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Chazore on 17 February 2022
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Captain_Yuri said:

It will be interesting to see how it does. One thing I will say is after seeing the Steam Deck, it will be interesting to see if Nintendo goes AMD and x86 instead of going Nvidia and Arm at some point in the future.

The benefit would certainly be that it will be even easier to port games over to the switch and x86 is getting to the point where the power efficiency is good enough. And considering the Volumes Nintendo is able to sell their products vs someone like Valve, I am sure they would get a bigger discount than what Valve is getting with their Steam Deck.

Even if the Switch 2 has Zen 2 + RDNA 2 specs similar to the Steam Deck, it would be quite powerful as we have seen the Steam Deck being able to run Ghostrunner with Max settings + Ray Tracing at above 30fps. With the low level API and optimizations you can do on a console, they can get even more juice out of it while having decent battery life. Of course the problem would be that whatever Gimmick Nintendo would plan would sink into the cost. So that would probably be the biggest issue unless they want to sell the Switch 2 for $400.

The main issue I've had with Nintendo for some years now is, while their handhelds can be great and have a good selection of games (though Switch just feels lesser of a library to my tastes personally), but when it comes to their first party for Switch, we see a lot of stuff is pared back. I know We've seen games like Doom and stuff, but those were primarily designed around PC/higher level consoles than the Switch, so the Switch ports are naturally expected to suffer some cutbacks, but when it comes to Ninty 1st party, I'm expecting a vast wealth of knowledge and know how of designing games ultra specifically around the Switch.

What sucks is we got a somewhat deforested and emptyish Zelda, a Zelda that's running with UE and acting choppy (still not sure if they fixed that issue yet), a Pokemon that's severely deforested and sparse, with models looking rather low poly and not nearly as stylish as X/Y was back in 2013, and the ones that stand out to me are Mario and Splatoon.

If Ninty made a new handheld that was better than the Deck, I'd have new expectations of their first party, but at the same time Ninty doesn't seem all that bothered about visuals, not since they flopped against the PS2 with their better visuals on GC (seriously, PS2 got Code Veronica while GC got REmake 2, which I thought looked superior at the time, tank controls or not). 

I just wish they cared enough, but that's why I'm not going to be bothered by them much when I go for a Deck, because I know roughly what to expect with that device, but at the same time I can actually fiddle about with the clock speeds/voltage and game settings to likely get more perf and visual gains in some areas that the Switch won't, and that's what I want from Valve, because in my eyes, Ninty has given up on providing a good range of settings that aren't "feh, let's lock the game to 30fps and crank everything to lowest, ppl will lap it up anyway".

That being said, I do think the Deck will find itself a home in some parts of Japan, especially the indie devs and the visual novel fans (which Steam has plenty of and the Switch barely has). I still expect the bigger publishers to treat PC as they have for years (like how SE cares so little for PC port quality and now prices). 



Mankind, in its arrogance and self-delusion, must believe they are the mirrors to God in both their image and their power. If something shatters that mirror, then it must be totally destroyed.