The Wii U and Virtual Boy aside, how do they do it? Even the 3DS people came around on. Really wild how much weird shit ('innovation'?) this company can get away with.
>The Wii U and Virtual Boy aside, how do they do it?
Nintendo's top-tier exclusives, and a constant focus on end-to-end user experience.
The PS4/Xbone (and even, to an extent, the 360/PS3) have so much jank when it comes to playing a game on them.
My experience with The Last of Us Part II basically consisted of inserting the game, waiting nearly 25 minutes for it to install, going through that entire process again, twice, because there was a smudge on the disc, then waiting another 20 mins to download a 10GB patch, only to load up the game and sit through hours upon hours of boring-as-fuck intro content before I saw a single zombie.
With Super Mario Odyssey, I put the game in, downloaded some optional 50MB patch in about 20 seconds, then started jumping around collecting coins and throwing my hat at everything.
They just "get it" in ways that Sony and Microsoft don't (or at least, haven't "got" since the original PS2/Xbox era).
> They just "get it" in ways that Sony and Microsoft don't (or at least, haven't "got" since the original PS2/Xbox era).
I fundamentally disagree. There are some great games for the switch out there but they are absolutely hampered by Nintendo's outright refusal to provide modern features. Animal crossing was a lovely game except for the fact that it didn't support more than one island meaning either me or my girlfriend had to skip it. the "visit your friends island" experience is reminiscent of the late 90s in online gaming. Their support for peripherals has lead to this [0] being considered a reasonable solution to voice chat.
That's before you get into the whole ninetendo switch online + expansion pack.
Nintendo don't "get" online gaming in the way that the other two seem to. The ROM hack of Melee made by one guy famously has better online than Smash Ultimate does.
They are the only company still serving up the classic experience, though.
>They are the only company still serving up the classic experience, though.
Heh, I actually disagree again here, but not quite as strongly. PlayStation have absolutely hit it out of the park on "classic experience" over the past few years. their remakes/remasters have been absolutely stellar (Tony hawk's Pro skater/spyro/crash bandicoot) and really hold up well in modern terms. Their single player games in the last few years (god of war, uncharted, sekiro) are nothing short of outstanding. They may not all be your cup of tea but I think it's fair you can say that about some of the Nintendo family of games too.
Xbox has a few home runs in the same category. The Ori games are absolutely incredible, and having recently come away from Metroid Dread _very_ disappointed (really poor story pacing, overly predictable plot, and horrific instadeath mechanics) I would choose ori and the blind forest/will of the wisps over the more recent Metroid games.
I'm not talking about the games themselves, I'm talking about the experience of using the console (I also thought Dread was a bit of a letdown, and don't get me started on the difference between 3D All Stars and the Crash/Spyro remaster).
It's just that on the Switch, in almost all cases you just put the cartridge in the console you're in-game within seconds.
For Xbone/PS4 (and I'm assuming this is worse on the new consoles), there's a whole arduous process to go through before you can play the game. As someone who no longer has the time/energy to pour into gaming like I used to, this hour long wait before playing a game just makes the whole experience not worth it.
It's hard to understate how much "time to play" makes the switch enjoyable. I can return to a game I was playing, exactly where I was, in about 3 seconds. Even if I've not touched the switch in days or weeks! The system level pause/resume makes it so I can quickly jump into a game whenever I have time, even if it's just 10 minutes.
Contrast that to my ps4 experience and it is a world away. Takes at least a minute to get to home screen, then there's usually gigabytes of updates to download. Sometimes it might be _hours_ before I can start the game I wanted to play.
I'm not sure if the latest generation of xbox/ps have solved this. Combimed with the supply issues of the new generation consoles, I've not been too keen on getting one because my switch has sufficed
The situation is better but not perfect (i would argue switch has some major issues on that front mostly related to slow in game load times). Ps5 games in my experience are turn on console to in game in under a minute. The OS standby is much better and quick resume features in games are excellent (Online games aside)
its actually better on newer consoles. (ps5 in particular is much better than xbox). The consoles themselves are quick to wake up, and if you're playing single player games there's no need to update.
> in almost all cases you just put the cartridge in the console you're in-game within seconds.
This is true for some games on switch, however my experience is that many games suffer from extremely long loading times even compared to PS4/Xbox one. The ps5s loading times for games are orders of magnitude quicker; power on to in game in Spiderman miles Morales is less than 30 seconds. I've spent more time than that staring at single loading screens in Smash Bros, Metroid Dread and breath of the wild.
> this hour long wait before playing a game just makes the whole experience not worth it.
The hour long wait does happen occasionally, but it's not like you actually need to do anything during that time. You can do that and come back that night, and a month later the game will still be playable without updating.
It's called Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology. It was Gunpei Yokoi's credo. Other console makers start off with, okay, we are going to design a system around the latest and best technology and really wow people with our graphics. Nintendo starts off with, what can we build using old technology that we can pick up for a song and second-source easily if need be? So it becomes a question of, how do you combine these old technologies in new ways that would have a fun gameplay story in them? When you do LTwWT, you really have to focus on gameplay and fun, because you don't have much to fall back on. And then on the software side the question becomes, what kinds of games can we write for this system that a) play to the system's strengths; b) look, sound, and feel great, even with the hardware's more limited capabilities?
Developing for a Nintendo system is not for everybody. It's like being a Mac developer only more so: you have to write software that integrates smoothly with the hardware and contributes to the grand narrative of the vendor.
Pokémon, Legend of Zelda, and Smash Bros all sell consoles and their innovation is child-targeted so they innovate in weird ways cuz kids don’t care really about processor speed or graphics cores.
I think you wildly underestimate who purchases these consoles. There is certainly an element of catering to a younger audience, but young adults are the real money maker.
In my experience, at Pokemon release events in Japan and in the United States, the majority of attendees lining up are adults, most under 30.
What you’re describing is Nintendo reaping the rewards of having previously targeted kids. If you play a modern Pokémon game with a non-nostalgic eye (as it is easy for me to do, since I am too old to have grown up with them) you can see that however fun these games can be for an adult, they are definitely made to appeal to children.
This is definitely true. I had a SNES, but skipped the N64 and also for some reason never played Pokemon as a kid. It's still reflected in what Nintendo games I like. Zelda a Link to the Past was my favorite game. So I loved A Link Between Worlds. However, I really struggled getting into any of the 3D Zeldas because of lack of Ocarina of Time nostalgia. Same with 3D Mario games. I bought Pokemon for 3DS during a lot g layover on my first trip to Japan. I thought this would be the perfect drosetup to get into the series but without nostalgia it's too easy, to repetitive and I honestly saw no reason to get more than a handful of Pokemon.
Planting the seed early and reaping rewards for the entire life is definitely what works for them.
Funny enough, I like the Shin Megami Tensei series which in essence is a dark and challenging Pokemon. I find the mindless grinding while listening to a podcast quite relaxing.
Those 30 year olds likely fell in love with those franchises when they were kids. i suspect Nintendo know this and see catering to kids as an investment.
It's unlike anything else- with Xbox and PlayStation you can get mostly the same experience on the "opposite" console, or even on a PC. All of nintendo's consoles have followed a similar thread where it adds something that you just don't have on other consoles.
Nintendo exclusives don't hurt, either. But Xbox and PS have exclusives, too.
Every single other big developer seems to focus on high end graphics and extensive scripted stories, not sure how Nintendo managed to keep the focus on FUN instead. Graphics and stories are much easier to produce than FUN, Nintendo somehow managed to avoid that. I wonder if this is the culture barrier? Making a game people want to buy without a story or graphics is really hard, but Nintendo chooses that hard path anyway. Very different from the Hollywood games we see from USA where most of the money is spent on motion capture, graphics, effects, storytelling etc.
I have to imagine the changes have to have been somewhat more driven by developers coming up with fun gameplay ideas while messing with new hardware. Super Mario 64 DS for example includes a collection of minigames with varying gameplay mechanics that explore different ways to use the dual screens along with the pack-in metroid demo, the Wii U had Nintendo Land, and the 3ds faceraiders, Mii Plaza and some AR demos, which all seem like polished proof of concepts for how to take advantage of the new hardware.
And fostering a culture at the upper echelons of management that enables, encourages, and embraces that mentality - that's the magic. Decades of fun goofy shit, and it hasn't yet been eaten by the business turds.
Nintendo also has a culture of sharing institutional knowledge regarding game design. Shigeru Miyamoto is not very involved in the day to day of Mario and Zelda development anymore. Other designers and producers who have worked with and learned from him have taken the reins of those franchises and taken them to new heights.
Contrast that with, say, Sega, who never found their footing with the Sonic franchise ever since the late 90s. Sonic games were developed by whatever developers happened to be available -- sometimes American or mixed Japanese-American teams; and the design ideas from the first few games that made them so great were lost once new hardware generations came along that couldn't use the original engine code. Sonic went a whole console generation (fifth generation, Saturn era) without a new full game in the main series, and the games featuring him after that have been a real mixed bag. (No, Adventure 2 is a mess. The controls are some of the most slippery imprecise shit in the 6th generation.)
I was really hoping for some sort of backwards compatibility. Nintendo had been doing that with their handheld for the past couple of generations. The dual screen would have had to have dealt with, naturally. But the 3DS has an amazing library.
I have both systems now, and enjoy my Switch, but I still prefer the 3DS. I hope whatever the Switch successor is goes back to adding a backwards compatibility mode.
Considering the Switch hardware is just incredibly boring — ARM, capacitive touchscreen, standard gamepad — I’m hoping it will have good backwards compatibility for a while yet. Just like the DS and GameCube.
