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Nintendo Switch Online Playtest Program is a new multiplayer game
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- Title
- It Took About 2 Seconds for Nintendo's Mysterious Switch Game to Leak - IGN
- Published
- Oct 21 2024
So, if you didn't know, this is a playtest where Nintendo only allowed the first 10,000 people who had the Switch Online Expansion Pack and signed into a website on a particular day to participate. Of course, the 10,000 slots filled in a literal second. Now we finally know what this test is supposed to be.
This is a game where players work together to build a planet, and have their own little areas where they can build. People like to compare it to the idea of a "strand-type game". The popular theory is that this is using generic placeholder assets and will be either a new IP or an Animal Crossing spinoff. It's likely one of the big new games for the Switch 2's launch year, or a preinstalled hub world game like Playstation Home on PS3.
I literally can't tell if this is serious or another meme about strand-type games.
More on topic, 10000 is incredibly few. Almost not even worth the effort looking into it. Maybe if they did 10 or 20 concurrent groups of 10000 it'd be more interesting and not just about who could click on a slammed website the fastest. Then again, it's a Japanese gaming company. Their netcode is probably made of bits of tin can, fabrics and a spool of rope. 10000 may just stress it enough to break it.
The people I've seen use that word to describe it have used that word entirely sincerely. They're talking about the way you build things to help other players. Mario Wonder also had a "strand-type" feature with the cardboard cutouts that let you set checkpoints for other players. the Souls series also has messages. Memed on or not, the term actually does mean something.
What are "strand-type" games?
From Death Stranding. It's still a young genre/term, but it refers to mechanics like where you are able to build something onto the environment that other players can access, even (exclusively?) for an otherwise single player experience.
If you're not familiar with Death Stranding, you could leave ladders and rope or even build roads and large zip lines to ease travel for other players. You could also leave items at a town for other players to pull from. You could access a locker that had a small assortment of these donated items.
To be seen how important the mail person/delivery aspect is for a game to be considered strand-like.
How is them being a Japanese company related to the performance of their netcode?
I don't know about Japanese companies in general, but Nintendo is very infamous for their outdated views, techs, and "features" about online games.
Japanese gaming companies in general have outdated views about online gaming and networking as well as just being mediocre at actually implementing decent netcode. They tend to create laggy messes with security holes you can park your bike into. From Sony to Nintendo to Bandai Namco, they're all their own kind of awful.
There's been a notable improvement in the fighting game genre with netcode rollback and the like, but that was incredibly overdue and their overall netcode performance has been lamented for years for being outdated and shoddy.
Lets chalk it up to reputation. Though it is a reputation they commonly prove to be true.
To pile on to the issues, one major problem is that Japan is small and has pretty good internet, so the problems aren’t local.
Then you roll out your gave internationally and it’s a mess playing nearly anywhere else. This has always been a huge issue in the fighting game scene (where every frame matters and Japan makes two of the big three).
I am not in the playtest but very intrigued by what the final implementation will look like.
10,000 players in a server test is of course still far fewer than the number of people who would sign up for a massively multiplayer online Nintendo game, so will the final product still need to be instanced to work?
I've heard that this playtest already has a full soundtrack included (where they could easily have used placeholder music for testing purposes). If that's true, it suggests that some pretty substantive resources have already been put into the development of whatever this is.
The playtest is on the current Switch, notwithstanding that Switch 2 is expected before March 2025. Does this suggest that whatever this is will be released on the original Switch? As a cross platform title?
They are no strangers to cross gen games, but whenever they do it, it's because the original was supposed to come out on the old console and it got delayed. It's still possible this will be a Switch 2 exclusive. The Switch 1 build could be a much smaller scale, much worse graphics version for the sake of the playtest.