Resident Evil 2, 3 and 4 Arrive Natively on Switch 2 With a New Launch Trailer
Capcom brings Resident Evil 2 Deluxe Edition, Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 4 Gold Edition natively to Switch 2, all live now on the eShop.
Capcom has sent its back catalog to a brand new audience. On October 16, Resident Evil 2 Deluxe Edition, Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 4 Gold Edition all went live on the Nintendo Switch 2 eShop as native, cartridge-class ports, and Capcom marked the moment with a short launch trailer cutting between Raccoon City, Nemesis and the Spanish village that made Leon Kennedy's second outing a horror classic in its own right.
It closes an odd gap in the Switch library. Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 had only ever reached the original Switch as cloud-streaming versions, dependent on a steady internet connection and unplayable offline. Resident Evil 4's 2023 remake had never come to a Nintendo platform at all. Switch 2's jump in horsepower is what finally made full local installs possible, and Capcom's trailer leans hard into that contrast, framing the ports less as a conversion exercise and more as these games finally arriving the way they were meant to be played.
What Each Release Actually Includes
All three are sold separately, with no bundle discount for picking up the set. Resident Evil 2 Deluxe Edition folds in the previously separate costume packs for Leon and Claire along with extra weapon models. Resident Evil 4 Gold Edition ships with the Separate Ways campaign starring Ada Wong built in from the start, rather than sold as an add-on. Resident Evil 3 is the plainest of the three: Capcom has not brought the online Resident Evil Resistance mode that shipped alongside it on other platforms, so this is the single-player campaign on its own.
Save data is the one place Switch 2 owners get a smaller inheritance than the price might suggest. Capcom has confirmed that progress from the earlier cloud versions on the original Switch cannot be carried over, so anyone upgrading is starting Raccoon City, and Nemesis's pursuit of Jill Valentine, from zero.
Built for the Hardware This Time
The pitch Capcom is making with the trailer is explicitly about horsepower rather than convenience. Early performance breakdowns from outlets that got hands-on time back up the message: both Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 hold a steady 60 frames per second on Switch 2, while Resident Evil 4, the most demanding of the three thanks to its RE Engine lighting and larger crowds of Ganado, dips below that target during the game's busiest village and castle encounters. Capcom lists Resident Evil 4's download at roughly 29GB, making it comfortably the largest of the three on a cartridge-class release.
None of this required new assets built for Switch 2 specifically; all three are the same RE Engine remakes players have known on PlayStation, Xbox and PC for several years now. What changed is that the hardware can finally run them as installed, offline games rather than compressed video streamed from a server, and the trailer is built to make that distinction obvious even to viewers who never touched the cloud versions.
Pricing and a Limited-Time Discount
On the US eShop, Resident Evil 2 Deluxe Edition lists for $39.99, Resident Evil 3 for $29.99 and Resident Evil 4 Gold Edition for $49.99. Capcom is running an early-adopter discount through November 7 that brings those down to $29.99, $19.79 and $39.99 respectively, a window worth noting for anyone who was planning to wait for a bigger sale rather than buy at launch.
Physical copies are a separate, later purchase. Capcom has set January 29, 2027 for retail releases of all three, more than three months after the digital eShop versions, without yet saying whether the cartridges will hold the full games or ship as key cards that still require a download. The studio has not explained the length of that gap beyond confirming the date in its own investor announcement.
Part of a Bigger Switch 2 Push
The timing lines up with a broader Capcom push onto Switch 2 this year. The same investor materials that confirmed these three remakes also detail Monster Hunter Wilds arriving on the platform December 4, bringing full cross-play with PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC for the first time in the series' history. Capcom frames both moves the same way: as evidence that Nintendo's new hardware has crossed a line where its biggest, most demanding franchises no longer need to be cut down or streamed to fit.
For a series that has sold more than 213 million units across its history, with the Resident Evil 2 remake alone passing 20 million on its own, getting all three of its best-reviewed modern entries onto Nintendo hardware natively closes one of the last remaining platform gaps. The Resident Evil 3 remake and the Resident Evil 4 remake round out the set as, respectively, the shortest and the newest of the trio.
All three are live now on the Nintendo eShop, with the discounted launch pricing running through November 7.
Official links
Mira leads previews at Gamers6. She has spent fifteen years playing co-op shooters badly and writing about them well, and she still keeps a spreadsheet of every weapon reload animation worth the frame count.
