Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@BiasedSonyFan
Disregard my post lol I was really confused by all the @'s.

Washington dc switch preview event is awesome!!!!! Wish i could post pics directly....

3 weeks from today we'll all be playing Switch. Just 3 weeks!

21 days.... 21 days.... 21 days

Once I get my hands on that Switch, from Monday to Sunday I'll never see the sun's rays... just 21 days

I'm not denying that games with good graphics sell, but those games still got poor user ratings. If the stereotype was true and non-Nintendo gamers care only about graphics and not gameplay, they would be rated much higher than that. Despite selling well and having good graphics, a lot of those games fizzled out quickly. Besides, not all of those games are bad. Minecraft and Fallout 4, for example, are generally regarded as good games for the most part, at least outside of the PlayStation community. A lot of them had significant hype trains behind them before launch too, like The Division and Fallout 4, which would definitely help with sales.

Graphical fidelity definitely has an impact on game sales, so it doesn't help Nintendo to have outdated visuals at all. I'm just saying that literally no one would continue playing a bad game just because it looks good. They might skip good games just because the graphics are bad, which is pretty ridiculous, but hey, to each his own. At the very least they would stick with other goods games that also have good visuals.

Games:
Gameplay > Art Direction > Mobility (portable/streaming) > Framerate > Resolution > Graphics

Hardware:
Quiet > Cool > Horsepower > Compact

(my opinions, obviously)

@TomJ
In general? Yes. If something falls behind to a ridiculous degree in any category that's kinda crap. But I'm thinking more in terms of what I'll be willing to ignore. I can ignore the fact that a game that has average graphics technically if it has great gameplay and art direction. But if a game has fantastic graphics and I can run it at 4K? Who gives a crap if it's not any fun.

Same deal with hardware. It can be the most powerful machine in a tiny form factor all it wants. If it sounds like a plane taking off and you can cook an egg on the side of the case? I don't care. I am not impressed. A piece of hardware that is virtually silent and comfortable to hold? I can live with the fact that it's not running Doom at 8K.

@KirbyTheVampire
Eh, I mostly agree with you, but I still stick to my assertion that there are WAY more people out there than you may think who believe games without good graphics suck. I interacted with these people daily (my editor made us be active in the comments section for our own stories), and if you can use laws of statistical analysis to predict a large pattern off of a sample size, then you'd be pretty shocked at how many people think this way.

I also have a friend who is a community manager for a pretty big, well-known MOBA game dev, and she would tell you the exact same thing. For a large, large number of people out there, graphics=good game, lack of graphics=no sell.

@rallydefault
To be fair when you're looking at trailers and stuff graphics is basically all you see. You don't see framerate because a lot of that content is still at 30fps. You may see resolution but online streaming services are still heavily compressed and a lot of people view this stuff on phones/tablets. And you can't really appreciate the gameplay of something by looking at a video.

So all you're left with are the graphics and the art direction. Terms which people use pretty much interchangeably. And the graphics in particular is heavily focused on by the gaming press. They want that to be the main thing because it's less open to interpretation. They don't have to give an opinion about the graphics they can just do a side-by-side comparison. And that's the content that the most vocal people will get used to consuming.

But the thing I'll always go back to is this. People don't know what they want. At the end of the day the biggest hits in gaming aren't always the best looking games. So despite what people say? Gameplay is still the most important thing to gamers. It's just that it's a thing that's harder to describe and it's a little bit more subjective.

But to be fair, it's also been proven that what people say they want and what they actually buy are sometimes radically different.

@skywake
I can mostly agree with what you're saying, but I think the particular communities within gaming vary A LOT. I think there is a MASSIVE difference between Xbox/PS gamers and PC gamers, for instance (which are all very different from primarily Nintendo gamers).

Take a game like Stardew Valley, for instance. Released on the PC first. Certainly not great graphics, not even good. Could probably have run fairly well on a SNES. But the art direction was inspired, and it sold like dang hotcakes. It sold over a million copies, only on PC, in a little over its first month. For a game designed by one dude and released on only one system, that's pretty awesome.

It's been out for nearly 2 months now on Xbox AND PS4, and honestly, I can't find a single article touting its sales or anything positive in that regard. I'm sure it's selling to a certain degree, but between the two consoles, I'm not entirely sure it's sold a million yet. In double the time it took the PC community to embrace it.

That's just one example. There are plenty more if I cared to look into it deeper, but my point is that gaming communities vary wildly with what they want and, yes, Xbox/PS gamers tend to put a lot of stock on graphics. They tend to write off games that don't have cutting-edge graphics, and they also tend to gives games with awesome graphics but terrible gameplay a chance (looking at you The Order:1886... looking at you).

Edit: Just for fun, I did look up The Order's sales, and physical sales are around 1.75 million. Now, add in online sales, and if we're being VERY conservative, we can assume it's sold about 2 million copies total. And that's obviously only on the PS4, because it's an exclusive. A widely panned game with terrible gameplay (yes I've played it), no replay value, but very pretty graphics. 2-million seller.

@rallydefault
Good point. I think it goes without saying that different platforms have slightly different audiences. That's always going to happen. Games more suited to the audience that the platform attracts will do better on those platforms. The PS4 early on? That audience was going to skew towards people who mostly care about the visuals. It also probably skewed towards an audience that wanted the latest and greatest whether it had content or not. So something like The Order was always going to do pretty well with that audience.

Compare that to the audience that the Switch is going to attract. Gamers old enough to care about Zelda and Mario. People who want a portable gaming device and aren't put off by the lower spec. People who aren't freaking out about the price or the fact that it's a "720p" console rather than a "4K" one. Those consumers probably aren't as fussed about the graphics because of the simple fact that they're buying into a platform that's not really about the graphics.

I just think that overall what the market wants is good gameplay. Most people aren't running benchmarks for fun beyond maybe the first 10mins of getting a new bit of hardware. People buy games not tech demos. It's just that it's a harder thing to communicate on websites and in marketing. The games that stick are the games that people have fun with. Whether that's just me wanting that to be the case or not I don't know. But it is what I think people want whether they say it or not.

I think Sony and Nintendo should get together and make a console that blows Microsoft out of the water. The PlayStation Switch would have the strengths of both consoles and all the best IPs. I know it's been tried before but let bygones be bygones.

@Mellor2000 don't know if you're sarcastic and not, but that is a terrible idea. We need competition. Having 4 big gaming platforms is wonderful for the consumers. Going down to 2 would not be good. We'd get more expensive consoles, more expensive games, and perhaps less games, because they wouldn't need to compete in the same manner they do now.

Of course games compete against other forms of entertainment, still competition within a "niche" is healthy.

@AlliMeadow I was being sarcastic but thank you for the informative rebuttal.

@Mellor2000 good to know, I've had that discussion too many times already.

Yeah, Microsoft and Sony are what prevents Nintendo from releasing only like 2 games a year.

Holy words! Really! Statement not of the day, of the year! In the last years i always hear people talking about cartoony graphics and how it is bad. Well, why should i play a bad inspired, realisticly graphical game, when i can choose what will be hands down the best game in the history with a fantastic gameplay, a well done physics engine for the first time in an open world (hello The Witcher 3??), and an art direction that is simply jaw dropping??? I think that in the last 2 generations the gaming community lost what is really important about gaming...

@BiasedSonyFan I appreciate what you're trying to do with the Metacritic comparison, but I don't think that was what I was talking about. The ''average'' gamer isn't the person that goes online to talk about video games, and certainly isn't going to rate the game on Metacritic. FIFA 17 only has 468 user ratings, that's nothing compared to the umpteen million copies it sold. Many people just complain about the fact that it's the same thing over again. Although I agree, does that make it a bad game? Just something to ponder about. Would FIFA 17 be better if all the previous FIFA games didn't exist? It would get a higher score, but the game is still the same in the end. I'm personally not a big fan of user ratings on Metacritic, it's mostly 10s and 0s, and the result is a tug of war that is generally skewed to one side.

@rallydefault In all fairness to Stardew Valley, the Steam sales are public, everyone can see them. If the developer doesn't release the PS4 or Xbox sales, there's nothing to write about.

Also, I know that this is going a bit more off-topic, but I'm actually willing to give The Order 1886 a try some day. I know that it probably won't hold up as a ''video game'', but I'm interested to see how well it holds up as a piece of entertainment.

I think you just described The Witcher 3

No way! Zelda >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> TW3

Guys, please. In three weeks time we will all be proved how much more awesome Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild really is compared to the Witcher 3. And as the Switch is portable, we can constantly force that fact in everyone else's face