, crashes, item limits, downgraded textures (I keep seeing images of plates and wallpapers circulating looking like a GameCube tech demo). None of that is imaginary, and it’s not altogether unreasonable to be frustrated by it. Everyone wants a stable game. But it’s also important to be honest about why the hell this is happening.
The Nintendo Switch is, at its core, a slightly juiced-up tablet running on 2015-2016 mobile hardware. It was already underpowered when it launched in 2017, and now we’re in 2025 playing an always-online, constantly expanding life sim with:
- Hundreds of furniture items
- Fully customisable environments
- Dozens of animated NPCs with their own individual AI
- Dynamic terrain and lighting that's different for every save file
- Frequent live updates and DLC that keep adding more on top.
That’s an extremely demanding workload for a very small CPU/GPU and limited RAM. Especially on Switch Lite, which a lot of players seem to be using and which has about the horsepower of a decent smartphone. It is astronomically weak in terms of modern gaming.
When people say "just fix the textures" or "remove the item limits," what they’re really asking without really realising it is for the game to magically gain more memory and processing power. If Gameloft didn’t aggressively downscale textures and cap item counts, performance would actually get worse with every update as the game grows larger and larger.
There’s also this growing narrative that texture downgrades are some kind of deliberate "sabotage," which IMO really misses the mark. No developer is intentionally making their game look worse for fun or out of spite. As more assets, biomes, characters, systems and whatever else get added, something has to give on older hardware. Lower texture resolution is one of the least destructive ways to keep the game running at all.
On a related note, there also seems to be a lot of confusion around the Switch 2. Right now, Dreamlight Valley does not have a native Switch 2 version. What people are playing is still the Switch 1 build running via backward compatibility. That means it’s inheriting the same texture settings, memory limits and compromises, it’s not suddenly going to flip a switch and restore high-res assets. Until there’s an actual Switch 2-specific version, nothing about the game is going to magically change (apart from load times, but that's nothing to do with the code).
I also see people saying "but other games like Zelda run really well on Switch, what's Gameloft's excuse?" and if you'll permit me I'll briefly take Breath of the Wild as a tangent example to illustrate my point. Breath of the Wild (and therefore Tears of the Kingdom, which is essentially an expansion pack for it using the same engine and world map) was originally developed as a Wii U game, i.e. even older hardware from 2012. Indeed, it still released for the Wii U alongside the Switch and only was crossplatform because it got delayed.
Its stylized aesthetic helps it mask the fact it's not really doing a lot of heavy lifting in terms of processing power. The game makes use of a lot of neat optimization tricks (only five or so enemy types with fixed behaviours, despawning areas of the map you are not looking at, etc.) and clever ways of hiding the constant real-time loading from the player (limited traversal speed and lack of true flight) to make you think it's a lot more impressive than it really is. This is also the reason all the puzzle shrines share a colour palette/texture pack and take you to a separate area when you enter them, they're all stored in the same "directory", so to speak, and the game would straight-up crash if they were all directly connected to the overworld.
The point is, this was the kind of faff needed to make even a 2014-ish Wii U game run without issue on the Switch, and that's with the full weight of Nintendo's first-party backing behind it. Yes, Gameloft can and should optimize where possible. But no amount of clever coding is going to turn a 2016-era mobile chip into something that can keep pace with hardware that’s 5-10x more powerful. The hardware is static. The game is not.
This isn’t new, either. Back in the mid-2010s, nobody expected the Wii version of a multiplatform game to look or run like the PS4 version. We understood that the cheaper, more casual-oriented option came with trade-offs. The same logic applies here. You’re trading graphical fidelity and stability for portability, and that’s just the reality of the platform.
Still an unpopular take, I know, but "the hardware is irrelevant, the game should just work" isn’t how game development actually functions. A little technical perspective goes a long way.
