Nintendo Direct September 2022 Predictions

There it is already! Tomorrow 4PM CEST. Less than 24 hours to go. There have been rumors that this Nintendo Direct might have been postponed out of respect for Queen Elizabeth II, who has died last week, but they will simply skip the livestream for Nintendo UK and the rest of world can watch it normally. See here and here.

They state that it will be "mostly focused on Nintendo Switch games launching this winter", probably to not get our hopes up for anything about the sequel to Breath of the Wild, which is said to be released in Spring 2023. But they are using the word "mostly" and they usually go beyond the time frame that they were specifying beforehand anyway...

So, I'm still confident that this will be it for the sequel to Breath of the Wild, where starting tomorrow we may finally can stop calling it the "sequel to Breath of the Wild" (or "BotW2"). New trailer, full title, actual release date, first gameplay footage, introduction into the story. We're getting the full package. They will have to lift the curtain on the game if it really still planned to be released next Spring – they can't just hide it forever and the marketing campaigns need to roll sooner than later.

There is of course the possibility that "Breath of the Wild 2" got delayed even further. In that case I'm throwing in the usual prediction of The Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD for late 2022 in a double pack (or triple pack with Link's Crossbow Training). I don't really expect to see both these ports and a focus on the next game, because one may detract attention from the other, but I certainly wouldn't mind to be wrong here and to get a very Zelda-heavy Direct. It would also be fantastic if we were to have all 3D Zelda games on the Nintendo Switch united before the release of the next one...

Otherwise, I still have some hopes that the team of Splatoon 3 has been working on a small Splatoon crossover for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where this would mean that we're also getting the Zelda stuff later on. Or maybe we will get all the missing Nintendo crossover contents at once. But I'm truly being hopeful here and not realistic, because that's the one thing I still desperately want for the game. I would be very happy.

Then there have been rumors about a remake or remaster of Metroid Prime coming to Nintendo Switch. I personally don't like the idea of not going for the entire Metroid Prime Trilogy, but of course this is Nintendo what we're talking about, so they might just bring back all three games individually for full price, because they can. It's just that I probably wouldn't be too excited about just Metroid Prime itself, unless it has received some interesting changes.

And just for the record, I don't expect to see Metroid Prime 4 any time soon, but it's another case where I wouldn't mind to be wrong. It just feels like something that gets into spotlight after the sequel to Breath of the Wild is out in the wild.