I think it’ll ship, because EA has probably sunk a lot into it already. But there will also be a huge amount of pressure for it to make a shitload of money so it’ll most likely release half-finished and loaded with microtransaction nonsense.
Then there will most likely be a backlash like there was with Anthem and possibly Bioware will limp along for a bit, maybe become a support studio for someone else for a while, but I don’t really see them making another big game after this, at least in their current form.
There was talk of a new Mass Effect game IIRC but that could really be made by any of EA’s studios, it’s not like anyone who made the originals special will still be at Bioware anyway.
I’m a AAA game dev who worked on a game at EA for 4 years (plus 2 years of pre-production I was not involved with).
They cancelled the game a couple months before we were supposed to launch. Everyone at the studio got laid off. They had sunk literally millions into the game, but when they decided to change their minds there was nothing we could do to stop them. We literally had a working game that never went to players.
This is not exclusive to EA, either. Disney Interactive pulled this a couple times as well. There’s an open-world Iron Man game which was largely complete but never saw the light of day (even though it was really fun!) because Disney decided they didn’t like movie tie-ins one day.
There was a Pirates of the Caribbean game that was also nearly finished when it got cancelled. The assets/code got sold to Ubisoft and the game was reworked into Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.
Moral of the story: never assume your game is safe until you see it on shelves.
Black Flag without the real-world stuff would have been great. I need to see if there’s a good pirate game out there. I played Sid Meir’s Pirates! or whatever it was called, but a 3D pirate game like Sea of Thieves, but single player… hmm.
Okay so they just made it slightly bigger. I don't know how to feel on the joycons, though. Like with them just being held by that connector alone on either side, doesn't make me think they'll be as secure.
I wouldn't really call this an ushering of a new generation, this just feels more like an suped up Switch model.
At least you'll be able to play nearly all Switch games on it so nothing is that drastic.
Slightly bigger? Look again, the old switch screen has massive boarders and this one lokks to go to the edges as well as being larger by a few inches. It looks steam deck sized. I would say its a significant increase.
And i got the impression that the joycons would be magnetic. That would make connecting and disconnecting them MUCH easier and intuitive. The amount of times ive seen people struggle the first time with the joycons having the button to release.
Seems like a good upgrade to me. And thats not to mention the extra shoulder buttons on the joycons, the larger joycons, and the fact that this likely doesnt reveal everythin nintendo has in store for us.
I am pretty sure those extra shoulder buttons on the back are the release levers for the joycons. I think the joycons attatch magnetically, but which also activate locking hooks. Otherwise people would be accidentally detaching joycons and the tablet portion would fall and break. Nintendo designs hardware to be kid friendly, so there is almost certainly a secondary attachment mechanism in addition to the magnets.
I was talking about these buttons. And in terms of locking in, thats a possibility but a strong set of magnets with a recessed area and a connector seems like it would be quite secure.
Now that I am looking at it again, I wonder if those buttons you circled are actually little plungers that push the joycon away from the body to help release it.
Edit: Whatever way they attach, I hope the new joycons don’t loosen and flex like some of the current joycons do. Some of my joycons have “wobble” when attached and it makes me sad.
this just feels more like an suped up Switch model.
To be fair, the last 2-3 generations of PlayStation and Xbox consoles have also been a little more than a bump in CPU/GPU specs. Anything else they added was just gimmicky fluff like Kinect that never really caught on.
Were we really expecting Nintendo to come out with something that wasn’t also just a souped up version of the last console?
I wouldn’t call the difference between PS3 and PS4 just a bump in CPU/GPU there is a huge difference. The PS3 cpu architecture is completely different from the PS4. The PS3 uses a custom PowerPC architecture. The PS3 can be used to make super computers.
At the same time, gaming consoles were simplifying, making them less useful to science. The PlayStation 4 outsold both the original PlayStation and the Wii nearing the best-selling status currently held by the PS2. But for researchers, it was nearly useless. Like the slimmer version of the PlayStation 3 released before it, the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.”
I‘m assuming they debated about it until the very last second until they settled with the safest option. The leaks probably accelerated things a lot towards the end and it might’ve been called something different entirely if they had more time to agree on a name.
That‘s not how projects or marketing work most of the time, however. Nintendo is known to use project names throughout development. They have a schedule for each and every step and the recent leaks have turned things upside down for sure.
The reveal itself looks incredibly rushed. I suspect they hastily whipped up a quick animation in Blender by using some simple modifiers and clever editing. It has “Make a product animation in Blender” Youtube tutorial written all over it, if that makes sense. I kind of love it, but it’s not very Nintendo-like and neither is the name.
I plan on buying just the console (which they usually lose money on anyways), and then leaving it in the box not connected to the Internet until a mod chip comes out.
I don’t think Nintendo loses money on their consoles. With the original switch, and this switch 2, they specifically went with old and slow hardware to ensure the margins work out.
There’s a disclaimer that says not every Switch 1 game will work, but I think it will play on the new Switch with the same lousy performance it has now unless you buy the Switch 2 version.
That is how every previous Nintendo back-compat implementation has worked.
GC on Wii
Wii on Wii U
Game Boy on Game Boy Color
Game Boy/Color on Game Boy Advance
Game Boy Advance on (New) Nintendo (3)DS
Nintendo DS on Nintendo DSi
Nintendo DS/i on Nintendo 3DS
Nintendo 3DS on New Nintendo 3DS
In every case, the system drops back to the earlier console's hardware specifications. There are hybrid cross-gen games on some of the handhelds which offer improvements on the newer hardware, but up to this point, older games have never been updated to get the improvements of newer hardware. That doesn't necessarily mean the same will hold, but I'd suggest you assume it will and be pleasantly surprised if they buck the trend.
I’m those cases isn’t it because they had separate hardware built in for backwards compat? This is more of a PC style hardware upgrade rather than totally different hardware (compute wise) so it might be different for that reason?
Sort of, though Wii and Wii U are a bit more complicated than that so this somewhat of an oversimplification. The ELI5 answer is that some hardware components are directly upgraded and can run in a compatibility mode, other components are just the original hardware thrown in separately.
New3DS is the most recent and most notable exception. It's directly upgraded 3DS hardware, but the CPU downclocks to run at 3DS specs on all legacy titles (and there are almost no native New3DS games so this upgrade was pretty pointless). Softmodding can unlock the full clockspeed, and most games do work fine this way but there are a few rare bugs.
I expect Switch 2 will just be the same architecture upgraded, because that's a lot easier to do now, while the old style of true redundancy would inflate costs too much today. It's also worth noting that Switch titles already expect variable performance in order to support handheld and docked modes, so I doubt much would break if allowed to overclock. But I could also see Nintendo not even trying to support it if even one bug might exist somewhere.
Just adding on to this, I do think the "up-specced OG hardware" approach something Nintendo has done before. Upgrades like GC to Wii and Game Boy to Game Boy Color are really just boosts to the clock speeds and RAM, they don't have anything specifically included for BC reasons (unless you're counting GameCube memory card slots). They really are just iterations on the same hardware. Similar to the New 3DS, on modded consoles you can run GameCube games at Wii clock speeds and they almost all work without issue.
On that subject, the fact that Nintendo says the compatibility won't be 100% is potentially encouraging. If the Switch 2 was just going to downclock compatible parts to their Switch 1 performance and was otherwise identical, you'd expect all games to work. The reduction in compatibility could be because games are going to be running with Switch 2 clocks across the board, which most games should handle just fine and a small handful may not.
Sure, but the game sets the resolution, not the console. The game might get a performance boost or a more stable frame rate on better hardware, but unless it gets a patch to detect which system it’s running on and adjust the resolution accordingly, most games will still run in 720p.
Another commenter elsewhere mentioned that things like Labo or Ring Fit won’t (likely) work because of the different sized controllers. I would be surprised if other games that don’t use special extra hardware work just fine.
Normally I’d disagree (because games written for a single console don’t do well with hardware upgrades), but since the old console already runs at different speeds when handheld and docked, I’d expect most games to be able to handle faster processors safely. We’ll have to see how that shakes out. If it really does run them better, and it has drift-proof sticks, I’m quite interested. Otherwise, I’ll wait a year or 2 until there’s a good, cheap library of games for it.
Ah so upgrade cost identical to what Sony did? I can see them doing that … The problem with that is that the games already have the ability on the cartridge. Remember the datamine of Paper Mario TTYD remake and the higher resolution data on the cart?
I would not put it past Nintendo to charge you $70 for Tears of the Kingdom again so that you can run it at reasonable resolutions and frame rates this time.
I think the “Switch Pro” would be the OLED model as an upgrade of the original. This thing looks brand new even if it shares a lot of similarity to the original.
The rumor is that the price is going to be $450 for just the console and $500 for the console with Mario Kart bundled. May or may not be true, but it’s certainly plausible given how expensive electronics have gotten since 2017. I was thinking of pre-ordering after the Apr. 2 Direct, but if that price is accurate I’ll look into getting a Steam Deck instead. A lower price was the biggest advantage the original Switch had.
Ubisoft is allowed to stream CoD? But Ubi doesn’t have a streaming service? Or is CoD allowed to be on Ubi+ which enables Ubi+ subscribers to play the games through GFN / Luna?
Ubisoft was a great Stadia supporter. I’m kinda hoping they will get hold of the Stadia tech somehow and start their own streaming service.
Unlikely, Nintendo probably isn’t bothered to boost the graphics beyond the switch 2’s onboard GPU. Nintendo doesn’t really care about graphics so I’d be surprised if it had an eGPU.
Could make an interesting pricier addon for down the line. Like the release version is just a dock but later on they release an egpu dock that you have to buy separately.
That would complicate things in a pretty non console way, especially counter to Nintendo that hasn’t tried to match competitor console performance since the GameCube.
It ought to have been, considering how much games struggle on the first switch lately. This will have the same problem otherwise, 2-3 years into its lifecycle it will be begging for death while the PS5/XSX are still chugging along.
Mouse mode has been rumored, and some leaks have shown what could be an optical sensor on the joy con.
Also, if you take your current joy cons and place them on their side like that, they surprisingly feel pretty great as a mouse. Shoulder button for min click, and your thumb hits the four face buttons. I could see it working pretty well.
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