[Write-in Thread] Firelink Episode #51
🕑 Added 2025-01-21 19:40:48 +0000 UTCHey folks!
This week on Firelink, we'll be talking about Sony's recent cancellations of more live-service projects, including games that were in development at Sony Bend and Bluepoint (God of War liveservice game?! Ick).
We're also chatting about the Switch 2 reveal and the discussions around its lack of innovation that people have been arguing about online.
Send in your thoughts, questions, or topics you'd be interested in us discussing! We won't have time to read and discuss everything, and please keep posts topical, safe for work and not huge walls of text.
Submissions close at 3 PM CT on Wednesday, January 22nd.
Comments
Adam Parker
What are your hopes for The Aardman X Pokemon team-up? Aardman's style seems like it could be suited to Pokemon and a different tone to the Ryan Reynolds movie would be preferable.
Lil' Cass
Nintendo Switch 2 is a very smart name while also having it show that Nintendo is learning from their mistakes with the Wii U, just make a better Nintendo Switch
Lil' Cass
I'm not inherently against live service games as my time with Brawlhalla and Crash Team Rumble will vouch for me, but a God of War live service game does come across as Sony not reading the room because how would something like that tonally work for God of War?
Kyle Vanden Eynden
The amount of time live service games demand to "stay current" or finish seasons/battle passes tends to fatigue me as someone with a job and family. I often wonder how big can the audience possibly be that has hours on end to spend on these live service games? I love Destiny, but even I barely manage to get in a couple hours here and there nowadays.
plz help
Let us never forget that in the year of our lord 2005 the main menu music for Midnight Club 3 DUB Edition on the PS2 was the instrumental version of Mannie Fresh's "Real Big"
JR
So, any predictions for the Switch 3 just about now? ;-) More seriously: Who is the Switch 2 mainly going to be competing with? Rather consoles or cell phones or both equally? Or is there a special niche in the market for this, the steam deck and those other mobile gaming deck PCs noone remembers the names of?
Rob Paul
With how much they spent on each of these projects, do you think Sony expected all of these live service games to have healthy playerbases, or were they just hoping one or two would stick and recoup the entire investment?
Pixel Grip
The switch 2 launch trailer had a small disclaimer that not all switch 1 games would be backwards compatible with the switch 2. Do you think it will only affect games like Labo and Ring Fit or do you think it'll affect more games generally? Or do you think it's only a disclaimer for Nintendo to cover their ass and most games will work on it regardless?
GayBearDaddy2
Where do you think the next gen Nintendo games will go, now that Zelda has gone full open world, Mario has expanded its 3D platforming to more "adventure," and Pokemon has expanded to actual open world?
Andy Hunter
For the Switch 2, if it’s just a beefed-up Switch that lets third party devs keep bringing their games to Nintendo, I’ll be happy. I wouldn’t be surprised if their are innovations that we’ll learn about it time, but I very much do NOT want gimmicks that will detract from the games (forced motion controls, expensive gamepad with an underutilized screen, all games must now be mouse controlled).
DarwinsDummy
While internal hardware improvements to the Switch 2 are sort of just meeting expectations, the physical QoL upgrades are nice. A better stand + additional USB that is no longer on the bottom makes extended play on the stand feasible. Magnetic controller attachment likely a big plus over the sliding attachment. Any thoughts on the speculation the joycons may also have mouse-like functionality?
Shua
Which nintendo franchise are you guys most curious to see Nintendo expand on for their next console?
LookItsAnEric
Switch 2 Thoughts: Not to be a prick but what were people expecting? There's this notion that every Nintendo console has to be wildly innovative, but bAcK iN tHe DaY the Nintendo consoles iterated on one another. The innovations of the N64 and GameCube were primarily in the controllers and hardware upgrades. This appeard to be Nintendo proving that they learned their lesson from the WiiU yet again, by primarily keeping the new console focused on slight hardware improvements and supposedly controller fixes, we don't need ray tracing for a Mario game, just fix the damn drift.
Inverse Skies
(Mother 3 is an obvious one, personally I would go to bat for the SFC strategy RPG Bahamut Lagoon from squaresoft).
Far Too Many Frogs
Do you all think that with how many live service failures and cancellations there have been that this will be an industry turning point or is that too optimistic to hope for?
Inverse Skies
What games are you disappointed never got an English translation?