Why don't they just make 2 controllers that you can snap to the sides of an iPhone?
Edit: like this: https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/HRDG2ZM/A/backbone-one...
Save the planet, reuse hardware.
Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
601–610 of 1001 posts
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
That last sentence is worth an essay of its own. Everyone else keeps pumping resources into being photo-realistic blah-blah-blah without nearly enough attention to "is this fun"?
Strongly agreed. When I think of the best Nintendo products the words “fun” and “play” spring to mind. AAA gaming on the other hand, either resembles sports, shallow short-form media, or Oscar-bait melodrama. Very little fun to be had. What ever happened to fun and play?
Singleplayer AAA gaming on top of all that feels like work, the older I got the less those games kept me playing because I don't want to spend 3 hours running errands to be rewarded with an item/spell/skill.
The melodramatic storylines are also pretty grating, there are a few games with good storytelling but most are some rehash of "this world has been destroyed/is in the process of being destroyed, in the aftermath a hero is about to rise and save it" so if the mechanics don't feel fun right from the get-go I lose interest completely.
The most fun I have with games are the ones with a very iterative game loop (roguelikes for example), or social/multiplayer games, anything with a lot of replayability, and the constant feeling of improvement is like crack to me.
A surprising example I re-discovered last year after only playing it for a while some 15 years ago is Trackmania, got even some friends hooked on it to play hot seating trying to beat each others time. The game loop is short and intense (about 1-2 minutes max), has a high skill ceiling, and you feel yourself getting better at a track each time you play it, nailing some very tricky part that felt impossible 30 min before is absurdly satisfying.
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nintendo is not Nintendo-y enough for a while now. The switch system UI is bland and on launch the gray switch was the one being presented.
Yeah, I am not a big fan of the Switch UI. They really took out the "surprise and delight" compared to the Wii U and 3DS. Very bland and straightforward, and yet somehow awfully slow and laggy.
There's a very good reason for this: The whole OS is under 400MB. Every Nintendo Switch game cartridge comes with a full copy of the necessary OS on it.
Every game card is playable, no matter how out of date the Switch is, without any internet connection.
I'll take that kind of functionality before "surprise and delight." We might get "surprise and delight" this generation though, if in part because the change to a modified Samsung NAND over Macronix might be cheaper at larger capacities if rumors are correct.
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#604At this point I'd be hard pressed to consider this over my Steam Deck. We will see the specs later but I doubt it will really compete processing-wise or screen-wise. The openness (full arch desktop) of the Steam Deck is also awesome while having a great UI that you never have to leave if you don't want to. EDIT: I mistakenly called it "fedora desktop", my bad
SteamOS is Arch, Bazzite is Fedora if you want a more Fedora experience. I agree mostly because I find myself playing a lot of smaller games these days, and it's much easier for devs to release and patch their games on Steam than it is a Nintendo platform. They also have a much friendlier refund policy. For the masses though, a Nintendo system just works. I can hand a Switch to my daughter and know she can play Ninte…
> They also have a much friendlier refund policy.
I can see why steam has an easier refund policy. It’s easy to buy a game that doesn’t work well (or at all) on your hardware.
But the switch shouldn’t have this issue, and that’s basically only reason I would ever return a game.
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#605Happy to see that Nintendo is treating the switch more like how they traditionally handled their mobile platforms instead of their consoles. Iterating instead of throwing out everything with each new version. There is a part of me that is going to miss the, do weird shit and see what works, Nintendo that brought us some really fun ideas. But a stable Nintendo just being able to continue putting out great games has it…
> The only real issue the Switch had was being able to keep up with some of the games put on it with FPS but it still had beautiful games (like Tears of the Kingdom) A bit of an aside, but... Tears of the Kingdom looks just awful to me. My kids played Breath of the Wild and when they got Tears of the Kingdom I walked in and was astonished at the graphic quality. I think I had just finished Doom 2016 at the time and I…
I can see the lower quality of the rendering, but the graphical content is stunning in my opinion. The art in the game inspires me a lot more than more photorealistic games tend to. I think they did a stellar job given the resource constraints and the scale of the game.
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#606Happy to see that Nintendo is treating the switch more like how they traditionally handled their mobile platforms instead of their consoles. Iterating instead of throwing out everything with each new version. There is a part of me that is going to miss the, do weird shit and see what works, Nintendo that brought us some really fun ideas. But a stable Nintendo just being able to continue putting out great games has it…
They’ve got the weird shit covered still, apparently the joy cons in this gen can be used as mice. Was heavily rumoured/leaked and this teaser video literally shows them gliding along a surface. How Nintendo will leverage that functionality, who could honestly say, but that’s the genius of keeping a toy company mindset in an industry full of sports car company mindsets.
Ha. Since when does Nintendo care about ensuring functionality they add to their devices are leveraged? Other than first party games, and even that can be limited, almost no one ever implements the weird little functionality they add to their devices.
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is it. Once a console can run an LLM you will see open world games with immersion that we’ve never seen before Procedurally generated worlds are one thing but imagine exploring an endless world where you can talk to every NPC and never have the same conversation twice
It sounds like a good idea at first, but would people really care after the first few conversations? After all, the conversations are unlikely to be related to any of the gameplay, and even though you could drip feed worldbuilding to the player, you only have so much source material. After a while I suspect it would become obvious which things are part of the official world source material, and which things are being…
Imagine that classic Star Trek scene where a crisis erupts, you’re in the captain’s chair, and you ask your bridge crew, “options?”
In a modern game, the crisis was scripted, and then you’ll get a scripted followup, or you’ll get a few scripted answers you can choose from, and half the challenge is figuring out which ones the game designers think are the good ones and which ones are supposed to kill you.
Now let’s imagine the crisis arose organically because you got yourself into a bad situation, and the options from your crew make sense in context, and maybe none of them will save you or maybe some will and you can’t just figure out which ones the game designers thought were good.
Basically, tabletop roleplaying with a good group and a good DM, but as a solo game with fancy graphics and all that.
I’d pay good money for that sort of thing, and it’s not something that can be built yet but which sufficiently good AI tech can enable (or maybe it’s now possible but only very recently).
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
The games are crippled by how archaic and underpowered the hardware is. TOTK is beautiful _despite_ the hardware limiting its true potential, robbing world class studios, and forcing them to cut corners. It’s indefensible considering how much legendary IP that potato is holding hostage.
The good news is that the best Nintendo platform is also the best mobile platform: The Steam Deck. It plays Nintendo games better than Nintendo consoles do, and as a bonus, it plays everything else.
Have you ever tried to dock a Steam deck to a TV?
Have you ever tried to use physical media with a Steam deck?
Have you ever tried to get 5 hours of battery life with a Steam deck?
Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket? (I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.)
Nintendo will be just fine. I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were screwed from the start... The Xbox came out when the PS2 did. When it came time for the next generation, Sony went with the obvious PS3. Microsoft of course couldn't compete with an "Xbox 2" vs a "PS3", and they couldn't skip right to "Xbox 3", so they called it the "Xbox 360", which was frankly genius because it had the 3 there anyway and put it on the same level in consumers' eyes. But after that it all f…
> Microsoft of course couldn't compete with an "Xbox 2" vs a "PS3" Part of me wants to think that consumers can't possibly that uninformed, but I know in my heart I am wrong. They should have done what Nintendo (usually) does and left the numbers out of it. Call the next iteration of the Xbox the box.
They can't call it the Box because they don't want people to think of it as a Microsoft Device.
Nintendo can go from Nintendo 3DS to Nintendo Switch because the brand is Nintendo.
Microsoft clearly considers the brand "Microsoft" to be poison ivy to gamers, and always brands their gaming hardware as "Xbox" as if that were the company name. Going to Ybox would kill their brand and put them back at square one.
Re: Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
#610It seems like the days of revolutionary consumer electronics are over. This looks nice, for sure. But it’s really more of the same. Not surprising. It does surprise me that there’s such emphasis on it, though. There’s the name, of course, and then the entire video is based around “it’s the same thing but a little better.” Game console updates used to be big deals. The SNES was a revolution. PS2 was huge. Now… PS5? Wh…
> Game console updates used to be big deals. The SNES was a revolution. PS2 was huge. There are two categories of "big deal". The SNES and PS2 were big deals simply because game graphics had so much headroom for improvement. Now that the low-hanging fruits of color palette, resolution, frame rate, texture quality, animation quality, and geometric complexity have all been squeezed, the improvements are more asymptotic…
Exactly. For a while you could have huge improvements from better hardware. Then there were some cool new gimmicks. Now both of those seem to be played out.
And that’s happening across the board. All the stuff I’d go ogle in Best Buy as a teenager is now basically maxed out both in terms of hardware and gimmicks.