As we get further away from the euphoria of that well-constructed if overlong launch trailer, my hopes for the Switch are diminishing. I say hopes, not enthusiasm, because I know I'm going to buy it and I'm pretty sure I'm going to love it, unless the portable unit is a lot clunkier than it looks. But I'm no longer as confident that the system's overall performance will be strong enough to draw in people who didn't buy a Wii U.
The possibility of portable versions of games that have previously been console-only has a lot of appeal. If the launch trailer was honest in suggesting portable Skyrim, that's going to be an extraordinary thing. (And if the launch trailer was being deceptive, that was incredibly stupid. Personally I see Bethesda's coyness on this topic as an effort not to pull focus from the HD remaster, but we'll see.) But it will only be extraordinary if the game performs adequately. Given how brutal Bethesda's open world load times are on consoles, I can only imagine what they might be like on the Switch. This is not a trivial problem for a system that may have a three-hour battery life, and the welcome reports that it will have a standard charger aren't enough to counter that. Especially since the same report suggests the system can't be charged while it's on a kickstand. If that positioning of the port was required by the hardware design, it's a shame; if it was just a cosmetic decision it's another case of Nintendo being bafflingly obtuse.
The question is whether issues like these will detract enough to draw people away from the appeal of portability. For established Nintendo fans (which does, I think, include some people who didn't buy the Wii U-- attachment to brands can be latent for a very long time), I predict it will be. It's the Playstation/Xbox/PC crowd that will be a question mark. And this is a place where Nintendo's traditional hardware weaknesses may be an asset. As I suggested in my last post, I think Nintendo was terribly misguided to put money into porting things like Arkham City and the Assassin's Creed games to the Wii U, because that wasn't going to be a sustainable practice, and console gamers knew it. The next-gen consoles weren't far off, and they were going to outclass the Wii U so thoroughly that developers would give up. The Wii was sold on first-party content and occasional ports of Nintendo-esque games, and the Wii U should have been sold the same way. But the Switch is different.
Unlike the Wii U, the Switch can get by with a library that's largely last-gen games, because it's making them portable. The lack of a competing handheld market is key here. Microsoft, of course, has never done the portable thing. The Vita mostly gets versions of PS4's shorter and simpler indie games, and while that's great for what it is, there's a lot to be said large-scale experiences on small-scale systems. The thing is, Nintendo needs a strong library of third-party titles to commit non-fans to the cost of a new system that may well be graphically inferior when transmitted to a television.. Bethesda is a get, but portable Skyrim is only going to help so much. If having From Software onboard means a Dark Souls or Bloodborne port that's also amazing, but again, not enough. I worry about a self-defeating cycle where too many devs hold back to see if the system sells enough, and the system doesn't sell enough because of a weak library caused by too many devs holding back. That was what doomed the Wii U even with Ubisoft on its side. (Or sort of on its side. The withdrawal of exclusivity for Rayman Legends was a real blow to the system, and the insistence on delaying the Wii U version to match the others was a kick while it was down.)
In the age of iterative consoles, getting people to buy the Switch is going to be even harder. If there's going to be an upgraded console in the middle of every generation, that's a serious hit to gamer finances, one that might make buying a portable on top of it seem positively self-indulgent. And yet, dedicated gamers have often been willing to buy both a console and a handheld, and Nintendo is in an excellent position to take over that dynamic, if it can only get the games. And that goes back to whether the hardware will be easy for developers to work with. It didn't take long for devs to publicly trash the Wii U.
I want the Switch to succeed, because its failure would create a real risk of Nintendo dropping out of the hardware market, and I don't want that. There's a certain strange appeal in the idea of Nintendo properties on other hardware, similar to the pleasing oddness of seeing Sonic on Nintendo systems after Sega's hardware line collapsed. (And imagine Nintendo games with achievements. Seriously, Nintendo, create an achievements system. They're everywhere for a reason.) But Nintendo is still trying to innovate with hardware in a way that its competitors aren't. It was the first to do motion controls and the first to do touchscreens, and now it's the first to try bridging the console/portable gap. The PlayStation and the Xbox have pretty much limited themselves to cosmetic upgrades. The PlayStation Camera and Kinect are peripherals in the truest sense of the word.
So there's a lot riding on the Switch. They're pretending this isn't the end of the 3DS, but anyone who consults its forthcoming lineup can see that's just rhetoric. Nintendo is putting all its eggs in one basket, which is fundamentally risky for a company that just dropped a crate's worth. I want to believe they can do it. But it's going to be a long wait for the launch lineup reveal in January.
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