They got Zelda BOTW 1 AND 2 right on there! You can just open up the eshop and buy No More Heroes and become the coolest person you know! Don't you like Pikmins? What's wrong with you? They've got all four Bayonettas! ARMS is the secret best fighting game and it's on the Switch! The best version of Deadly Premonition is on there! You seriously telling me you don't want an open world Shin Megami Tensei game? You can just buy Dodonpachi Resurrection, no one can stop you!
I could go on.
People hand wring about performance and 4k and all sort of tedious stuff but those kinds of people don't know how to please their partner.
They've got Earth Defense Force 2, 3 and 4.1 right on there!
Maybe the Switch 2 will run all these games? Maybe it won't? Who cares? If you can afford it, buy a Switch! You might be dead tomorrow and no amount of not buying a Switch is going to change that.
The best game ever made OG Resident Evil 4 is on it. The secret next best action game, Resident Evil 5 is on it!
@“whatsarobot”#p112029 I must be playing all the buggy titles, then. Bloodstained: RotN crashes on me regularly and has lots of late game visual glitches. Outer Worlds also crashed a few times. Warlock of Firetop Mountain is glitchy in menus and crashed on me at least once. There were others but I don't remember them specifically.
@“Chopemon”#p112030 People hand wring about performance and 4k and all sort of tedious stuff but those kinds of people don’t know how to please their partner.
I think for me this question just comes down to: do you like it, and do you want to play the games on it now, or not, because the argument that folks should wait because there might be a potential Switch 2 coming at any moment could be made about just about anything console-wise. Should you buy a PS5? What if the PS6 is announced in n months?!? If the Switch 2 gets announced in n months, well, then you‘ve got that many months, plus however long it takes you to buy one after it launches. I’ve gotten used to seeing this obsession with whenever the next (implicitly better) thing will come out for years in online Mac hardware discourse. There‘s a whole segment of journalism that’s grown up around this ecosystem, as well as a rumours ecosystem for when the next thing will come out. Like with most things, I now feel like I‘m being harsh, but like… if you want a Switch now, and you can afford it, you can get a ton of play out of before a potential successor. I know that the cost of buying one isn’t zero, but it‘s nothing like the cost of a Series X or PS5. I mean, the 3DS has had an extraordinarily long tail to its retail footprint (to the point where a bunch of folks here have bought used ones lately), even after it was announced that it would be discontinued, and even longer until the eShop was shut down for it. I don’t think the WiiU is a good comparison, because it was unsuccessful from the start. The Switch, on the other hand, has been one of Nintendo's biggest successes.
As for me, I have a history of playing handhelds much more than on-TV consoles, so the Switch was and is an excellent option for me. I play exclusively in handheld mode, and it has the side benefit of letting my partner play games on the TV at the same time (although we used to have a dual TV setup a few years back, lol). If mine somehow crapped out tomorrow, I'd buy another one in a second, so the choice in the survey was super easy for me!
If the primary motivator is someone wants the exclusives and is convinced they‘ll enjoy those games + doesnt care about portability as per the OP, then there’s not much of a counterargument besides nintendo's aforementioned weirdness about backwards compatibility. Are mario, zelda etc worth sinking $500 vs continuing to spend your gaming time on pc? Not in my opinion. One of those new 1440p gpus would be a better use of that kind of cash I think
I agree you‘re better off with a gaming laptop or a gpu in the X070 Ti range for your money. Especially since games like botw are more enjoyable on PC hardware.
GPUs are becoming more expensive, but they’re also becoming a much better console-replacement,.
Some other compelling reasons to get a switch outside of just Nintendo exclusives:
- It‘s region free and there’s a lot of interesting imports! Densha de Go, Champion Jockey Special, Dragon Quest X Offline, Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry‘s Wonderland RETRO, Angelique Luminarise (i kinda want to get it even though I don’t speak Japanese)
- Most of the PS Vita visual novels have been ported and have touchscreen support!
- All of them Picrosses
- The best Fitness & motion control games on the market are on the switch
- Hundreds of Arcade Archives, Sega Ages, and other retro games
- Lots of cool mobile ports available on a big boy console (Dragon Quest 1-3, Reigns, Gorogoa)
- Doubles as a tablet for touchscreen-based games like TWEWY, or those drawing games
- Indie game exclusives (Is Hades 2 planned to start as exclusive?, Golf Story, Into the Breach, Slime Rancher Portable, the aformentioned Cadence of Hyrule)
- Joy cons are joyous
- Portable mode is great, sometimes I sit in front my tv and still play portably because _it feels good_. Or I can watch tv or a movie or the you tube while playing. Sometimes I sit under a shade tree, go on a car ride, or fly in airplane and bring my switch. Taking your whole damn system to a friend's house to show them your games or play local co-op is a blast. You will find excuses to go portable, trust me!
You might not care about any of this, but all this plus the first party exclusives made the switch my all time favorite console too.
Honestly if you don't care about graphics or performance (and why would you), I think the switch is still a solid pickup. You can wait for a Switch 2 but I don't see them releasing it this year at all. They would have to announce it in the summer to have it on shelves for xmas, and I feel like Nintendo knows that Gamers^TM would throw a hissy fit over buying and playing Zelda on inferior hardware. Realistically I think they will announce a new console in Jan/Feb 2024 with a spring 2024 launch window, and both old and new switch will be supported for a while except for games like Metroid Prime 4 and maybe Mario Kart 9.
@“marurun”#p112023 Look where splitting with the past got them: outstanding Switch sales, hardware and software. I simply do not see Nintendo prioritizing backwards compatibility at this point.
While I don't necessarily disagree with this in principal, from a technical perspective it's worth noting that whatever the next Nintendo device is going to be - there is a decent chance it will be based on an evolution of the nVidia tech that's in the Switch. In that case, the backwards compatibility will be essentially baked in and quite trivial to implement. The only way it wouldn't have it is if they make a conscious decision to not allow it.
A lack of backwards compatibility does seem like something that would annoy _a lot_ of people, especially given how it's basically perfect in the competition. But I could also see Nintendo looking at the failure of the Wii U and feeling like they leaned too hard into the success of the Wii, didn't do enough to distinguish or distance it from the Wii.. and arguably similar with the 3DS although it eventually was fairly successful. If they feel that way, maybe they would go hard on marketing the new device as a brand new and different thing, and part of that could be preventing backwards compatibility.
I agree - I think it would be very surprising for the next nintendo console, unless it‘s absolutely nothing like the switch and uses a different interface, to not have backward compatibility. I don’t think Nintendo would be so foolish as to think backward compatibility is the reason the Wii U and 3DS didn‘t meet expectations. Plus, the trend of today is remasters, which they can certainly do more of, and they’ve got 40 years of games to re-sell, I don't think the switch being backward compatible limits them in that.
If they decide to change the media format from carts, that might be a serious consideration, but otherwise it seems super likely they'll go for it.
I mean, if they stick with an Nvidia Tegra solution I wouldn‘t expect them to explicitly wall off backcompat. But what if AMD lures them with a more Steam Deck style hardware model? That could have them deciding it’s not worth it to bake that in. There‘s also the issue of physical media and whether they’ll stick with the current form factor.
I would absolutely hold off for whatever is next. I mean, it doesn‘t hurt to do so anyway. Even if the new thing ends up being completely different and non-backwards-compatible, there aren’t really stock issues with the Switch right now. It‘s hard to overstate how underpowered the Switch hardware is these days. I’m willing to bet you that even ToTK winds up having performance problems at points. BOTW already did.
@"marurun"#p112076
One point against this is that when Nvidia was hacked last year there were some references to a new Tegra chip as well specific mentions to "NVN2" (the switch is NVN) with DLSS support and stuff. So it seems entirely likely that they were working with Nvidia again.
I mean worst case you just play the games later on the same hardware and save a buck. I say wait, but I also have a couple of Switches already.
Keep your eyes peeled for a second hand unit in decent condition at a good price. I mean if you want a switch just get one, right? But if you‘re at all concerned about the value proposition of it so far into the platform’s lifespan, just don't buy new.
Forget what I said above, don't buy a switch… yet.
I saw [KennyL's post](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/677-games-for-cheapskates/589) about buying the switch vouchers... and I looked it up and realized, Nintendo doesn't have anything announced to come after Pikman in July. There's literally nothing? This is raising a red flag for me, Nintendo usually has _some_ first party game to whip people up into a blind consumer frenzy about. Instead **_they're_** the ones signaling you shouldn't buy a switch in 2023.
As far as I'm aware, there are no games without a release date attached. Even games like Yoshi we knew about years in advance. It's very odd... I could see them announcing some smaller tier game for this holiday, but they don't have the kind of game that they would normally sizzle in the directs for a year or longer. They also wrapped up the Fire Emblem and Xenoblade DLCs very quickly, I think the only games with dlcs still on the way is Mario Kart and the obligatory Pokemon DLC?
I still don't think we're getting new hardware this year, but _do_ I think we're going to 1-2 small things this year, but a lot of announcements for Mario's Illiad or whatever with a vague 2024 or later release dates... which will end up as the switch successor's lineup of games.
I seriously considered buying a switch lite cus there‘s a couple games available I’d like to be able to play on-the-go. the blue model was introduced relatively recently, in May of 2021, I like that one good enough. it's unfortunate that gray, my preferred colour, seems to be basically sold out and not in production any longer.
@“Tradegood”#p113149 I would agree but I‘d also bear in mind that Nintendo have been pretty transparent about only mostly announcing things when they’re within roughly six months of release. I can see them announcing a couple of things in the summer, aside from Metroid Prime 4, to run up until Christmas.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61gndBOP9zS.jpg