Plans for Astral Chain had been made with Nintendo since before Neir Automata...

[Shiken]

Hiku said:

Shiken said:

I think this is a brilliant way to work with 3rd parties.  They did not just buy an IP, they helped create one and was heavily involved in what the game came to be.

Yes and no.
This can (and has) also resulted in games straying from the original concept in negative ways, when the publishers impose themselves on the creative freedom of the developer.

For example, Bandai had Monolith strip Xenosaga 2 of a lot of elements that Bandai wanted to save for the next game. They also fired Soraya Saga from the project, who was the lead writer, and is married to Tetsuya Takahashi. (Source, Soraya Saga's blog after she got fired.)
This resulted in poor reception for Xeno 2, and contributed to the shortening of the originally planned 6 game series down to only 3 games.

Another example which is more recent, and more close to home since it involves Platinum, is Scalebound.
Although in this case we don't know exactly what went wrong, but we do know that quite some time before the game got cancelled, Kamiya posted on Twitter "Damn Microsoft, are you f***ng kidding me?"

The rumor is that MS wanted them to change the direction of the game to be more multiplayer/online focused, and this lead to a number of development problems, which in turn lead to the cancellation of the game.

So when it comes to publishers being heavily involved in the development of an outsourced game, it really depends on how it is handled. When the ideas are implemented (sooner some times means less potential issues), and if the ideas are for the better, or worse.

This probably works best when there's proper trust between the developer and publisher, where both can express their ideas, without neccesarily enforcing them against the developers wishes.

Oh absolutely!  Everything you said is absolutely true.  Luckily Nintendo and Platinum Games seem to have such a relationship that you expressed in the bolded part of your post.

It is not just PG either, as we have seen them do good work with Ubisoft as well with use of their 1st party IPs in crossovers.  It just seems like Nintendo is approaching these partnerships right, where maybe MS did not.

In any case, Nintendo and PG seem to be close enough now that it is almost reminiscent of Sony and Insomniac for example, before Sony bought them outright.