Indie World Showcase

Considering the last time we had a broadly focused Nintendo Direct, which was back in September of 2019, expectations were probably a little higher than they should have been for this weeks Indie World Showcase. Since September, we’ve received a few focused directs that went in depth on games such as Smash and Animal Crossing but those didn’t give us an idea of what we can look forward on a wider range. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it would have been shocking to me if Nintendo put out a Direct before the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It just wouldn’t have made any business sense to take attention away from the relase of the long anticipated, full console release of Animal Crossing. It’s also about the only thing that we know of for the first half of the year that is exclusive to the Switch and taking peoples attention away from that could potentially jeopardize sales. The global health concern that has affected many lives and businesses clearly hasn’t been favourable to Nintendo either.

Previously we have received some great announcements at the Indie World Showcase or what used to be known as Nindies. I enjoyed that title as it rolled off the tongue and it was playful which fits right in line with Nintendos gaming image. Indie World Showcase is a little bit more a word mess in my mind, but I guess they want to focus on indie studios from around the world. The last indie world showcase in December had some solid announcements including the sequel to the critically acclaimed Golf Story, titled Sports Story. The modernization of the 16 bit classic Streets of Rage with Streets of Rage 4. It also featured the Switch port of Dauntless, and finished with one more thing with a new look at Axiom Verge 2. These announcements all have a greater level of notoriety than anything mentioned in this weeks showcase.

The feeling that I get is that people were underwhelmed by the showcase and that is justifiable. After all, we are nearing a six month dry spell for Nintendo Direct and the fans are getting very hungry for information. Most of the games announced during this weeks showcase are releasing anywhere from now to late summer. Nintendo must have something farther in the pipeline that it could have used to really give this showcase a boost. It could have used something coming in the fall or even early winter as a nine month marketing window wouldn’t be bad. I think not giving us a anticipated title or something with a little more cache to it was a missed opportunity. Spelunky 2, Carrion, or maybe even something like OceanHorn 2 coming to Switch would have been great. OceanHorn 2 is currently an Apple Arcade exclusive but the original was pretty popular in the early days of the Switch due to its Zelda Lite qualities.

Presentation basics 101, is to start and finish strong. When you start with a big game announcement then people are hooked in for the rest of the show and when you close out the showcase with a solid game, it will help soften the blow if the overall showcase missed the mark. The showcase opened with Blue Fire, as it looks to be an open world platformer in the vein of Breath of The Wild due out in the summer. It looks great but we don’t know anything about it as they only showed gameplay and didn’t reveal any story elements. In the middle of the showcase there was a new game coming from AnnaPurna studios, which have published some critically acclaimed games including Edith Finch, Donut County and 2019’s critical darling Outer Wilds. However, I Am Dead, seems to be lacking the same x factor that those other games contain. Hello Games had a nice looking game with The Last Campfire. Hello Games latest leaves behind procedurally generated universes for a much more intimate adventure game that looks to be full of puzzles and dungeons. Obviously anytime you build a game with exploring and puzzles, you are bound to draw comparisons to The Legend of Zelda, and based of the trailer it seems to capture some of that magic.

The best way to make a bad presentation good is to leave people with a great takeaway which usually comes in the form of a one more thing style announcement. Unfortunately, Nintendos big moment was was Exit the Gungeon. I dont have anything against the series but it didnt provide the big moment that Nintendo could have really used for this showcase. Exit the Gungeon, a previously Apple Arcade exclusive that was available at the time of the Indie World Showcase, if you could get onto the EShop as it was down most of Tuesday. With the latest self quarantine happening across North America, online services are clearly seeing an uptick in activity. All three major console makers have seen service interruptions over the past week or so with the massive influx of users who are staying home and playing games.

I don’t think it was a bad Indie World Showcase, as there were some potentially good games announced and most of them are coming out hopefully by the end of summer. I think that the showcase did feel a little underwhelming due to the amount of content we have been starved for from Nintendo in terms of announcements. Looking forward, I think the next Direct, which will hopefully happen in the next few weeks, will be judged very harshly as expectations will be through the roof. Nintendo always has a Direct at E3, and there is an outside possibility that will actually be the next Direct we get. When it comes to Nintendo, after Animal Crossing, we are generally in the dark for the rest of 2020 and what their plans are when trying to stay completive with the latest from Sony and Microsoft still on track for late 2020.

PS5

Moving on to other companies that have also been starving the fans of information, and that would be Sony and the PS5. Microsoft has clearly been playing catchup this generation and have had marketing plans ready for years most likely. The Xbox Series X marketing campaign began with a great teaser trailer at The Game Awards and have hit some great strides since then. It seems that they have been making the right moves at the right time and most of the time these moves are making it look like Sony is staying silent. Back in late February, Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, released an article featuring some of the major touchstones of the Xbox Series X. With the exception of Teraflops, most of the talking points were actually understandable for the average gamer including things like smart delivery and quick resume.

Then this week, Xbox pulled back the curtain even more on the Series X, which we will get into more detail, but shortly after we got an announcement from Sony that we would be getting a deep dive into the PS5 with system architect, Mark Cerny. This was a very dry presentation that was clearly, as Jim Ryan said at the beginning, intended for GDC. It was a very technical presentation with little in the way of big marketing moments, we didn’t see the controller, we didn’t see the box and there was very little for the casual gamer.

I think there are a lot of people who after the presentation were a little disturbed by the lack of details but this talk wasn’t aimed towards the gamers, it was aimed towards developers. I think leading up to this Sony should have been a lot more clear on this to avoid disappointing the fans, because at the early part of this stream there was almost three hundred thousand fans watching and hoping for some excitement. They did announce it as a deep dive into the PS5 architecture but I think it was assumed that it would have a little more pop to it. I think the best thing would have been not to make an announcement at all like Xbox has been doing. Just release it, people will find it. I am not sure if that would have made a difference but once I realized what the talk was going to be I did find it to be enjoyable and informative.

One thing that has been repeated since the speculation began about the specs of the next boxes from Sony and Microsoft was that the Xbox would be the more powerful console. Phil Spencer has said before that the Xbox won’t be out of position on power or price. This means that the PS5 will technically have lower specs and the job of Mark Cerny is to explain how power isn’t everything. How Sony plans to leverage the strengths or the PS5 and the exclusives will be the challenge. The main touchstones for the GDC aimed talk was the SSD, GPU and 3D audio. Starting with the SSD, one thing that seemed a little strange was that the PS5 will have a 825GB SSD, which seems like a strange size to decide on. It could have been based on size they are trying to keep the PS5 or the keeping the cost down on the console required a smaller SSD. This is another area that Microsoft has a clear advantage.

I am not Digital Foundry and can’t explain what the difference between the 10.3 Teraflops in the PS5 and the 12 Teraflops in the Xbox Series X actually mean but I do know that 12 is bigger than 10. The big difference is that the PS5 will have a higher clock speed at 2.33GHz as opposed to the 1.825GHz on the Xbox Series X and according to Mark Cerny, the advantages of having a higher clock speed are greater all around then having higher Teraflops. I don’t know if this is true or not but the only way we will know is when we can see the games that are being created for these machines. Sony seems like it will have an uphill battle trying to overcome the marketing of having the system with less Teraflops. It seems that it’s becoming much easier to differentiate these two consoles this generation as opposed to when the Xbox One and the PS4 seemed identical in specs.

The other touchstone of the presentation was 3D audio and how they are building new technology into the PS5 with what they are calling the tempest engine. The gist of 3D audio is that every ear is different and when the system is using audio built for your ear it sounds more immersive. Since there would be no way to program for everyone’s ear, they have created five presets that come close to matching most peoples ear canal, which you will choose in settings when you first set up your PS5. It’s a lot more technical and complex than that but if we are coming to a slower advancement on visuals in games then it makes sense to look for other ways to move the medium forward. Take it all with a grain of salt as it might not be noticeable at all. 

Now to put on the tinfoil hat and read too much into certain things. There were a few strange decisions made throughout the course of the presentation including referencing Jak and Dakster when talking about the SSD capabilities, and then also referencing Dead Space when talking about the 3D audio. Mark Cerny and Sony could have picked any game to talk about the benefits of load times as well as the importance of 3D audio in the game as opposed to those two. Its the use of them in the presentation that makes you wonder if either of these titles are being teased for a comeback on the PS5

The other tinfoil theory was the graphic Mark used when referencing backwards compatibility of the system. The graphic showed PS5 in native mode, PS4 Pro in pro legacy mode and PS4 in legacy mode.  It was interesting choice to have plenty of extra space below the PS4, which you could infer that space will be future PS1, PS2 and PS3 announcements. I feel like companies should know by now that everything will be dissected and they would only leave things in if they were meaning for it to be a teaser.  

A lot of this information would have been probably received better if it was released in another Wired exclusive or partner with someone else in the same vein as Microsoft just did with Digital Foundry. As for where Sony is heading from here, anyones guess is good as during these times everything seems uncertain. I wouldn’t be shocked if Sony is taking a Plan A and Plan B approach with the full reveal of the PS5 including games, pricing, controller and date. I think they would like to have industry media cover the event in person to be able to demonstrate some of the features they will have and how power isn't everything. I also think with the health concerns they are quietly planning the backup plan, which would be a State of Play. As hungry as everyone is for all the PS5 information they can get, I don’t think Sony needs to give us the big reveal until June or July. This means they still have time to wait and see how the world progresses from here.

Xbox Series X

Just a few weeks ago, Phil Spencer made a large post on the Xbox News Wire detailing the specs of the Series X as well as some of the new features we will hopefully be seeing this holiday season. There was plenty of great information to get excited for at a gamer level including the smart delivery and quick resume. This week, Xbox gave us another look at the Series X, except this time we got the full specs in collaboration with Digital Foundry. Im assuming most of you have already seen it since most people are home, but in case you haven’t head over to the Digital Foundry YouTube page where they have a detailed video with hands on time with the system when they were invited out to Microsoft.

A lot of the features that Microsoft is touting for the next generation were demonstrated using simple and impressive demos. For the Quick Resume they showed switching from State of Decay 2 to Forza 7 to Ori and the Blind Forest, to backwards compatible The Cave, to HellBlade and then back to State of Decay 2. All of these games were suspended during gameplay and it looked to be almost instant when resuming these games from their suspend points. The other demo that they showed was how the system will benefit from the SSD and how quick loading will be. They used State of Decay 2 on the Xbox One X, which can be a little long on the current generation. On the Series X, the game was up and running in around ten seconds and on the Xbox One X, it was closer to a minute. Even though we were told of faster loading times in and during games, it was still impressive to see it.

Microsoft also fully unveiled the look and features of the Xbox Series X controller, which is a big factor for gamers when looking at which system they are going to invest in. The Xbox One controller is arguably the best controller on the market, not taking into account how great the Elite controller is, which I purchased when it was released and have been extremely happy with it since. Microsoft understands that if its not broke then don’t fix it just because it needs to be next gen. “Given the love the fans have for the current controller, want to ensure they don’t change things just for the sake of change” I am not going to bore you with trying to explain the controller differences as well as latency they plan to improve, thats what Digital Foundry an Austin Evans are for.

Im not sure how all of this will equate to sales come fall when the new systems are released but the way Microsoft is giving us a steady flow of information and teases is superior to the method PlayStation is taking. Especially when you have two technical heavy releases from the same company in the same week to try and explain what the new features are and what they mean to gamers. Microsoft decided to release all of this information without any warnings or hype compare to Sony telling gamers and fans to tune in this week for PS5 news regarding a deep dive on the system specs.

Mark Cerny is a very smart man to say the least but the PlayStation 5 event this week that was supposedly intended for GDC just felt like a lecture for the most part with information that the casual gamer wouldn’t fully comprehend. On the flip side, Xbox partnered with Austin Evans and Digital Foundry, two very popular gaming related YouTube channels that can display this information in exciting and informative ways that will keep the audience engaged. In just five days the two videos posted have almost 7 million views combined. Xbox has had a lot of time to sit and think about how they are going to attack this generation after almost seven years of being second place.

Xbox is hungry and you can feel it and the hope is that this trend continues when we get the full reveal of the system date, games and price. As for the price, based on all of the information they have told us regarding the specs, in conjunction with how logistics have been affected this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if this launched at 599USD. People freaked out at the price of the PS3 when it launched at $599 and claimed that it required two jobs to afford, but what is largely hidden from the spotlight is that by the end of that generation it most likely outsold the Xbox 360, despite the 360 having extra time on the market. Perception isn’t always the reality and with the right mix of power, games and features the Xbox Series X is poised for a strong comeback this generation.