Topic: The Nintendo Switch Online Subscription Service Thread

@MarioLover92 yeah, still thank you for super late response. xD

I wonder if all the sites that reported on the supposed "horrible value" of NSO and "poor emulation" citing OoT will do follow ups now given the patches fixing issues with the emulation of OoT, the regular N64 releases and the inclusion of Mario Kart DLC......

I'm not holding my breath

@skywake are you saying that those sites are obligated to follow up with that information? Should Nintendo expect that information to be offered up about their products by unaffiliated sites?

@NinChocolate
I'm not saying that sites are obligated to cover anything from any particular angle. They certainly aren't obligated to paint decisions made by a cooperation in a positive light. However there was a lot of noise about the NSO expansion pack at its announcement and launch and there were plenty of publications who got a LOT of clicks out of it. Particularly on youtube

I know it seems like almost a foreign concept in this day and age but..... I'd think good journalism would involve publicly correcting the record as visibly as your original take was when your initial take turns out to be as wrong

@skywake Do you think all the attention the emulation problems got prompted the fixes? If not, were there any indications that they would have improved the emulator, beyond a general positivity about Nintendo’s past quality?

@NinChocolate
They had a mechanism in place for patching individual games from the start, I think that part is pretty clear. Also while I'm not entirely sure about OoT (which has had multiple fixes across patches) I saw a deep dive into the Paper Mario crash. It was caused by a game specific patch for Paper Mario to fix a graphical glitch on the game over screen (which you never saw because it was fixed before release amongst dozens of other optimisations and fixes for the title). However that fix caused a crash if you had Watt as your ally. The Japanese release had an additional patch to fix that issue, the US release did not. They added that fix in this release.

So no, I don't think the attention that was focused on the emulation quality had any impact on them implementing fixes. At best people highlighting issues may have been picked up by someone scouring the internet for bugs. Which may have found its way into the ticket queue. But there have been patches in every update to fix issues/improve performance and at a rate which I'd say is pretty typical. This is not a massive about face by any stretch

Also the Mario Kart DLC and the choice to call the service the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion from the start. They would've known when they released it that the intent was to include the Mario Kart DLC as part of this. Now could Nintendo have marketed it better? Probably. I think there would've been much less push back if they had even just said "there's more to come". But the fact is, there is more to come and they knew it

There's a lot to complain about how Nintendo have handled things. There's a lot to complain about some things Nintendo have done in general. But I think people overplayed their criticism of NSO and the honest response would be for people to post an update and/or correction given the service is not what they claimed it would be

@skywake it is good that the fixes are coming through. Nintendo has fewer excuses than a company like Sega because it is their hardware and software platform. Switch is also the fifth or sixth Nintendo console now that N64 games have been on either through remakes or emulation. They are more or less a permanent feature of their hardware at this point. So if there are glaring issues, those complaints are valid. And will be for future Nintendo consoles that no doubt will again feature NES, SNES and N64 titles.

@NinChocolate
Honestly the fact that these are Nintendo retro consoles running on new Nintendo hardware doesn't really make much of a difference. You're still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with instructions in French and an assistant who only speaks German. Hold the entire thing together with sticky tape and string and throw several orders of magnitude more power at the problem? You get somewhat close to the game running on original hardware. But you'll never be perfect

Also when we talk about N64 games on previous Nintendo hardware we don't have quite as many examples as you think. We had the N64 games emulated on the Gamecube, a small number of them. The emulator there wasn't great. But then we had the Wii VC which ... well the Wii was basically a Gamecube so likely some code reuse there. And the Wii U was, well a Wii x10. So that's possibly one confirmed emulator to your list. Then there was the DS which only had remasters, those don't count. The 3DS? Well again, reworked titles. Does not count. Which leads us to the Switch which is the second architecture Nintendo has created an N64 emulator for

But hey, I'm sure it's as easy as dropping a ROM and shipping. I know I for one haven't had anywhere near that much luck dropping random N64 games on emulators for PC. N64 is probably one of the worst consoles for emulation in my experience, especially for the era. Don't get me wrong, N64 emulation isn't bad.... but certainly not to the quality of the emulation on Switch as it stands now with a simple "drag and drop" of a ROM onto an emulator

Also worth remembering that when the N64 launched on the Wii VC, as a paid product, the release schedule was MUCH slower than we've been getting with NSO. So they gave themselves more time to optimise and test games before release to find the sort of issues that will inevitably come up with N64 emulation. The expansion pack launched in late October and we now have 12 games. It took Nintendo 18 months to release that many games on the Wii VC and that was more than half the games they ever released on the Wii VC. So letting a few lines in a handful of config files break a few edge cases slip? I can see how that happened. Not excusing it but I get it, it makes sense

Don't think it's as straight forward as the story you've built up in your head

@skywake people are quick to point out Nintendo’s errors because they are an institution within the games industry. They set the pace and maintain many of gaming’s core standards generation after generation. That may not include the full compliment of modern networking features, but it should include (and has included) the treatment of older game properties. They command extreme brand loyalty. They’ll never be wanting for cash. They have the best creative minds in the business. So any perceived slack on their part doesn’t need pitying. A corporation such as Nintendo can withstand a lot of complaint. And these days that’s data that can be collected, analyzed and turned into marketing. But I still feel the initial complaints were valid. Let Nintendo then explain how it’s improved the recipe.

I do agree that I feel like people vastly underappreciate the difficulties of N64 emulation. As someone who spent quite a bit of time dealing with N64 emulation for videos, issues were consistent enough, that I had to make notable adjustments to the emulator for all three N64 games I let's played (including needing two different versions of the same emulator). The work needed to make those games work is so underappreciated and misunderstood, its really annoying.

But I think those issues are only so relevant when Nintendo had no need to release this when they did. It makes no sense to defend Nintendo releasing it when they did, because A. Companies that will be profitable regardless can afford to delay things no problem and B. If you like the service, you should be mad (as I am) that they unintentionally sabotaged its reputation. This has mostly been bad FOR Nintendo more than anyone, and the past 4 months of mockery that I consistently see online could've been avoided (or at least mitigated) so easily.

@kkslider5552000 and if the underpinnings of your emulation are going to show, at least don’t let it happen with Ocarina of Time, one of the most beloved games of the whole 90’s

Yeah, maybe don't have the first game you showed off for it and the most acclaimed game of the entire console have unavoidable, immediately obvious in the first area of the game type of emulation issues.

Nintendo's not even releasing a new game this month anyway, so this feels like it was all really easily avoidable.

@kkslider5552000 @NinChocolate
Let me be clear, I'm not saying Nintendo didn't do a shocking job of rolling this out in terms of the PR. Especially when we look at in with 20:20 hindsight. They could have held back titles to allow for more QA before release, clearly OoT in particular slipped through the cracks. They should have also definitely made it clearer from the start that the expansion service would involve more than just Animal Crossing and N64/Mega Drive. But I still think certain publications (most publications) overplayed their criticism of the service.

What I suspect is that management at Nintendo wanted this out in time for the holidays last year. And they wanted a solid lineup on day 1 to push the service alongside the AC DLC. So OoT was probably locked in for day 1, this would've likely been entirely out of the control of Dev. I also suspect that they wanted to hold back announcements at launch so that they could have regular announceables through the year. October service launch, December Paper Mario, Jan Banjo, Feb Mario Kart DLC & Majora's Mask etc. Keep people interested

But those OoT emulation bugs getting through the cracks combined with the uncertainty of what this service will offer beyond launch? Internet gaming outrage waiting to happen. And publications ran with that for clicks. But the situation has changed and I think there should be some correction. Which if you look at the front page is happening on this site to some degree

I think my main complaint here is that there's this perception that software is just this magical thing you just copy stuff over and go. People are used to that sort of thing for like music and video files. Maybe you've even played around with emulators briefly and gone "oh yeah, the menu loads". But the problem with software is that it's invisible, there will always be bugs that make it into a released product. The question is how much of it does QA pick up and how much time does dev have to fix it before the deadline. And unfortunately for someone like Nintendo, already on the back-foot here asking people for money, the best QA team is the one you get when you release a product to the public......

Oh yeah, the complete ignorance about game development and emulation etc etc during this has been really frustrating. I think there's an assumption a lot of people have had that Nintendo basically failed at doing the simplest thing in the universe, and that's far from the truth. Inevitably, this was gonna take some time to get right, even compared to other emulation Nintendo has done on Switch. And doubly so, there's no excuse for hardcore game fans who have been focused on any industry stuff at all to blame the devs for any of this, or most things from large gaming companies. It's so obvious that they were not given enough time to fix all these issues, and they almost certainly spent way more time than most would predict to get them in even the state they were in at launch.

I do hope next time they put out a remotely similar type of difficult system to emulate they bring in some people to test it in the time between announcement and release.

To be fair, Nintendo has revealed more about their legal proceedings against emulation sites than it has about any part of its emulation dev. Interested fans can probably tell you the last rom purloiner they took down, but couldn’t tell you anything about where N64 games come from. We do have to admit that we don’t know the story behind the Switch’s emulation service. Maybe they rushed a thing, maybe they didn’t. We don’t know the state or specs of the dev.

@NinChocolate
The development lifecycle is something that's pretty universal. And as someone who has an idea of how that process works in practice with an actual product you know where the weak points are. For software development, which creating game specific settings and patches for roms most definitely is, nothing is as simple as it looks. You change one thing and it impacts a dozen other things. It's why you have testing

And as someone who is a developer but not in the gaming industry I think for games.... testing is going to be a pretty rough process. Because you can't just have a script go through and test every core function. You have to have someone actually play it with a controller. I'd imagine that all of your testing is going to be manual testing. Even worse for emulation because "broken" might not be immediately obvious. Is this low framerate a performance bug or just how the game always was? That scene in OoT which has no fog or reflections, would that be obvious to someone without a side-by-side? Then you also have to test for every region (and we did see this one bite, the Paper Mario bug was only for the US ROM). Not trivial

And in terms of deadlines and pushing stuff forward for a release? Testing will pretty much always be the first thing to suffer when that happens. There's probably two main periods of the development cycle pre-release. You have the heavy development period where testing is mostly looking at the previous version. Then you have the pre-release period where stuff is being shuffled between testing and dev. Release too soon and either testing misses stuff or dev doesn't get a chance to fix it. And I think it's clear that to some degree that's what happened here

..... as for your comment on ROM sites and I presume the implied responsibility of Nintendo for game preservation/making their old content available? Not what I'm talking about here. It's Nintendo's product they're within their right to control how their IP is used. Do I like all of their choices? No. But I don't think that changes my view that a lot of the criticism levelled at the service took it too far

@skywake no, I’m not talking about game preservation. My point is: ask the average fan on the internet what they know about Nintendo’s emulation, they can tell you about their lawyers, because that’s the only inside baseball Nintendo puts out about emulation practices. So fans can’t be blamed for not understanding the scope of reissuing old games.

As for insufficient testing, that is a likelihood. But in that regard Nintendo has historically set a high bar, I think you’d agree. So when the sky is missing in the opening of Ocarina, that’s a standout error on Nintendo’s part. Sure, the backend of N64 emulation is a three-headed beast with a migraine, but People expect Nintendo to get it right anyway because it’s their game on their hardware. When they fall short, it’s actually newsworthy and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Maybe you saw some real acid being spit out about the issues, but i don’t think the complaints I saw were bad. I think they were valid, and Nintendo seems to have addressed the headline issues.

@skywake I think Nintendo originally wanted it out in fall/holiday 2020 but when the pandemic hit they decided to create 3D All Stars, SMB 35 and FE1 localization as digital (also physical in the case of 3D All Stars) stopgap releases hence why all 3 disappeared after March 2021.

Hurry up nintendo please and release f-zero X ( or wipe out 64 ) , Diddy Kong racing, donkey Kong 64. I hope the mario party games have online play oh and that paperboy game .😁

[delited]
I'm so stupid... Posted this on the wrong Thread for some reason. 🤐