Slowly but steadily, the Nintendo Switch 2 is building up an impressive library of third-party ports, and Bethesda has been aggressively (and unsurprisingly) pushing to get as many of its heavy hitters on the platform since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's arrival last December. Now, Fallout 4 has arrived to great fanfare and is surprisingly great on the hybrid console.

Of course, we always wanted the FO4 Switch 2 port to turn out good, but our expectations were lowered after Skyrim's frankly disastrous launch on the system (which has since been fixed and greatly improved). Would it mirror that mess or the Skyrim port's latest iteration? The answer is surprising: Fallout 4 currently offers an even better experience than Skyrim across both docked and portable play.

The shocker comes in the form of three different graphical modes available from the get-go versus Skyrim's two: Quality, Balanced, and Performance. In-game, however, they're named as 30, 40, and 60 FPS targets respectively, but that's what they are. The presence of the 40 FPS mode instantly confirms Fallout 4 is making good use of the Switch 2's 120 Hz screen and VRR capabilities, but it seems the 30 and 60 FPS modes also run on portable mode without lowering the refresh rate, with helps with responsiveness across the board. Even better, I've yet to notice any instances of screen tearing. Another pleasant surprise is TVs with 120 Hz capabilities can access the 40 FPS mode too.

In-depth testing by ElAnalistaDeBits has also revealed that, in docked mode, the game targets 1440p at 30 FPS, 1080p at 40 FPS with a nearly identical graphical setup, and dynamic 1080p (often below the target) with lowered graphical settings at 60 FPS. On portable mode, 1080p is the target in all modes, but the image can get quite blurry in Performance (60 FPS) mode. Check out my own screenshots near Sanctuary below:

Attribution

The 30 FPS mode is the clear winner here when it comes to image clarity and settings, with texture resolution and filtering also seeing a significant boost vs. the other modes. Of course, you'll have to put up with less responsive controls and sluggish camera movement that just doesn't feel good enough anymore if you ask me.

The 40 FPS mode looks noticeably softer, but still provides a clean image result even when playing in portable mode in my experience. The extra 10 frames per second greatly help with the game feel, and with the console's 120 Hz screen, it lands very close to the experience of running it at 60 FPS.

Finally, at 60 FPS, you're getting frankly good results in interiors and areas that aren't overly busy, but the console has a harder time hitting the target in most exterior areas and crowded enemy encounters. This isn't such a big deal when running the game in portable mode due to VRR's help, but the image simply becomes too soft and blurry, especially when looking at distant details. Even my girlfriend, who typically doesn't pay much attention to graphics and was playing FO4 for the first time last night, complained about it looking "bad." Perhaps the shocker here is the actual graphical settings didn't seem as paired back as in Skyrim when going for 60 FPS.

As for stability, I'm happy to report it hasn't crashed on me a single time yet, something I couldn't say about the recent re-releases of the game on other platforms. Load times are virtually identical to recent iterations of the game on consoles, too. The missed opportunity here might be the lack of gyro or mouse controls, which makes Skyrim a more complete port at the time of writing. Hopefully, patches will add in those platform-specific control options as the fifth Elder Scrolls gets a 40 FPS Balance mode in exchange for them.

Overall, I'm quite impressed with this Fallout 4 port at launch, especially considering the current-gen refreshes and last year's Anniversary Edition launch were a bit of a technical nightmare. Moreover, lessons were learned following Skyrim's disappointing launch and recent improvements. Though the teams and tech involved are different, I'm now quite excited for how Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Oblivion Remastered could be translated to Switch 2 later this year.