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pikashoe on 11 March 2018
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MTZehvor said:
pikashoe said:

I never said no ports have trailers without gameplay, i said most. i'm pretty sure the first footage we got for odyssey and splatoon 2 didnt mention they were new games. Many thought splatoon 2 was a port, they were wrong.

Pokemon no trailer, metroid a logo, fire emblem no trailer. Most of these games weren't announced at the same time. Just look at this year almost everything they've announced is being released very soon. With switch nintendo have announced very few games far from launch. With fire emblem, Pokemon and metroid being the exceptions. Most likely the reason they announced Pokemon so early was to show people where the future of the franchise Is going to be, many were doubting that a core game would release on the system.

What are your reasons for believing this a port? Smash games don't take very long to make. So time shouldn't be an issue here. It seems likely that they would have started working on a new game earlier due to the switch being in development and every smash game since melee has been in development for roughly a year before the new console released. Development for this game should be lot easier due to there being only one version of the game to make. Smash 4 took at most around 2.5 years to make, with 2 versions of the game with a lot of differences. Brawl took a little over 2 years to make. 

 

The case of Odyssey is a bit different, since Nintendo had already announced they were working on a new Mario game beforehand. Additionally, the first footage of both of those games was just to advertise the Switch, not really to market the individual titles themselves. I don't believe there's an instance of a trailer like what we got for Smash which just flat out says nothing about the game at all.

I wasn't trying to say that all those games were announced at the same time, just that there was a period of time where all those titles had been announced but not yet released. In other words, Nintendo has shown no qualms about having a bunch of unreleased titles in public view.

I'm not really sure how you can say that Nintendo has announced few Switch games far from launch. BotW, Prime 4, Pokemon, Fire Emblem, Yoshi, all announced at least a year in advance of their launch. In fact, out of the list of "major" titles that Nintendo is developing/has developed for Switch, I'd argue the ones announced at least a year in advance outnumber those not (Splatoon 2 and maybe Arms). Even if you ignore the director announcing it and count SMO in the latter category, what other big Switch titles has Nintendo announced so close to launch?

My reasons are pretty much what was in my previous post; announcing a Smash game this close to launch doesn't make much sense from a marketing standpoint or from a historical precedent standpoint. Smash Bros, and fighting games in general, tend to like to give themselves a good deal of time to accentuate the different characters that will be in their game. This goes doubly so for Smash, which, in the last two installments at least, has made use of guest characters to generate excitement. Let's assume that they don't say anything more about this until E3, which I think is a safe bet. Nintendo will have left themselves with 5 months, at most, to show off probably a dozen plus new characters. Previous Smash games have always been very intentional about giving themselves plenty of time to show off new characters and have had great success sales-wise; it seems odd that a new game would entirely abandon this philosophy and basically limit itself to less than half the time. I don't think there's a particularly good reason as to why they'd only drop this trailer now, rather than say have this trailer closer to the start of 2017 and show off gameplay at E3. If it's far enough along in development to be ready to ship by this Fall, there almost assuredly had to have been gameplay ready to show by last June.

There's also something to be said for historical precedent on how Smash games have been developed; namely that Sakurai's always gotten at least a short break between working on entries. He'd pretty much have to start working on Smash 5 as soon as Smash 4 development was finished in order for this game to be released in 2018, all the while working on the new Kirby title. I know Sakurai gets some flack for saying "I'm not doing this anymore," and then continuing to develop Smash games, but I find it hard to believe that someone who sounded as miserable as he did after Smash 4 wrapped up would be willing to immediately jump back in to the same cycle.

Botw was announced for an entirely different console. Arms, splatoon 2, xenoblade 2, fire emblem warriors, labo kits, Kirby star allies, Mario and rabbids kingdom battle, 1-2 switch all of these were released less than a year after being announced. If we add the 3ds into the mix, various Pokemon games, metroid, fire emblem echoes, that new warioware game off the top of my head. Nintendo have been doing this a lot recently.

Looking at the huge reaction to this trailer online can you honestly say they need to spend more than 5 months marketing this. They could tell us nothing but a release date and the game would still sell extremely well at launch.

As for historical precedent every smash since melee has been in development for at least a year before a new consoles release. The wiiu getting replaced quicker than usual would explain why smash is coming out quicker than past entries. Also sakurai hasn't worked on a Kirby game in years, the last time was well over 10 years ago. He hasn't been working on anything since the last smash. The last piece of DLC to come out was in February 2016, he could have taken 6 months off and started working on smash switch in August 2016 which would gives them 2 years and 3 months if the game releases November 2018. Roughly the same amount it took to make brawl. What makes this more likely is the failure of the wiiu.