Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

@skywake The Switch already far exceeded its quota of overpriced rehashes. If it's going to have the longest lifespan of any Nintendo console, then it should have the greatest number of first-party exclusives (adding together both the home console and portable lines, since it's supposed to replace both of them). Especially if some of those rehashes take just as much effort to make as a brand new game would.

Didn't Nintendolife do a story on something like that once?

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/07/random_have_super_s...

@Euler you make a valid point, but there are 10s of millions of Switch owners who haven't played these games. I have owned previous consoles but didn't get a WiiU, so i'm happy with the ports and own many of them. But I understand there are core fans out there who feel hard done by.

@skywake I suppose you overlap to a degree, if you had the concept and story, art etc done before you released the port you could half that timeline.

I would hope they are planning out some of these franchises over multiple years, they could start work on a battalion wars port and a new game in parallel.

@VoidofLight ...No they didn't? Metroid Dread was leaked in 2005 after it journalists were shown the initial demo privately at E3. The Prime 3 reference came years later in 2007. And then after that, a second prototype of the game was shown to journalists in 2009 which was again leaked. Based on the statements in the development video (that work was started, canned, restarted, canned again, and then this version occurred) this appears to be the truth.

Like, I understand not liking leaks, but don't try to rewrite history. The Dread rumors predated Prime 3, that's why people flipped when that game was released.

EDIT: Also, I believe the initial Dread leaked also correctly leaked the rest of E3 2005, which was probably... Path of Radiance and Pokemon XD at least... not sure what else was that year at this point.

@VoidofLight Metroid Dread has been a game that long predated Prime 3 in terms of rumors

It was initially leaked in an internal Nintendo software list of games they planned to show to the public during E3 in 2005 and 2006

The Project Dread thing came after all that in 2007

@link3710 Yeah, you make a compelling arguement, mate

@Slowdive I believe Mr Dive. There is far too much smok-OH MY GOD, I'M ON FIRE!!!!

@TheFrenchiestFry Ah. I didn't know that. Sorry.

@MarioBrickLayer They’re virtually out of Wii U games to rehash, the next ones will be from other systems. And this could be dealt with through backward compatibility and a proper virtual console (either of which would be just a few lines of code at this point).

The main difference is that Prime Trilogy just seems inherently quite likely. It's been ages since we had a Prime game, so it makes good sense they'd want to refamiliarise people with the original trilogy.
Those are also 3 of the most highly regarded games Nintendo have ever made, which have aged incredibly well, so a simple HD up-res would work well. It's just a natural choice for a modern remaster/HD port.

The next nintendo direct is tomorrow and it will showcase metroid prime 5, 6 and 7, can't wait

Not to get tooo political but I think it's worth clearing up here that this term has two very different meanings. The original meaning was in reference to troll factories spreading misinformation through social media. Often without any kind of obvious direct source, always without any kind of established media source. These usually had very strong and very obvious political motivations. The second use of the term was a "I know you are but what am I" from certain political figures who disliked what was being reported. Which, is kinda what the media should be doing? Reporting the kinds of things that make political figures uncomfortable? But that's another discussion for another forum.

In the case of Switch leaks obviously 4Chan is the troll factory, we shouldn't believe what comes out of 4chan. The likes of Bloomberg and Eurogamer are the established media organisations. So personally I'll take the view that people painting Bloomberg and Eurogamer with the same brush as 4chan are only doing so because they dislike what is being reported. Not saying all established media is always correct, it never was, but painting them with the same brush as 4chan is in my view is a bit much......

Maybe it's just the perspective I'm coming from but the way I see it I would expect that actual development is the bottleneck for game development. If you already have a story, game mechanics and other assets you can reference? You're right, that would cut down some of the effort on that side of the gannt chart. But a lot of these processes would run in parallel.

For example lets think of Link's Awakening HD and what they probably could have skipped in development vs A Link Between Worlds. Not a whole lot I would've thought. I mean they would have already have the story and localisation basically done but those things don't really hold up people working on the look, sound and mechanics of the game. They would have already had the soundtrack written but it still would need to be re-arranged and re-recorded. They would have had the look of the world and characters down but they would still have to recreate them from scratch as high res 3D models. None of which can be re-used for future remasters. So really, at the end of the day, it wouldn't have really saved them much time. It is just an exercise in easier marketing and reducing risk.

But HD remasters of Wii and GC titles? They can pretty much re-use all of the assets. The effort would be mostly in getting the Wii/GC code running on the Switch either through emulation or porting it. Once they have that? It's just a matter of improving textures & models (or even not doing that), replacing HUD elements and changing the control scheme. And the best bit is once they've done this for one game? They would likely be able to re-use a lot of these tools.

Whether or not Metroid Prime Trilogy is a thing that releases I think we can pretty much guarantee someone at Nintendo has Metroid Prime running on the Switch. But definitely not upto the standard of release, the texture work in Metroid Prime was pretty great by Wii/GC standards but it doesn't really hold up at 1080p. Especially when you're very often in very closed corridors

@Doofenshmirtz The next Direct is every waking minute of the day and will show Nintendo of Japan employees working on all the games, but from a distance and without sound so we have no idea what they are doing or saying. Then sometimes Miyamoto walks into shot and does some questionable hand gestures at the camera.

Isn't there a meeting this week or next? Maybe we might get some nuggets of speculation from that?

@GrailUK Dunno, would that be a quarterly results meeting? Didn't we just have one not too many weeks ago?

@FragRed It's the rather grandiose sounding 'The 81st Annual General Meeting of Shareholders'. So there may be some poor delusional idiot that has like 4 shares in the company and believes that gives them the right to know everything they have planned for new hardware and software hahaha. Dunno.

@GrailUK I want to buy shares so I can ask why they haven’t considered sending their designers into space on a week trip to come up with fresh and original out of this world ideas for games going forward.

@FragRed Hahahah!