OrtadragoonX

It’s pretty fascinating how nvidia laid everything out with the design. It’s a shockingly efficient method of doing things.

Probably 3rd person. I prefer 3rd person resident evil.

No matter how you shake it the price is whack. Still I’m gonna pick these up for Christmas because I’ve never played them. I never had a Wii.

Ya know considering this game, they really should have cut some settings and gunned for a 60fps mode. I think it could have been done with some smart cuts.

@LoneWolfSones

Cyberpunk doesn't use ray tracing at all on Switch 2. It's basically the same visual settings as the PS5 performance mode at a lower resolution and capped at 30fps combined with the PS4's NPC draw level.

Cyberpunk's artwork was designed to look good with either ray tracing or raster lighting depending on the hardware its ran on. All console versions use the rasterized lighting model except for the RT modes on Series X and PS5, which is capped at 30fps and enables ray traced shadows. On PC, the ray tracing menu is as large as most game's entire graphical menu so it's a very scalable game.

By comparison, Star Wars Outlaws literally doesn't have a rasterized backup method for its lighting. Ray tracing is required just to run the game. Switch 2 is Ampere based and has ray tracing cores in its hardware, so games like Outlaws and Indiana Jones are possible on it with smart cuts to account for the greatly reduced power output relative to other platforms.

It's actually a genius little hardware design Nintendo and nVidia came up with and I feel it will be widely supported for a long time.

@nessisonett

God the Cave The Rone. That whole part of that game is some nonsense. Yay time to grind on enemies who are stupid powerful and a ton of them have 1 hit kill spells.

DQII is a classic, trust me I feel that way, but man even by 8-bit standards that game is horrifically paced difficulty wise.

@HugoGED

That is true, but I will say that games opening start loading time on a PS4 was appalling. It was so bad I set it to the side until I got a PS5.

@Kazman2007

In some cases, that extra content was developed by outside studios so ownership is complicated.

And also, some of it is just bad. FFI is a good example. Of the extra dungeons, only Lifespring is any good. And that’s solely because of the boss fights with Shirnryu and Omega.

@iLikeUrAttitude

This game has problems on all its release platforms, especially on PC where it's basically a train wreck. The game should have been delayed as a whole.

Considering how weird this game runs on much more powerful hardware, the Switch 2 version had no chance of running decently. Good on them for delaying.

Wow since they added this I'll try out free roam. I've ignored it specifically for this reason besides just messing around in it when in Knockout Tour lobbies.

Maybe I'm weird, but I like the Genesis version the best.

@sixrings

Because when you have a kid, sitting down and idling drifting off into video game worlds for hours at time isn’t a thing for you anymore. It completely changed the kinds of games i play. I used to be big into massive open world adventures. But considering I only get to play late at night (and can’t use the bed room tv because my girlfriend is trying to sleep) i transitioned more into level based games that are much easier to complete with small time investments.

I live in the US as well and I have two TVs. A big one in the living room and a small one in the bedroom. But with how complicated life is with a kid, only being able to play in mostly short bursts for maybe an hour at the most, a handheld just works much better for people like me. I do have my dock hooked to the big tv so that when I do get some extended free time (like my GF takes our son to visit her parents and stuff) I play it on the TV.

@sixrings

A ton of folks bought them because it’s the best balance for a busy life. I was all Sony for three generations. I went mostly Switch because I had a kid and a console just plugged up all the time doesn’t work for me anymore. Handheld still allows me to enjoy gaming, my oldest hobby. Without it, I would have had to give it completely up.

@sixrings

It would put them in direct competition with Sony. Something they don’t do anymore. The whole point of the Switch is that is super easy to use on a tv or as a handheld. Even the PC handhelds don’t exactly replicate how seamless it is. That’s their calling card these days.

@sixrings

Considering the power budget they had to work with, what else could they have really done? Only real issue is the CPU and I’m guessing they wanted a battery life better than 30 minutes.

@smoreon

I don’t think so. Not when everything is added together and the efficiency of the Switch 2’s design. It hits above its weight class.

@RiasGremory

Outlaws was a good port. Even more impressive than Cyberpubk honestly because it relies on ray tracing for all of its lighting and shadowing.

@sixrings nothing about this game screams hard to run.

I bet an RTX 2050 with a 10 year old CPU could run something like this at 60fps above 1080p.

They just didn’t even try.

@Pikachupwnage

It does but only at 1080p. And the Switch 2 could do a lot better than that.

@rjejr IMO, I think Microsoft's game division has been mismanaged since the late 360 era. So very new guy in the seat tries to right the wrongs of his predecessor while also creating entirely new ones.

The one thing Phil was right about was that the PS4/Xbox One generation was the one to lose and not recover from. That was the first generation where digital purchasing became the primary method of game purchasing and it pretty much locked in players to their respective platforms. A ton of folks switched from 360 to PS4 at the beginning of the generation. But with large digital libraries and full BC, no one is switching again. Microsoft needed to do better that generation and frankly they bombed it. The sales numbers aren't horrible (they moved like 50 million Xbox Ones) but in terms of how they were viewed it was basically a Sega Saturn situation for them.

@RiasGremory

That's overall power when you balance out the machine as a whole, not the CPU specifically. GPU wise it's pretty powerful, somewhere between a PS4 Pro and a Series S but with a more modern Ampere based feature set. CPU wise, it's really underpowered, not too far above a PS4. But considering how most games are designed, that decision made sense for Nintendo to make. Spend more of the power budget on the GPU because most games are GPU limited, not CPU limited.

It only becomes a problem on games that are heavily reliant on CPU operations, like Grand Theft Auto with very complicated AI routines running constantly on the CPU. The way Cyperpunk's developers got around this issue with that game was that they cut out a ton of random NPCs that existed in its game world with their own routines that had to be calculated. Visually, Cyberpunk resembles the PS5 version, makes sense since the GPU in it is so performant. But when it comes to NPC density, it's very similar to the PS4/Xbox One versions. So its a very customized version of that game, mixing the visual settings of the PS5/Series X version (at lower res and a lower framerate target) but with the NPC routines of the last generation versions to balance the load on the Switch 2's CPU.

Game development is a balancing act. And the Switch 2 is a good piece of kit. I think Nintendo made the right decisions with its design. Really the only thing I would have changed if I was in charge is that it's kind of nuts that 3 gigs of RAM (system has 12 overall) is reserved for the OS to do smooth GameShare and GameChat operations. I would have restricted it to just 1 gig of RAM and accepted slower GameShare and GameChat performance. Those other two gigs of RAM would be opened to developers.

And the battery. The system is super efficient with how it uses power but its battery capacity is pretty low. I think they should have redesigned the mainboard to fit a physically larger battery. If it had the same capacity battery as a Steam Deck that thing would probably last 7 hours on Mario Kart World.

@Fiq_Strife

That's the one I don't ever see coming. Unlike most modern games, which are incredibly GPU intensive, that game is going to be a monster on both the CPU and the GPU. And with the way Switch 2 is designed, it prioritizes GPU budget within its performance parameters. That's one game I don't think could run. The Switch 2's CPU is barely above that of a 2013 era PS4.

@Exerion76

Consider how expensive game development is these days (even a cheap AAA game is probably 100 million bucks these days) it makes financial sense to release it on as much hardware as you can. Thus I suspect going forward, considering the explosion in popularity of portable handheld PCs, Intel's new budget graphics cards, and the Switch 2 scalability is the name of the game for the future so that the game is guaranteed to at least be tolerable on all the platforms actively on the market.

@Altaria_97

Honestly it sounds like a lazy port. They could have done 60 fps with these visuals with a higher resolution. Something tells me they didn't use DLSS and didn't want to modify the DRS engine for the game, reusing all the Switch 1 settings where possible. Basically it's lazy.

I'm kind of surprised the quality mode is capped at 30FPS. The Switch 2 would have the horsepower to run such an unsophisticated visual make-up at 60 at DLSS 4K visuals. It's kind of crazy they didn't do that.

Only thing I can think of is that its basically the Switch 1 version but with the cap removed and any DRS (dynamic resolution scaling) tuned to highest resolution with no margins to prioritize framerate in that mode. Using DLSS to essentially fake 4K would have let this game run at 60 fps easily. And if their physics engine allows for it, it could probably do a 120 fps mode at DLSS 1080P targets.

It sounds like Namco spent the absolute bottom dollar on the Switch 2 conversion. Unlike games like Cyberpunk and Star Wars Outlaws where they carefully tailored them for the Switch 2 hardware.

@Razzy I think it looks pretty good. It's definitely downgraded over the other versions but its still observably Resident Evil Requiem.

@molkom

In terms of basic feature set, with current games, the Switch 2 should be the primary target and then the game "boosted up" in quality for the more powerful platforms. Switch 2 has all the modern day features needed by games today. You optimize the game properly for Switch 2 and an upresed improved version for other platforms will run like a dream.

@Ultimapunch

To be fair, the Switch 2 is a glorified tablet for the most part.

@rjejr

Yes technically. When you get down to it.

The 360, PS3, and Wii U were the last consoles to use console exclusive hardware architectures.

But I think Microsoft meant they are getting out of hardware entirely.

@Suketoudara

That's fair but he's also covering his ass on that one. UE5 has some well known optimization issues that Epic has so far dragged their asses on actually fixing.

@Untempered-Link

RE4 sold well on both the Gamecube and the Wii.

Basically when Capcom has actually tried, the series tends to do well regardless of the platform.

@Oldstalk

I never found any of the resident evil games that scary really. The earlier ones were more b-movie corny than anything else while the more recent installments have tried to be more serious but still don't really feel scary.

RE4 was the pinnacle of the series in my opinion and one of the best games ever made. Primarily because they embraced how B-Movie corny the series was before that point and intentionally made one of the corniest games of all time.

@rjejr

Microsoft pretty much said they are done with dedicated console development. The future of Xbox is basically branded PCs certified to play games at certain settings.

@OldManHermit

Considering the lighting engine of the game was built with ray tracing in mind, not even having a rasterized back up system, I wouldn't put too many hopes in it coming to PS4 in any kind of way that resembles the other versions.

The Switch 2, while a bit underpowered, does have feature parity with other target platforms for this game, including ray tracing cores.

The PS4 can't do ray tracing in any kind of way, so they would have to build out an entirely separate lighting model just for that version. And I don't see that happening.

@JohnnyOutOfHisMind

That's good revolutionary behavior.

@TheBoilerman

2D Pixel Art games are mostly timeless in both design and visuals. I compare them to early had drawn animated films from the 30s and 40s. The never really age.

3D games, by comparison, usually age a lot in both gameplay and visuals. Same went for the early CG animated movies of the 90s. They just aren’t timeless in the same way.

@sixrings it was pretty light. But it wasn’t bad.

Nothing will ever top the Dreamcast launch. That launch date was stacked with that consoles best games arguably from day one.

I’d rank the Switch 2 Launch somewhere around the GameCubes. Similar in quality except the GameCube had Melee the second month on the market and the Switch 2 had DKB on its second month of availability. So it’s eerily similar to the GameCube’s launch quality wise.

@LastFootnote

This was probably done months ago. But it was easy to split off from the main game to sell as DLC. I ain’t that mad about it I don’t even have DKB (although I did play the demo and it’s on my wishlist for Christmas now) and it’s something almost every developer does these days.

Kind of nuts this isn’t included in the expansion pass and has to be bought separately. That’s dumb.

@michellelynn0976

Everyone has different tastes. I’m a tacky butthole so I find that stuff hilarious.

@kevin74

They didn’t advance Aloy’s character at all. She starts as smug Mary sue and ends the game as a smug Mary sue.

@Questionable_Duck

I only know one 70 year old gamer and highly doubt he's ever posted on any website, much less this one. He's obsessed with flight simulators since that was what he did in the Air Force. He flew C-130s. Has a whole huge rig.

@Banjo-

Miyamoto, Tanabe, and Kondo were at the top of their talents with those two games.

@GinMiguel

Well ***** it's even older than my mom.

@w1p3out did the six double a batteries last for the entire break?

@michellelynn0976

It’s mean to be funny for us older folks who remember that rivalry.

Genesis does what Nintendon’t.

@Maxz

“What the hell is a Gamecast? There’s a GameCube and a Dreamcast but…”

“Man not all of us are rich. I’ve got a Gamecast. That’s all I can afford.”

It's a decent looking lineup. But the only two I'm for sure getting are Metroid Prime 4 and Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave. DQ1&2 will be a sale pickup. Maybe FFVII Remake Intergrade since I have kind of wanted to play through that again.

@Member_the_game

Super Mario Land 2 is fantastic and really feels like Super Mario World mixed with the best of SMB3.

SML is worth playing just for good its soundtrack is.