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Nintendo has finally made their announcement for the NX, or rather, Nintendo Switch.



Yes, that was a dude playing Skyrim on it. Also a little more Zelda, new Mario, and what looks to be a new Splatoon game as well.

A list of companies said to be on board:

Which gen is this for them? Ps4/XboxOne or are they first in the gen after that?

Crazedwraith wrote:Which gen is this for them? Ps4/XboxOne or are they first in the gen after that?

I've seen a lot of people referring to the PS4 Pro, Switch and Xbox Scorpio as some sort of intermediate generation, between the PS4/XBO/WiiU generation and the next one.

Nothing solid on the specs yet, although realistically there's going to be no way you can make such a device with PS4/XBO-level power and have its battery last longer than ten minutes. At least the rumoured nVidia SoC should be much easier to work with than the clusterfeck that was the Wii U.

Crazedwraith wrote:Which gen is this for them? Ps4/XboxOne or are they first in the gen after that?

Mushroom.

It's a successor to the 3DS that you can plug in to a dock to make it work a bit better in your living room. It's not going to try and compete with even the current gen consoles let alone their upcoming refreshes.

Nintendo has supposedly said that they don't intend it to replace either the Wii U or the 3DS. Which is, of course, what they said about the original DS.

So in practice, it probably means, "We're not gonna abandon our old systems until the Switch has supplanted them".

Here's a quote, apparently from the late Satoru Iwata, about what they planned for it:



It seems like he was saying one of the key goals was a way to make games easier to port, even to a lower- or higher-powered system.

Well, looks like Nintendo is through fucking around. I LOVE the concept, simple yet elegant, and quite possibly the only way 'traditional' consoles are going to survive is through innovations like this. Glad that they're getting massive 3rd-party support as well.
I've always been a Nintendo gamer, never owned a non-Ninty console now I think on it (aside from a 360 I was given, which I sold to fuel a weekend away in Coventry when I was 18 ) and this...might just tempt me back.

Chimaera wrote:Well, looks like Nintendo is through fucking around. I LOVE the concept, simple yet elegant, and quite possibly the only way 'traditional' consoles are going to survive is through innovations like this. Glad that they're getting massive 3rd-party support as well.

You say that, but the PS4 was the fastest selling console ever, so reports of the home console's demise might well be as exaggerated as reports of the PC's demise a decade ago.

I call BS on two things:
1. A guy was playing Skyrim for 15 seconds and it didn't crash, much less moving it from screen to screen like that over an extended period of time.
2. That anyone smiles at anyone for any reason at an airport.

DaveJB wrote:Nothing solid on the specs yet, although realistically there's going to be no way you can make such a device with PS4/XBO-level power and have its battery last longer than ten minutes. At least the rumoured nVidia SoC should be much easier to work with than the clusterfeck that was the Wii U.

Skyrim is 5 years old now and that's the only "intensive" game I saw. It's also worth noting that the game was only ever CPU and VRAM intensive for the time. It actually couldn't even touch a second-rate video card, especially if you could live with 30FPS and sub 1080p resolutions. But Papyrus is a CPU hog and can't process more than a single script or thread at a time on top of that.

These days, you can play it on a toaster. And if the Switch has dynamic resolution when you move it to the small screen, you can cut the cycles required to run it down even more. The style of a lot of Nintendo games (Zelda: BotW, which was shown) could work very well with this type of system since their stylistic choices aren't as tired to resolution as a lot of AAA titles are. Good god, Metroid Prime still looks fantastic even to this day, if not a little low-poly.

iPads and other tablets can run 3D intensive games for quite a while. Battery tech has come a long way. Though, I do suspect a battery attachment pack to be a thing for this.

Here's what's supposed to be the specs on the devkits.

Those are some pretty weak specs for a console, but not bad for a strange tablet thing... Color me interested, but unlikely to buy it unless it has some killer app I can't do without.

So it's essentially a glorified tablet running on the same architecture that Android does.

Yeah it's basically an Nvidia Shield with some wee controllers on the sides and a dock that, presumably, upclocks it a bit to let it drive a higher resolution display.

So, given the specs and size, and estimating the sizes of components, it cannot have a lot of room for the battery pack. So without the dock, the battery life of it will be like a phone playing pokemon go or worse, right? An hour?
Is there any info on that?

No info on battery life yet, though I seriously doubt Nintendo is going to DOA their new console by giving it an hour battery life. 4 hours seems to be a pretty standard area, though no one can give concrete details yet. That said, if they have no need for active cooling and they have smart throttling, there's not a whole lot of power consumption I can see in the first place. Doesn't the Shield Tablet last about 8 hours? That thing is pretty slim.

The Shield's battery life depends what you're getting it to do. IIRC it lasts longer streaming than playing its own games.

I reckon a respectable guess for battery life will be 3-4 hours.

Now the part everyone has been waiting for... exhaustive analysis of literally every frame of the promo video!




Possible wiimote style ir reciever on the joypads.



Shoulder-buttons on inside edge.



More shoulder buttons.

But I don't really care, I just want to ask a question.

Is it possible that the IR reciever is going to substitute for touch when you are playing on the couch? Would that work? I mean, using two fingers on the touchscreen, then when sitting down, could the IR pointers be adequate substitutes?

That would explain why Nintendo didn't mention touch or the IR function. They may still be working out the kinks.

My question is, would it even work or am I crazy?

Some other people seem to think it's possible.

Over the past few days, much discussion has taken place about the Nintendo Switch potentially having a multi-touch screen on its handheld portion. We said in a recent report that we believe games will not be allowed to require touch screen functionality for any game, as all Switch games will be required to be playable while the handheld is in the dock.

With regards to how this will be circumvented, we believe the solution is that touch screen games will be playable on your TV by use of an IR pointer located in the bottom of the right Joy-Con.

Having spoken to sources within Ubisoft, we believe that games which support touch functionality on the handheld will use IR functionality to replicate that ability on the TV.

We believe the handheld, when docked, will switch on two small IR lights similar to the Wii Sensor Bar at the top of the handheld screen, peeking out above the top of the dock. The IR sensor in the right Joy-Con can then be used in much the same way as a Wii Remote pointer. This is designed to be used for touch screen replication, rather than the camera turning and aiming functions Wii Remotes were often used for.

http://letsplayvideogames.com/2016/10/r ... tionality/

Interesting if true.

TheFeniX wrote:I call BS on two things:
1. A guy was playing Skyrim for 15 seconds and it didn't crash, much less moving it from screen to screen like that over an extended period of time.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2 ... y-revealed

Update 2: While Bethesda's much beloved Skyrim was clearly shown during Nintendo's Switch reveal video, the publisher told us today that it's not officially confirming the game just yet. "We're happy to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Nintendo on the video. While we are not confirming any specific titles at this time, we are pleased to announce our partnership with Nintendo and support of the Switch. We look forward to revealing specific games and details in the future," a spokesperson said. Skyrim Remastered is set to launch on October 28 for Xbox One, PS4 and PC; perhaps the Switch will receive a version of the Remastered game at launch?

bilateralrope wrote:

Update 2: While Bethesda's much beloved Skyrim was clearly shown during Nintendo's Switch reveal video, the publisher told us today that it's not officially confirming the game just yet. "We're happy to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Nintendo on the video. While we are not confirming any specific titles at this time, we are pleased to announce our partnership with Nintendo and support of the Switch. We look forward to revealing specific games and details in the future," a spokesperson said. Skyrim Remastered is set to launch on October 28 for Xbox One, PS4 and PC; perhaps the Switch will receive a version of the Remastered game at launch?

I did my own bit of reading because there was no way I was buying Beth had a working port of Skyrim for a device like this, this early in development. I wouldn't be surprised if everything Skyrim was just pre-rendered video superimposed on the device screen. I was just too lazy to post anything on it, so thanks for doing it for me.

That said, my original post was more just another jab at Beth. If they do release it, the 64-bit port is likely to be a lot more stable, just like Fallout 4 is, and Nintendo would probably spank them if it was a garbage port. Or, you know, just fix it for them.

I will say a mobile version of Skyrim: Special Edition would probably help push some units and give people not normally big on Nintendo consoles to make the jump over. The game has a rather large amount of recognition.