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Happy to see that Nintendo is treating the switch more like how they traditionally handled their mobile platforms instead of their consoles. Iterating instead
by nerdjon 2y ago
Happy 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 its advantages.
I am curious about the specs, but honestly don't care much. 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). So as long as it is actually a decent spec bump I am happy and have zero care to compare it to the other consoles (but I am sure people are going too and scream that it is "underpowered").
The biggest thing I am curious about, will it be OLED since that will be disappointing to go back to non OLED from the OLED Switch. And Price.
- koromak 2y agoI just hope its powerful enough that Indies can target it along with the Steam Deck, rather than just hope an pray like they did for Switch 1's late lifecycle. The amount of <30fps indie titles on there was sad.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- MetaWhirledPeas 2y agoMan that's 100% on the indie dev. Most people don't buy indie games for cutting-edge graphics. You start pushing the envelope, you get what you get.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoWhat a bizarre thing to say. People buy indie games for all sorts of different reasons, and sometimes it's the beautiful art style.
- filleduchaos 2y ago"Beautiful art style" and "cutting-edge graphics" are nowhere near synonymous. They are orthogonally related at best (and many people would even argue that they are opposing goals).
- kbolino 2y agoThe Switch was weak when it came out. Decent PCs from that same year can handle most of these games just fine. It's not really the developer's fault when the Switch is the only platform with issues, and they're usually not "pushing the envelope" in any way. The fault here is Nintendo's, they didn't prioritize support for ported games, though admittedly they couldn't really foresee the indie game boom, since it wasn't nearly as big of a deal at the time, especially in Japan. First-party Nintendo titles are more or less the only games that actually manage to "push the envelope" on the Switch, and that's because they have the resources and experience to do it. Even then, some games end up constrained compared to the original vision, because the hardware can't handle it no matter how much insider knowledge you have about how it works and how to use it right.
- drawkward 2y agoWitcher 3 was an amazing port.
- evilduck 2y agoKinda. It had to be downscaled to below 720p to get passable frame rate performance. Compared to like almost any PC with a discrete GPU or any alternative console release it had, the Switch port was a huge step down in visual quality.
- drawkward 2y agoBut i dont care about any of those things; they dont make the game more fun for me. It was a great port. Buy a different machine if you want to be inside the matrix.
- kbolino 2y agoThanks to the success of The Witcher 3, I wouldn't call CDPR an indie dev anymore. I'm sure porting that game wasn't easy, but it had a well resourced studio behind it. Not all games can even make the tradeoffs that were necessary for it to work, though. Factorio, a 2D game, also made by a pretty competent but still indie developer, was ported to the Switch, but its expansion pack Space Age couldn't be.
- koromak 2y agoMost indie devs don't have time and money to optimize. They will make the game primarily for the biggest audience, and then make it somewhat playable for everyone else. The closer Switch is to the Steam Deck, the more likely both will be targeted.
- nottorp 2y agoUnity's fault? Unity also kinda killed playing indie games on a laptop (at least on battery) on x86...
- Rohansi 2y agoI wouldn't blame Unity for this. It's perfectly capable of running games efficiently on mobile. Problem is people either don't know how to or don't care to optimize their games performance.
- whynotminot 2y agoKind of by definition indies don’t have the resources to optimize their games as much as a major studio.
- Rohansi 2y agoSure, they're more limited but Unity actually has very good and accessible profiling tools included. It'd be easy for most developers to get quick wins if they've never optimized their game before.
- rpdillon 2y ago> 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 felt like I was rewinding the clock 15 years in graphical quality. I've heard literally zero other people have this complaint, so I suspect it's just my take on the aesthetics of the game. I think the state-of-the-art on Switch is really Panic Button's work on the Doom and Doom Eternal ports, but those are frame locked at 30 FPS, so I think getting a spec bump in Switch 2 would certainly help the demographic that plays games like that. My family has left the Switch ecosystem for Steam Deck, and that does a lot better. Would be interesting to compare with the Switch 2 in terms of specs.
- manojlds 2y agoState of the art imo is Metroid Prime
- rikthevik 2y agoBeautiful art direction to be sure. But let's be real, it's Super Metroid. :)
- PaulHoule 2y agoIt's a beautiful game, one of the first to use programmable shaders, and one of the earliest that doesn't look dated at all. The shaders make everything look smooth without looking blurry. Loading screens are hidden, it's not like the contemporaneous PS2 game Mafia where you wait a few minutes to load, spend a few minutes driving across town on a mission to shoot up some people at a restaurant, get yourself shot up, then have to wait for it to load all over again.
- scop 2y agoAs soon as you said Mafia I felt that loading in my bones…
- chungy 2y agoNintendo has tended to maintain at most 1 generation of backwards compatibility, though you can get some fuzzy ideas of "generations" in a few cases. Game Boy Color: plays original Game Boy games Game Boy Advance: plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color games Nintendo DS: plays Game Boy Advance games Nintendo DSi: plays Nintendo DS games Nintendo 3DS: plays Nintendo DS and DSi games Nintendo New 3DS: plays Nintendo DS, DSi, and (old) 3DS games Nintendo Wii: plays GameCube games Nintendo Wii U: plays Wii games The Switch is a notable break in both of these lines, playing neither 3DS nor Wii U games.
- TuxSH 2y ago3DS has hardware support for GBA games too, actually, though these only got distributed via the Ambassador program. Also had VC for most of Nintendo's platform.
- chungy 2y agoI know, and you can basically restore full GameCube compatibility on the Wii U via Nintendont. Neither of them let you use the actual physical games from the old system, and needing to perform jailbreak hacks to use them and load ROMs on anyway doesn't count as much as out-of-the-box compatibility.
- TuxSH 2y agoFair. A shame, still, especially for GC compat on WiiU.
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoThe problem in both cases is that the consoles were actually missing a key piece of hardware: the ability to read the disc or cartridge. If you're a hacker-type person who has already digitized your gamecube collection (or, let's be honest, downloaded the games illegally) then this doesn't matter. But for regular consumers, there needs to be a way to verify ownership. Nintendo could have made some titles available digitally (which is what I wish they'd done), but that requires getting content rights sorted out for games that have never been sold digitally before, so the full catalog would not have been available. Also, there would have been a ton of hemming and hawing about "Nintendo is making me buy my Gamecube games again?!?" No comment on whether such complaints would have been reasonable.
- wslh 2y ago> I am curious about the specs, but honestly don't care much. The specs seems to be leaked here <https://thegamepost.com/nintendo-switch-2-full-specs-appears-to-have-leaked/ https://thegamepost.com/nintendo-switch-2-full-specs-appears...> TL;DR - CPU: Arm Cortex-A78C 8 cores Unknown L1/L2/L3 cache sizes - GPU: Nvidia T239 Ampere 1 Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC) 12 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) 1534 CUDA cores 6 Texture Processing Clusters (TPC) 48 Gen 3 Tensor cores 2 RTX ray-tracing cores - RAM: 12 GB LPDDR5
- whynotminot 2y agoOnly 2 ray-tracing cores makes you wonder why they’d even bother. Any actual game devs wanna chime in on whether that’s enough to actually do any ray tracing?
- gjsman-1000 2y agoThe leaks are a little inconsistent on this one. On one hand, the base architecture is Ampere, but it's been repeatedly rumored that there are various backports from Lovelace. It's a weird mixture of the two, alone with some unique parts never seen elsewhere (a file decompression engine that accelerates LZMA, according to kernel commits). It's hard to say then how powerful these raytracing cores are, or how many are even necessary for simple but beautiful effects. It's also worth remembering that the Switch bakes the graphics drivers into the game itself, uses data structures and shaders more native to the GPU without compilation, and has a custom low level graphics API called NVN (and NVN2), so performance is not necessarily linear compared to a PC.
- enragedcacti 2y agoThat spec seems fishy given both Ampere and Ada both have 1 RT core in each SM. 12 RT cores would make much more sense. The 1534 Cuda cores is also weird since 128x12 would be 1536. ALSO the leak says "Nvidia T239 Ampere (RTX 20 Series)" but Ampere debuted in the RTX 30 Series.
- bargainbin 2y agoThey’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.
- adamc 2y agoThat 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"?
- ecliptik 2y agoOne of my favorite video essay's on this is "Nintendo - Putting Play First" by Game Makers Toolkit [1]. It goes into when making a game, Nintendo first determines the mechanic they want to focus on; jumping, throwing a hat, shooting paint, etc and finding out how to make it fun, then building and iterating on the idea. It's how they can keep putting out essentially the same games but are completely different. 1. https://youtu.be/2u6HTG8LuXQ https://youtu.be/2u6HTG8LuXQ
- dmonitor 2y agoGMTK is popular, but he's mostly talking out of his ass. He's got zero industry experience and most gamedevs I know personally clown on his takes constantly. Unless he references specific Nintendo interviews where they talk about their design process, I have doubts about this video containing an accurate description of how Nintendo does things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gusgus01 2y agoAt least in this video, all the interviews and documents that they base their claims/opinions on are listed in the description, so you can easily also peruse them if you doubt the interpretation.
- piyuv 2y agoEarly leaks said screen was LCD, hoping for them to be wrong
- hbn 2y agoThey're optimizing for cost so I'd expect LCD. Then they can release an OLED model later down the line and the extra $50 won't seem as big of a deal on top of what we can probably already expect in the price bump from Switch 1.
- hadlock 2y agoOLED seems like a no brainer for a lifecycle refresh at the ~3-3.5 year mark. Particularly because they've done it before, and Valve very recently proved it's still a viable way to boost sales. Nintendo has had 7 years to prepare for this launch they likely have every mario, zelda, metroid release date pinned to a particular month and year through at least year 5. A display upgrade mid cycle is almost a given.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoHonestly, if it keeps the price down I'm all for it. My switch spends 99% of the time in the dock, because I would far rather play with the pro controller on my big TV than play it in handheld mode. So I find the quality of the screen kinda irrelevant.
- hbn 2y agoMe too, I usually upgrade to the latest and greatest with Nintendo systems (specifically if it's an improvement, the "new 3DS" but not like the 2DS for example) But I never bought an OLED because I couldn't justify it for the amount I play my Switch handheld (almost never)
- orloffm 2y agoI would pay extra 100$ for an LCD. OLED screens' PWM give me headaches. I'm using an iPhone SE because of that.
- FractalHQ 2y agoThe 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.
- EA-3167 2y agoThe 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.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoHave 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.
- EA-3167 2y agoI didn't mean that Nintendo was in trouble, I just meant what I said: the best way to play Nintendo's games isn't on Nintendo platforms. For me, I'm not going to be playing games away from the ability to plug in or dock for 5 hours. I don't put expensive electronics in my pocket, and yeah I've docked my Deck to a TV... it's great. As for physical media, why would I want to use that? But sure, if you hate Steam on principle then obviously it isn't for you. In my 19 years of using steam I've never had any problems though, and I suspect that's true for most people.
- filleduchaos 2y agoI don't know, it doesn't make much sense to call the Steam Deck the best mobile platform by dismissing things that a mobile platform should be good at just because you personally don't care about them.
- theLiminator 2y ago> 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 its advantages. Yeah, I've always felt that Nintendo being willing to try out cool stuff is something that will be very sad to lose. The Wii, DS, and the Switch have all been very cool consoles. I personally only buy Nintendo consoles, as I feel like everything else eventually gets ported to PC anyways.
- nullbyte808 2y agoI hope it has at LEAST 12 GB of RAM. Hopefully 16 or 24 GB.
- kridsdale1 2y agoMost brand new laptops are not even there.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoWhy is this? Has RAM not come down in price over all these years?
- UltraSane 2y agoThe Switch 2 is supposed to be a bit faster than a PS4. It has more RAM and a much more modern GPU. It is using a LCD screen to reduce cost. I bet they will release a more expensive OLED version later.
- hadlock 2y ago> I bet they will release a more expensive OLED version later. I would imagine the only reason they didn't launch with the OLED is to drive sales in the second half of the product lifecycle. If the PS4 equivalent claim is true that will be great, the Switch 1 was anemic at launch and borderline painful graphics in 2025.
- Natsu 2y ago> Iterating instead of throwing out everything with each new version. I sort of feel like they were trying to fight emulation with a lot of their moves, doing things that were challenging to emulate, like the 3D stuff, or unusual hardware, etc.
- BrawnyBadger53 2y agoUnfortunately for them, they are subject to the most interest from emulation devs by far.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoMaybe because their games are not cross platform? Plenty of Nintendo games I would have happily purchased for PC.
- 2muchcoffeeman 2y agoHopefully the Switch as a platform represents the end of the line. SD cards can be up to 2Tb, and that should be enough for anybody ;) So I don’t see why they would need to change up formats again.
- baby 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS#DS_family_Comparison_Table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS#DS_family_Comparis... * Nintendo DS, 2004 * Nintendo DS Lite, 2006 * Nintendo DSi, 2008 * Nintendo DSi XL, 2009 * Nintendo 3DS, 2011 * Nintendo 3DS XL, 2012 * New Nintendo 3DS, 2017 * New Nintendo 3DS XL, 2020
- garfieldnate 2y agoIn my mind, addressing the huge lag on Switch between input and display would more than make up for any lost FPS. I want responsive controls.