Anything new for the Switch 2?

[Jake Johnson]

A new SoS game would sell me a Switch 2!

[PaleSunflower]

The only game I know of for the Switch 2 is a new Mario Kart entry. I'm guessing that other new games will come either with or after the full announcement trailer. The teaser of the announcement trailer was just a teaser.

[Kikki]

We know nothing.

All we've got is that very-low-on-info trailer they showed us already, and all it revealed is how the S2 looks, and that there's going to be a new Mario Kart, though it hasn't been confirmed if it will be a launch title or not. (I suspect it will, as most do, I think.) So if you've seen that trailer, you know everything there is to know already.

Everything else is just rumours.

As for SoS, we've known for ages that another one is in development...Marv has shown us a peek of it twice. There's been no further news on it and no official release window that I know of. We don't know if it will need the Switch 2 to run, or if it will also work on the original Switch. Or perhaps it has been designed with original Switch in mind from the start (though I kind of doubt it, at this stage.)

(There is, of course, going to be PLENTY new for the Switch 2. A new Animal Crossing. New Legend of Zelda. New Mario. New Xenoblade. New SoS. New EVERYTHING. Eventually. But everything right now is just speculation and rumours. No official news at all, yet, except for that trailer.)

We'll probably get a peek at a few launch titles on April 2. Or so I assume. It's very unlikely that SoS will be in that presentation. Marv has to eventually show us more about the next SoS but it's anybody's guess when.

[Crystal Power]

The game Kikki mentioned is likely going to be a Switch 2 title or at least cross platform.

Speaking of which, how they have been handling info on it is ridiculous. What is this, Square Enix!? In the mean time so many other farming sims have caught my attention, even Natsume's Harvest Moon have been making major improvements. Yet Marvelous have had this game announced with little to no information, not even a name and from what we seen it still have those PooT character models and art direction, which I'm not a fan of. Despite the lower quality style (being on a small handheld) the 3DS SoS games art direction was so much better to me. Winds of Anthos and Home Sweet Home looks way better too in my opinion. I hope marvelous is doing an overhaul or is at least adding enough content to make this worth it...

[Bluie]

Snip

To be fair, I think they more focusing on the newest Rune Factory entry first as it's further along in development and about to go gold. Also, Marvelous' most recent farming sim, Farmagia, bombed heavily. They probably don't want to show their investors their newest mainline until it's ready + guaranteed. This is just my theories, though, so take of that what you will.

[Crystal Power]

I feel like what you say is more likely true than not. Perhaps I just feel put off remembering the more simple developments these games had while still giving us experiences we cherish to this day. Marvelous is trying to go bigger but it all doesn't seem to be paying off overall, I think the sales have increased but the fanbases have become so divided or have moved on to other farming simulators.

[Kikki]

Marv is basically starting from scratch. I think that's what people largely don't realize...basically, the SoS games produced by Marvelous these days are being made by complete newbies. Three Rings had never made any kind of sim game prior to Olive Town, and they did almost all the work, making the game (the character concept designer and the...producer, I believe, or director, but I think producer...are as far as I know the only old-school members left on the dev team.) There may be some scattered others, but a huge amount of the game was made by Three Rings.

So basically all their experience went poof. There's at least some of it still existing, in Hakama, but Hakama doesn't have SoS under their umbrella.

So unless the producer guy has the same values and taste of the fans, the same understanding of what made the games great, we're unlikely to ever get those games again. They're just going to keep chasing the success of other games on the market instead of looking back on their own catalogue for inspiration. (The excessively obvious example being Stardew, of course.)

I think the new SoS looks pretty good, though the character design looked a bit babyish for my preferences, if I'm remembering right. But it was clearly still very early-stage, even in the second sneak peek, so I'm not looking at any of it with hope OR despair, yet.

All we know is they think high quality graphics are important this time (they clearly misunderstood what the fans were saying...even the Japanese fans seemed to be calling them out on that) so we should at least get a game of good QUALITY graphics. Though whether you'll like the STYLE or not is a different matter.

Still, good quality graphics are nice. Not heartwarming or cozy, by themselves, but nice. And hopefully they'll put some effort into optimizing the game for any console it goes onto. I'm setting making impressions aside, for now. We need more than this. Or I do, anyway.

[Crystal Power]

When I think of it under those lens it actually feel somehow worse.. Remember the outrage when Natsume kept the Harvest Moon name with fans feeling like they were misleading the fanbase? It feels a bit akin to that. I don't know if I'm making sense though.

I won't get too down about it though. I'm looking forward to receiving more info. I think I just needed to vent.

[PSI_Nightshade]

Although if we're being real, this happens a lot more than you think in the video games industry. Just because a new IP is being made by the studio who made the previous games don't mean it's being made by the same people. One example right now would be Metroid Prime 4. A lot of the people who made the first trilogy don't even work at Retro Studios anymore.

I'm not saying compare every credits lists, but we can't just assume that a long living series is going to have the same staff forever and when that's no longer the case, the best you can hope is that the new people can understand the series and reproduce what makes it tick.

[Milo]

I suppose it helps if it's a gradual turnover, Ship of Theseus style, rather than just swapping the entire team out at once.

It's very hard to tell when that's actually the case, though.

[Kikki]

Sort of. But it's not quite the same. Naturally dev teams change members all the time...but unless a studio is sold or etc, normally you don't lose almost every member all at once. It's usually more organic. SOME people leaving and new coming, but not everyone all at once. Things change more gradually.

With Marv, we lost almost every still-existing old term member at once in...um, when? Just after Trio released, I think...I guess around 2017. Before Olive Town, anyway. Trio was the last game Hashimoto produced. Or directed, whichever. It's the reason the tone shifted SO MUCH going from Trio to Olive Town. Of course we went from 3DS to Switch, but the difference went well beyond anything that could be explained by just that. It's because Hashimoto was no longer in charge and he took a bunch of the rest of the team with him into Hakama, leaving perhaps only Nagano (producer or director...I seem to never be able to remember what the two titles actually mean anyway!...and the character designer. Not the character writer...just the guy who comes up with the initial sketches/visual design for the characters, as far as I know.) I may have those names wrong, but I THINK it's Nagano and Igusa.

So, yeah. But also no, imo.

But I don't think we'll ever get SoS back to Trio/etc. After all, there were many who loved the series best in the days when Wada was still on the team (his last game was Animal Parade, iirc) and then he left, and the tone shifted...and we never went back to that, either.

These things just happen. I WANT games more like Trio to come back, but I know they won't. The new team has no idea what we love so much about the series, even though we keep telling them. The Japanese market was VERY loud about it (much worse than we were, and we were pretty bad!) and yet they still somehow came down to the idea that what we care about is the graphics.

That was NEVER it. The Japanese fans were appalled by that statement, too, and yet.

Nothing we can do. It's a new team, now, and Bokumono has been changing all along. It's just our turn to lose getting to be the target market. It's moved on. We're not the ones they're trying to please, any more. I'm not even s ure exactly what market they're trying to capture. Everyone who played Stardew, I guess, because WOW would they be happy to do Stardew numbers!

But Stardew was a freak thing, an uncalculated success that happens maybe once a generation because somehow, it hit all the right spots at exactly the right time. I don't think any other farming sim will ever do those numbers. At least, not until the next freak thing.

EDIT: That response was not to Milo...his reply wasn't yet on the page when *I* hit reply, so my reply was to the post before Milo's. I can't see it on this edit page, but...Nightshade, I think?