Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

Does the maintenance sometimes precede a Direct or announcement?

@Sigran102 I mean I literally have a PS5. I had a PS4 for years before my PS5, and I enjoyed a ton of games on that console. I'm not a Nintendo fanboy, nor am I a "Sony pony." I'm just a person who will criticize any company that deserves said criticism. There are things Nintendo has done that I genuinely don't like. How they've treated Animal Crossing, the live service stuff they've been doing more and more commonly, and the destruction of canon in games like Pikmin or Zelda. I've gone on record in the past to say that I preferred more games on Playstation than I did Nintendo, since Nintendo kept releasing games in series that I loved which destroyed or catered to audiences that weren't apart of the original fanbase.

I am 100% far from being a fanboy, and I'm not one who engages in the console wars either. The people who do that tend to be genuine losers that fight over what corporation they champion, when all the corporations are pretty God awful.

@Grumblevolcano This doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since that NSO maintenance was pretty much a day long and seemingly did nothing.

I know some people think maintenance sometimes happen around the same time as presentations, but I thought Nintendo might try to avoid this week from a major presentation.

Also I’m not sure a Jamboree overview would happen before an Echoes of Wisdom one. Has Nintendo done something like that before?

Speaking for myself, I have a PC that I wouldn't describe as "high end" but it's certainly PS5 adjacent in terms of GPU spec. The PC gaming experience certainly isn't for everyone. It's probably not even for me in the living room space because when I had a PC in there I just played Switch most of the time. So I understand the appeal of the PS5 in that sense

But again, and speaking for myself who's clearly biased because I'm here, if convenience is the game and with Switch 2 almost surely out soon. Soon enough that it'll be on the shelf for most of the rest of the PS5/PS5 Pro shelf life. Very possible scenario, Switch 2 is on shelves for ~$600AU or a tad over. A portable that sits somewhere between PS4 Pro and XBox Series S on spec. Next to it is the XB Series S for $500AU, XB Series X for $800AU, PS5 at $800AU and PS5 Pro at what.... over $1000AU? Maybe it's just me but I don't see how the PS5 Pro is an attractive product in that line

I don't think I could justify to myself spending that much in one go on a device just for gaming. When I spend that much on a PC it's for gaming sure but it's also a productivity tool both for work and tech-life in general. I need to have a PC, that's not a want, the want is the additional spec of the GPU over and above a simple display output. A gaming console is just for games.... how can that kind of price be justified when the $600AU thing plays most of the same games and is portable?

Midori is back and people are believing them again for some reason. They're saying that Xenoblade X is going to get a port on Switch next year. The known fraudster who has been exposed for trading leaks- most of those leaks being dubious information because they ended up running out of content in the Atlus presentation they were drip feeding. The one which they stole from SEGA itself.

I don't get why people keep following people who are already ousted as frauds.

@VoidofLight Odd that Midori returns, I think it'd be best to stop doing game-leak-related things after what happened. I feel like a lot of things he is saying is likely true, but I don't fully believe all of it.

@PikminMarioKirby Ehhh to me a lot of the stuff he's saying currently is probably dubious at best. He was exposed for trading bad information for dubious quality information. Fake leaks for fake leaks on the off-chance that they ended up being real. I just can't see them porting Xenoblade X next year.

Are we expecting any Nintendo announcements next week? I've heard somewhere that we're getting MP Jamboree previews, I hope NL has good things to say about this game, so far it looks pretty good! A Direct is technically possible, but I wouldn't get my hopes up too high for this week specifically. If we don't get a Direct this month, I'd expect an NSO announcement and/or an overview trailer for Echoes of Wisdom next week.
But if a Direct does happen this month, it's plausible that Nintendo would wait for NSO and Echoes of Wisdom for the Direct, which could be the week after this upcoming one. I believe Splatoon's Grand Fest is happening next weekend, so this could supposedly be a decent-sized week for Nintendo. PS5 Pro seems likely to be getting announced within this same time-frame, so I guess we'll see what happens.

@VoidofLight I feel like it's pretty typical for a leaker to make claims about a potential Xenoblade X remaster, because it is highly requested from the Xenoblade fanbase. (Similar to Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, and Kid Icarus Uprising rumours) Yeah this could be true, but it's been claimed so many times that it's not shocking that someone would eventually get it right. As for my personal opinion, I think an Xenoblade X remaster is possible for next year, but even if it does I don't know if Midori would know that. I think it's best to take what Midori says with a grain of salt, even if some things he says comes true, it's possible it was simply a good prediction/safe guess.

@PikminMarioKirby I think the focus will be on Splatoon 3 Grand Fest. There may be updates on Echoes of Wisdom/Jamboree/Brothership/NSO but nothing that would overshadow Grand Fest.

@PikminMarioKirby I personally hope there isn't a remaster of X and that the staff and resources go to Xenoblade 4. I just.. really do not like X at all. I love mainline Xenoblade, but X is just nothing like mainline, and has nothing appealing about it for me.

@Novamii I believe next-gen reveal for September is currently the most accepted answer for the Nintendo fanbase (due to many rumours and the Partner Showcase/Indie World)! However I personally disagree with that and I'm leaning on an early October announcement, but that pretty much depends on what happens this upcoming week. If we are getting either a Direct or Successor announcement this month, I think week of September 16th is the most likely time for one of them to happen.

As for the trailers recently, all have been fairly short and haven't really revealed much. Zelda not getting an overview trailer yet is also intriguing to me. There is a supposed unannounced mode in Mario Party Jamboree, something like Toad Factory (I believe there was a mention of it on the JP website or something like that), so could we potentially be seeing that in a new trailer? A Direct seems possible, but as I said before it depends on what leads up it.

@Grumblevolcano I totally agree. Grand Fest will be a priority for Nintendo, although a smaller announcement is entirely possible since it wouldn't really take attention away from the Splatfest. I think it's safe to guess that we'll have to wait for a Direct/Successor announcement until after Grand Fest.

@VoidofLight Nintendo and it's 2nd party developers will sometimes outsource their games to be remastered by other companies (like Donkey Kong Country Returns HD & Luigi's Mansion 2 HD), so it's in the realm of possibility that there'd be a low amount of Monolith Soft involvement in the remaster. Either way, I don't think this would significantly effect the release of Xenoblade Chronicles 4. If an Xenoblade Chronicles X remaster is in development, the entire Xenoblade team probably isn't working on it.

@PikminMarioKirby Ehhh it depends on if it'll be a straight remaster or if it'll be a rework of the entire game. X is one of those few Nintendo games that desperately needs to be reworked, since it was released completely unfinished. The story ends about where the halfway point of other Xenoblade titles would be. The development for X was so rough that tons of ideas were introduced in the game itself and planned to be expanded on, but were pretty much left to the wayside due to it. It left X being an empty husk that prioritizes MMO-like side-questing over the actual story experience.

If this game gets a full rework, it'll probably have to have Monolith working on it.

@VoidofLight I think either way, there should be some involvement with Monolith Soft, the main question is how much. Even if it is a more ambitious remake/remaster, I doubt it would still require the entire team. They'd likely split up the developement, and if done right, wouldn't have too big of an impact on Xenoblade 4's release.

X does feel incomplete but it always felt weirdly deliberately incomplete to me. Like the core story of the game is just doing the sidequests for the basic task of surviving in the new world they discovered, and there just happened to be a handful of "main story" chapters because they had to because that's how the genre works and not because that was the main priority. Which makes it very weird for a JRPG.

I think if X came out nowadays I honestly wouldn't have been shocked if it had deliberately been made so the main story could continue in future updates. It'd be like how certain live service games do it, barring the terrible monetization (which is exactly what 2 did with mobile game mechanics, so I think this is a weirdly credible idea I just made up).

My big problem is that I'm not replaying X, so even if they did make dramatic changes and additions, I'm not playing it. Which is hilarious to say, since I was one of the top advocates of this game before release, and is literally the last game I ever pre-ordered (barring a few LRG releases). I liked it a lot but certainly not "let's spend another 140 hours on it" levels of enjoyment.

I just remember buying X as my first Xenoblade game. I was excited because I thought the game looked super good from the trailers, only to play it for a few hours and just.. drop it. I almost didn't even touch mainline Xenoblade because of it as well, since I figured that if I didn't like X, I wasn't going to like Xenoblade Chronicles 1. That changed when 2 was revealed and I actually saw how radically different the mainline games were from X. Played a bit of 2, and then watched Chuggaaconroy's Let's Play of the original game before finishing 2.

For as many gripes I have with 2, I'd take playing XC2 over XCX any day.

Xenoblade Chronicles is probably my favourite series ever but I dropped Xenoblade Chronicles X after about 30 hours. Most of the things that make the series great were absent and once I got over the whole running around exploring part of the game, there wasn't enough left going for it for me to push through to the end. If they re-released it I might give it a second chance just because it's a bit easier to push through games in handheld mode but I certainly wouldn't be excited for it.

The strangest thing to me is that even in regards to other Xeno games- there's just something missing with X. I have a huge interest in Gears and Saga, but X is the only Xeno game I just have 0 interest in going back to or playing.

I think Nintendo's got plenty of games coming up for the rest of the year. Announcing switch successor before christmas would jeopardize their sales so I don't see a direct happening anytime soon. The reveal for the next console will probably happen on February or January at the earliest.

@Retrodouche I mean... would people on this site suddenly not buy Zelda because a Switch 2 was coming in 7 months? Would a family which bought a Switch a year ago for their small children suddenly not buy Mario Party as a family party game for the holidays just because if they wait a year or two there might be a Switch 2 Mario Party? For the same reason Nintendo puts out a game basically every month, I don't think announcing there will be a new console 6+ months from now will suddenly make people decide they don't want any new games for the next half year.

Could it slightly affect hardware sales this winter? Perhaps a little, but they care about software sales and their transition to the new console much more than a small difference in hardware sales for a couple months. And, fundamentally, they have already announced it exists even if they haven't yet named it, so anyone who really wants to hold off to wait for new hardware may already be doing that regardless of when it gets an official name reveal.