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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)

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Josh5890 said:
Counterpoint: It has been in development since the restart in early 2019. Prime 4 has likely been developed for the OG Switch for a long time. I don't think they will have moved it to the next system exclusively.
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AAA games take at least 4-5 years of development.
Any major game within the first year of Switch 2 likely started around 2019.
 
lexony said:
More a case of I wasn't careful with my wording. Mixed with that the the clarification will never reach the majority of people because other entites like clickbait news sites or Youtubers who spread this stuff don't care about that. 90% of misinformation in media happens like this, regardless of the topic.
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Embellished*, the term announcement so many times and in the context of a previous public press release from nintendo. I don't really get how anyone would see it any other way. Regardless, grubb has heard about something anyway so we have at least something pointing towards it so the article isn't egregious.
 
Josh5890 said:
Animal Crossing would be a big, but would they have a new one ready so soon after Splatoon 3?
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It would be pretty similar to Splatoon 2 -> New Horizons, which was two and a half years. They can also build on New Horizons foundations this time. New Horizons was a huge jump into HD with a lot of brand new systems that took up development time.
 
Josh5890 said:
Animal Crossing would be a big, but would they have a new one ready so soon after Splatoon 3?
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No, that's way too soon for them to release a new Animal Crossing. I don't see that happening until late 2025 or 2026. That game should not be coming so early for the system. Again, we have to remember it's not when games are done. It's when Nintendo sees where is the best fit for a title too.

I don't think stacking 30+ million sellers into one holiday for the Switch launch makes sense. To me that's just diminishing returns.
 
Magic-Man said:
It would be pretty similar to Splatoon 2 -> New Horizons, which was two and a half years. They can also build on New Horizons foundations this time. New Horizons was a huge jump into HD with a lot of brand new systems that took up development time.
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I don’t see it considering how they treat the release timings between the two franchises. I also don’t really see Nintendo slotting it in at launch holidays. AC is probably gonna be released sometime in year 3 sometime during spring/summer.
 
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Have a feeling enhanced Prime 4 (under a new "standalone" title) will be released in the launch window close to 3D Mario. It satiates the core crowd and can be used as an AV showcase for the system (although 3D mario is usually always impressive too).

New Mario Kart will be targeted for release within first 6-12months as a system mover, with next Splatoon and then Smash after (Bandai-Namco likely already developing it with Sakurai, despite whatever BS Sakurai has been saying recently).

Zelda gap will be there - I don't think TOTK will be used as a key title (likely an enhanced patch for higher res, frame rate improvements and draw distance). Perhaps a full fledged remake? Ocarina of Time?
 
eye0h said:
Embellished*, the term announcement so many times and in the context of a previous public press release from nintendo. I don't really get how anyone would see it any other way. Regardless, grubb has heard about something anyway so we have at least something pointing towards it so the article isn't egregious.
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I don't deny that they were doing that to get some attention. Though I don't believe that they were actually aware how people react to it. Attention is cool and all until people will hold you accountable which in the long term will lead that you don't get taken seriously anymore.
 
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Nintendo could have a new Wave Race for launch window on the next system. How about a new Star Fox? IP's that didn't make this gen could show up early on the next gen too. Star Fox though, I don't see releasing in the launch window.
 
necrolipe said:
Only to add my tidbit to the Nate podcast
  • The info regarding devkit that I have points to 8 inch too
  • Even being a devkit, still a LCD panel as speculated, but the person told me that is very better in comparison to early Switch model
  • Oh, and 1080p, of course ;)
Thanks for the podcast Nate, nice ep.
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This is so good.
 
Cybergatuno said:
AAA games take at least 4-5 years of development.
Any major game within the first year of Switch 2 likely started around 2019.
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Probably worth noting that we don't know when Retro really started development. Yeah they took over the project in 2019, but they were still working on Prime R for years after that. There's no telling what type of development Prime 4 had in the interim, how much staff was involved, how long it took them to get up to a full dev team, etc.
 
LiC said:
If it's a 7.91'' screen, that's 0.8'' wider and 0.45'' taller than the OLED screen (some of which would just be filling bezel space). It's not that major.
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And this is good to me, I don't want an iPad in my hand while playing.
 
Instro said:
Probably worth noting that we don't know when Retro really started development. Yeah they took over the project in 2019, but they were still working on Prime R for years after that. There's no telling what type of development Prime 4 had in the interim, how much staff was involved, how long it took them to get up to a full dev team, etc.
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They actually took over in Summer-late 2018 on Prime 4. You're of course right that we don't know when it entered full development but the story is that they made a pitch demo for it in mid-2018 and started working in earnest later that year, the announcement in 2019 was after they were already on the game.
 
Magic-Man said:
It would be pretty similar to Splatoon 2 -> New Horizons, which was two and a half years. They can also build on New Horizons foundations this time. New Horizons was a huge jump into HD with a lot of brand new systems that took up development time.
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I also think it's too early for a new Animal Crossing. Half the people on my friends list are casual players who still play it most days. It's Nintendo's point about not wanting to cannibalise sales, and I think New Horizons is still in demand and probably will be for at least a year after the Switch 2 comes out (Like New Leaf was after the Switch). We're gonna want a five-year wait minimum between mainlines games, but I'd be reasonably certain there will be a spin-off of some sort to cash in on the brand before then.
 
Well hey if we're working with an 8 inch, 1080p LCD screen that definitely eases some of the pain of losing OLED. One of my biggest hangups was in all other instances of Nintendo handheld refreshes, they never lost the upgrade when the new gen arrived. GB -> GB Color -> GBA (Still had color) -> GBA SP -> DS (Still had backlight). You could argue they lost 3D when they went to 2DS/Switch, but the market unfortunately decided that wasn't a universal upgrade like all other instances of screen advances.

At least with 8" 1080p LCD, it's not a complete downgrade from the OLED. And it being 1080p actually makes it the tradeoff better. You can expect them to make an OLED model later, but games targeting handheld res will only stay at 720p regardless if that's the initial screen it launched with.

And hey, maybe we even get VRR now. Which.... I sincerely can't remember if 1080p OLED can do at the moment
pelusilla6 said:
I would take OLED first than 512gb :(
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Honestly I would too. I can always buy more storage at launch (probably), but I can't buy an OLED screen to replace the LCD until Nintendo releases that years later.
 
ammonite said:
I also think it's too early for a new Animal Crossing. Half the people on my friends list are casual players who still play it most days. It's Nintendo's point about not wanting to cannibalise sales, and I think New Horizons is still in demand and probably will be for at least a year after the Switch 2 comes out (Like New Leaf was after the Switch). We're gonna want a five-year wait minimum between mainlines games, but I'd be reasonably certain there will be a spin-off of some sort to cash in on the brand before then.
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Please can we get a spinoff of Animal Crossing or Splatoon next? I really want a spinoff for Splatoon.
 
Dark Cloud said:
No, that's way too soon for them to release a new Animal Crossing. I don't see that happening until late 2025 or 2026. That game should not be coming so early for the system. Again, we have to remember it's not when games are done. It's when Nintendo sees where is the best fit for a title too.

I don't think stacking 30+ million sellers into one holiday for the Switch launch makes sense. To me that's just diminishing returns.
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Didn't Nintendo announce 2 years ago or so that they were investing 1B+ onto themselves? New offices, equipment and hiring?
It may be too soon to really see any effect of that, but EPD teams could be expanded and able to work on multiple projects in parallel.

Dark Cloud said:
I don't think stacking 30+ million sellers into one holiday for the Switch launch makes sense. To me that's just diminishing returns.
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+1 for this.
Although the Switch had BotW, Mario Kart and Odyssey for its first holiday.
Having 2 major titles in different genres separated by 3 months would certainly boost hardware sales and not dilute software sales by much.
 
Dark Cloud said:
Please can we get a spinoff of Animal Crossing or Splatoon next? I really want a spinoff for Splatoon.
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I'm looking forward to the Sideorder DLC in Splatoon 3. I feel like at least aesthetic wise it could go in a quite different direction.
 
So Andy Robinson (Of the VGC story) did a podcast today (Which I listened to on my walk home), and whilst most of it is rehashing and discussing the story itself, there are two interesting tidbits:
  • Implies he's had sources tell him backwards compatibility is definite and others tell him it's not happening, then stops mid-sentence to backtrack and say he didn't include it in the story for a reason.
  • Mentions he was also the guy who broke the Wii U dev kit (And hence touch screen controller) story, which A). Shows his track record but B). He pointed out had a very different screen to the final product, even if all the other details in his initial story were accurate
 
Dark Cloud said:
No, that's way too soon for them to release a new Animal Crossing. I don't see that happening until late 2025 or 2026. That game should not be coming so early for the system. Again, we have to remember it's not when games are done. It's when Nintendo sees where is the best fit for a title too.

I don't think stacking 30+ million sellers into one holiday for the Switch launch makes sense. To me that's just diminishing returns.
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Plus, Animal Crossing caters more towards the "casuals". Nintendo will want to build up their base first.

Dark Cloud said:
Nintendo could have a new Wave Race for launch window on the next system. How about a new Star Fox? IP's that didn't make this gen could show up early on the next gen too. Star Fox though, I don't see releasing in the launch window.
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NOW WE ARE GETTING SOMEWHERE!
 
Josh5890 said:
Lineup Speculation: Let's say that Nintendo releases this system around September or early October. How heavy does the lineup get from a first party stand point for 2024?

Launch (September)- Mario 3D
November- Pokemon

Gotta figure that Nintendo has something else in there. Maybe a racing game like a new Diddy Kong Racing? Another launch title similar to Nintendo Land or 1,2 Switch? Maaaaaaybe a 2D Zelda? Late 2024 seems too soon for Splatoon. A new Donkey Kong Country game? Kirby feels like a Spring 2025 game for reasons I can't explain. A new Mario Party game? That would make sense.

Bottom line, I think we get another launch window title from Nintendo besides Mario and Pokemon.
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maybe the next 3D Mario, the action RPG Monolith Soft is working since 2017, cross-gen Metroid Prime 4? 2/3 new IP for Nintendo, a return of another old/dormant Nintendo franchise, port of current/last gen third party games such as RE4 REMAKE
 
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Mr.Gamerson said:
8 inch screen also means bigger size, which may mean bigger battery? I think 8inches and 1080p are a good compromise for lack of Oled, but i hope the bezels aren't too big. Also, hopefully this leads more credence to the system being as powerful as we may have hoped and the leaks seem to indicate.
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5/6h of battery for Switch sucessor hopefully
 
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Thraktor said:
There is one game that would definitely benefit, though, Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition. It renders at a full 1080p in portable mode (at unsurprisingly bad frame rates), so should actually look really good in portable mode without any changes on Switch NG if they do use a 1080p screen.
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I forgot about that, I wonder if there was a bug at undocking that made switching between modes problematic.
 
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Shoulder said:
If the screen is in fact 1080p, what you’d end up seeing is likely a 540p internal resolution with DLSS upscaling, which would actually look cleaner than say a native 720p screen at the same size.

There would be edge cases of games using a native 1080p while handheld, but if DLSS is in the picture, you bet developers will use it to get better fidelity out of it.

I mentioned this weeks ago, but my thought is with a 1080p screen, 540p would be the target internal resolution in handheld for most AAA 3rd party titles, and for docked mode, a 1080p internal.

In both instances, that’s a 4x difference in resolution, and not unreasonable to upscale to native with DLSS.
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There's some evidence that 540p to 1080p was being evaluated as a desirable target.

This could have been so early that it didn't connect to concrete screen plans, or it could have been done with the intention to downsample to 720p. So we can't say it was planned or intended with any certainty.
 
ammonite said:
I also think it's too early for a new Animal Crossing. Half the people on my friends list are casual players who still play it most days. It's Nintendo's point about not wanting to cannibalise sales, and I think New Horizons is still in demand and probably will be for at least a year after the Switch 2 comes out (Like New Leaf was after the Switch). We're gonna want a five-year wait minimum between mainlines games, but I'd be reasonably certain there will be a spin-off of some sort to cash in on the brand before then.
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people are actually sad Nintendo cut the content of Animal Crossing New Horizon too soon, they trough, Nintendo should have suported the game more after the 2.0 update
 
ammonite said:
I also think it's too early for a new Animal Crossing. Half the people on my friends list are casual players who still play it most days. It's Nintendo's point about not wanting to cannibalise sales, and I think New Horizons is still in demand and probably will be for at least a year after the Switch 2 comes out (Like New Leaf was after the Switch). We're gonna want a five-year wait minimum between mainlines games, but I'd be reasonably certain there will be a spin-off of some sort to cash in on the brand before then.
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You could make this argument about Mario Kart or Smash too. Animal Crossing is Nintendo's hottest IP at the moment and they're going to want to capitalize sooner than later, especially as leverage for their brand new system. At least that's my thoughts.
 
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Pokemaniac said:
There are other confirmed cases of games rendering at 1080p in handheld mode, mostly for simpler stuff that can afford the extra overhead to not have to worry about resolution changing.

To my understanding, the resolution of the compositor windows that games render to is completely arbitrary.
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Yeah, as I understand it you can supply a frame at basically any resolution to the Switch, and it will just scale it to either 1080p or 720p if you're in docked or portable mode respectively. I just find Hyrule Warriors particularly interesting because it's a graphically intensive game that seems to run an identical profile in both modes, and just runs at 1080p regardless. The best image quality of any Switch game in handheld mode I've played, but definitely not worth the performance hit.
 
ammonite said:
So Andy Robinson (Of the VGC story) did a podcast today (Which I listened to on my walk home), and whilst most of it is rehashing and discussing the story itself, there are two interesting tidbits:
  • Implies he's had sources tell him backwards compatibility is definite and others tell him it's not happening, then stops mid-sentence to backtrack and say he didn't include it in the story for a reason.
  • Mentions he was also the guy who broke the Wii U dev kit (And hence touch screen controller) story, which A). Shows his track record but B). He pointed out had a very different screen to the final product, even if all the other details in his initial story were accurate
Click to expand...

To your second point, what was the original screen in the Wii U dev kits prior to the 480p resistive touch screen?
 
Quoted by: LiC
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ammonite said:
So Andy Robinson (Of the VGC story) did a podcast today (Which I listened to on my walk home), and whilst most of it is rehashing and discussing the story itself, there are two interesting tidbits:
  • Implies he's had sources tell him backwards compatibility is definite and others tell him it's not happening, then stops mid-sentence to backtrack and say he didn't include it in the story for a reason.
  • Mentions he was also the guy who broke the Wii U dev kit (And hence touch screen controller) story, which A). Shows his track record but B). He pointed out had a very different screen to the final product, even if all the other details in his initial story were accurate
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Shoulder said:
To your second point, what was the original screen in the Wii U dev kits prior to the 480p resistive touch screen?
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He brought up the Wii U gamepad thing in VGC's follow-up video too. He was making a point that his original reporting wrongly said the gamepad had an HD screen because that's what people who used or saw it (but, implicitly, didn't know the technical specs) had told him. So the connection to the current reporting is if someone says something has an LCD screen, or maybe some of the other questionable details in the article, they might just be wrong because they misinterpreted or misunderstood something.

So I wanted to clarify that he didn't bring up the Wii U gamepad as an example of something that changed from devkit to release. It didn't change (or at least, didn't change from HD to non-HD), his sources and he were just wrong about it. Either way, I think it's totally justified to question his reporting, whether that's because things could change or the reporting could be wrong.
 
Sol said:
If this pans out, the device will be bigger than the current Switch - which means Joy-Cons wouldn't be compatible with the new device (at least in terms of being physically attached).
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It could be compatible and awkward, like Game Boy games on GBA.
9M7RDBc.jpg
 
JoshuaJSlone said:
720p->1080p works pretty well. Though it would be nice if, even if Switch games can't be patched to truly use more power, they could be patched to change how their internal scaling is done so instead of something like "600p image scaled to 720p, 720p UI slapped on, new machine then scales to 1080p", it could straight do "600p image scaled to 1080p, 1080p UI slapped on".
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My perspective is just coming from playing the Switch on a 1080p TV for several years now. Those games that are 720p didn't look bad on the TV by any means, but they definitely looked, well, 720p. Which in my mind would be a downgrade for those games on the Switch 2's screen, as opposed to how sharp they look natively on the Switch 1.

I was going to say maybe the device doing the upscaling to 1080p would be better than my TV doing it, but then I realized the Switch is still probably the one upscaling those internally before it sends out a 1080p signal to my TV. (I assume?)
 
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My own personal rationale to make a basic LCD seem better: make the bezels as small as possible, and/or DON'T make them black. Anything black and bulky next to an LCD will exacerbate the washed out black on the screen.
 
1080p? That an expectable upgrade. Hopefully battery life is at least as good as OG Switch or a little better

Now someone should leak RAM memory, DLSS and RT features.

I imagine current Switch games would run as docked specs.

Honestly, with these case like SWJ Survivor getting PS4/XOne ports, PS5/XSeries not getting a Switch 2 (late) port will be a matter of politics rather than technical problems.
 
Cuzizkool said:
Quick question now that we're contemplating a bigger form factor: Is 8nm back on the table? Bigger = bigger fan, bigger battery, so bigger SoC? Please tell me I'm wrong.
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It's probably on the table, but I feel like it's still unlikely due to how bad the power consumption is. Just slapping on a bigger battery won't solve it if the power curve is that bad for such a big GPU.

Especially because a bigger screen is also gonna draw more power.
 
LoneRanger said:
1080p? That an expectable upgrade. Hopefully battery life is at least as good as OG Switch or a little better

Now someone should leak RAM memory, DLSS and RT features.

I imagine current Switch games would run as docked specs.

Honestly, with these case like SWJ Survivor getting PS4/XOne ports, PS5/XSeries not getting a Switch 2 (late) port will be a matter of politics rather than technical problems.
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Those were leaked literally well over a year ago.

Well, not leaked. More like stolen.
 
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