| RolStoppable said: I don't know about that Gamefreak Pokémon game. The next thing in line should have been Z (or an X 2 and Y 2) and ready for this holiday season. It seems like the usual pattern doesn't hold true anymore. It's both. The next systems shouldn't be as much of a change for development as Wii to Wii U was, so getting to grips with new hardware won't be as big of an issue. I didn't mention the teams that are working on Super Mario Maker and Star Fox, did I? The other teams are certainly working on unannounced projects though. It could simply be that nobody has been motivated enough to break an NDA yet. Besides, Nintendo themselves hinted at a few things, so what's the point in breaking an NDA to confirm it? Nintendo saying it is already confirmation. Of course there's a handheld underway. Have you been living under a rock? Nintendo has merged their R&D for home consoles and handhelds because in the future their systems will be like brothers, similar to how iPhones and iPads run the same applications for the most part. So same OS for home console and handheld, plus games that will run on both devices. That's how Nintendo aims to combat the droughts that have plagued their previous systems. And if you think about that, it points towards a simultaneous launch for the next Nintendo home console and handheld, because the previous reason to stagger the launch of two different systems obviously doesn't exist anymore. |
Nah, the pattern holds just fine. Pokemon isn't a typical annualized series. Very rarely are games actually released under 13 months apart. Ruby & Sapphire released November 2002, FRLG not until January 2004, 14 months later, then Emerald a short 8 months after that. They made it a good 15 months with no new releases between BW and B2W2. I wouldn't even put it past GameFreak to have pushed Z / X2Y2 back a bit so they could make a big deal about the 20th anniversary.
You said, "The only in-house team left that is working on a big Wii U or 3DS game is the Zelda team." But that's not true, because Mario Maker and Star Fox are big Wii U games. Fire Emblem Fates is a big 3DS game that IS only just finished making, and they are now likely working on the promised "third version" DLC. (You may argue that Fates reuses a lot of Awakening assets, but there are significant improvements to the assets in question and a full cast of new characters, maps, weapons, etc. It's a fully new game. Er, two fully new games? A fully new game and a half, how about that.)
Oh yeah, Iwata also said they'll be releasing five mobile games within the next two years; all of them are being made internally, one of them helmed by the Mario Kart producer. That's more development resources tied up in smaller projects.
It's all speculation. In order to believe both systems are coming in 2016, I have to accept a lot of assumptions about those systems, about Nintendo's internal development processes, and more. I have to assume that people just don't feel like leaking any information about these systems at all including what kind of controller they have, what kind of components they use, what kind of games are in development. I won't commit to all of those assumptions so I'm content to be extremely skeptical.
