Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Nintendo Switch Online Detailed

Today Nintendo revealed their plans for the Nintendo Switch online service. When I heard about NES games playable in online multiplayer, I was excited at first. Imagine playing The Legend of Zelda online with others in the style of Four Swords. Multiple Links running over the screen and shooting sword beams. This would have been amazing and an absolute must-have for myself.

Sadly, that's not what this is. Instead it's some sort of Twitch on console for singleplayer games, where your friends can watch you play and even take over. It's not a bad idea and I can even see this winning some popularity, but it's nothing that would get me excited.

The price seems okay: 20€ for a one year, I can live with that. Of course nothing beats the pricing of "for free" that Nintendo's online services used to have. But everything is getting more and more expensive these days...

Cloud backup for save games is also nice to have. But nothing beats backing up save games on a SD card like you could do on the Wii. Why isn't this possible anymore? This already annoyed me on the Wii U, but on the Switch it now feels like they don't allow this on purpose, so that you would subscribe to their online service. Nintendo's Smartphone games also use cloud storage, but they don't charge you for that...

And with games like Hyrule Warriors or Breath of the Wild, where you can easily invest hundreds of hours, you want some way to secure your savegames. For the people who really just want that, this will be a rip-off.

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