Everyone's Revealing The Switch 2 But Nintendo
Also: Marvel Rivals kills mods, Destiny's impossible balancing act, and a controversial FFXIV stalker tool
It's either a very elaborate hoax or almost everything you'd want to know about the Switch 2 has already leaked ahead of Nintendo officially announcing it. Accessory maker Genki was passing around physical 3D-printed mockups of the new handheld its products will be based on at CES 2025.
It made the press believe it was based on real specs before later saying "just kidding" after Nintendo broke its silence and released a non-denial denial that the displayed products were "not official." But behind closed doors at least one accessory maker claimed to have access to the finished console. You can get it on the black market "if you put up the money," one manufacturer told Numerama.
According to one French journalist, Genki said Nintendo's lawyers even visited its booth after its Switch 2 mockups went viral. “He told me that Nintendo had already sent lawyers their way," Julien Tellouck claimed. "But Genki has nothing to worry about because they’ve never signed any papers with Nintendo, no confidentiality agreement, no NDA." What a mess!
It could all be lies and self-serving stunts by companies rushing to market to support what could be this year's hottest new gaming device, except what's been shown all seems to line up with every other existing alleged leaks about the Switch 2. It's pretty hard to believe that what Nintendo will eventually reveal is secretly something completely different than what effectively amounts to a Switch Pro fans have been waiting on for years.
Nintendo faces impossible expectations with the Switch 2. It's unlikely the company can strike lightning twice. An underpowered gaming handheld in 2025 faces a completely different landscape than the original Switch did when it was the only game in town.
There's no reservoir of existing, underappreciated Wii U exclusives to pull from to support another all-time best launch-year lineup. It's hard to imagine getting another revelation like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild this year. It will never be 2017 again. Sigh.
The only thing that hasn't leaked yet are the games. Can Nintendo surprise us in other ways? Will the next 3D Mario platformer dazzle and delight in ways no one can yet conceive of? Will Metroid Prime 4 catapult the 3D metroidvania shooter into the upper-echelon of gaming franchises? Is there a completely new tech feature that expands the existing vocabulary of gaming in new and unprecedented ways?
Or will the Switch 2 deliver known quantities at higher resolutions and better framerates alongside a bevy of late-generation, third-party PS4 ports like Elden Ring and Diablo IV? In other words, will it be just as disappointing as the rest of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S console generation, providing incremental performance gains in service of very familiar faces and formulas?
Nintendo might finally give fans what they claim they've always wanted and the results might end up being kinda "meh." Some analysts are already predicting weaker sales in the first year than the original Switch. My prediction is that the Switch 2 ends up being supremely underwhelming as a machine but Mario Kart 9 will still sell 50 million copies.
Marvel Rivals Digest
NetEase's comic book hero shooter is more popular than ever. The free-to-play game just broke its Steam concurrent record with 642,333 players overnight. It's the most-downloaded game according to Valve and remains in the top five on console. It's raked in an estimated $136 million in microtransaction sales since launch.
This comes after the release of season 1, which includes the Fantastic Four as new heroes, a $10 battle pass featuring 10 additional skins, and more stuff to buy in the item shop. One of these is Malice, a $14 costume for Invisible Woman's dark alter-ego, which is a perfect example of how Marvel Rivals has leaned into the hyper-sexualization of its print source material to great effect. Players online immediately lost it. "Marvel adding a barefoot vampire gf," one wrote. "These devs are cooking." New datamining leaks point to Professor X and a ton of other new heroes joining later this year.
The developers recently revealed the most picked heroes in the game so far. Jeff the Land Shark, the adorable fish with the terrifying OP ult, was at the top of the list in quickplay (21.18 percent pick rate) despite having a less than 50 percent win rate (a new patch just nerfed his ult's range). Storm was the least popular (1.66 percent pick rate) despite high-level players singing her praises when used correctly (her damage and survivability were buffed).
The update also nuked mod support for the game which fans were using to play as Dragon Ball Z's Vegeta, Pochita from Chainsaw Man, and 19-inches of Venom, AKA Nude Venom, AKA Venom with a massive dong. Removing Squirrel Girl's clothes was a day three mod for the game.
Even prior to NetEase's official intervention, NexusMods was forced to step in and moderate user content when players started putting Donald Trump into the game. Moderation, skin sales, and preventing cheating and hacking are just a few of the reasons the company might crack down on mods, points out game developer Del Walker.
Live Service Interrupted
Final Fantasy XIV fans are freaking over a new stalking tool that recently surfaced called PlayerScope created four months ago by a Discord user called Generall. As PC Gamer reports, it's effectively in-game doxxing and circumvents Square Enix's friends list blacklisting option which was updated last year. Harassers can even trace players' alt accounts with it, and the creator will only remove people's account IDs from the tool if they fill out a Google form.
In addition to a stalker's "wet dream," some players are also hailing it as an unprecedented surveillance device for the entire MMORPG. "So in theory, if I walk up to the Balmung Quicksands with this thing on I'm going to upload the data of everyone that is there," wrote one player who recently used PlayerScope. "This also means most likely that most people's data is already in the crowdsourced server since it does the uploading without human input."
The big question is how Square Enix will intervene, if at all. Some feel the company has a sort of "don't ask, dont' tell" policy toward mods. Individual players will be sanctioned for egregious behavior but there's no crackdown on the use of various plugins more broadly.
In the meantime, FFXIV players also continue to face frequent service interruptions. The results can be painful but funny. One player calculated the most talkative character in the game. It's the brainiac everyone loves to hate Alphinaud. The developers have temporarily suspended routine auto-demolition of in-game houses due to players impacted by the fires waging in Los Angeles this week.
Destiny 2 players just want to go back to Destiny 1. The first game's social hub recently got an unexpected holiday glow-up. Bungie says that was purely a mistake. Don't expect a Destiny 1 remake, or even a legacy edition revival, anytime soon (though you can still play the original game just fine). Load up Episode Revenant Act III which went live this week and you'll see why.
It's a narrative mess of hopscotching between conversations, repetitive and annoying enemies, and no real payoff in the world. Though it teases eventual travel to new worlds, It's a far cry from the magic and mystique the game's sci-fi world held for players a decade ago even as they were complaining about missing content and unrewarding grinds. Destiny is on life support. It needs a dramatic reboot.
“I think you can look out in the broader game industry right now, and it's rough out there, and I really feel for a lot of things going on in the game industry, and that's something that is going to be one of our biggest challenges,” Bungie design lead Tom Farnsworth recently told Gamesradar. “What's the right way to give players what they want and let them have agency of experience, while also finding what you were saying about the sustainable path forward?"
Apex Legends players share why they're abandoning the game. Common complaints are "I left because I graduated college and work a full time job now," wrote Travisgrr. "With my now limited time I don't want to waste it in sweaty lobbies where I get destroyed." Common complaints include cheating, community toxicity, and recent controversial changes to Pathfinder's grappling hook. For others it's just a lack of new content.
"I recently 'left' because the game just isn't updated enough for my liking," wrote YouTuber TimProVision. "4 legends in 2 years and 2 of them aren't great imo. One map in 2 years and then it was removed during the first half of the split next season. 1 New weapon in 2 years. Support meta isn't that fun to me and makes most legends kind of pointless to play. Apex is still a solid game, just doesn't have the same magic it used to."
Fallout 76 players are tired of all the goofy items. It's been a longstanding complaint among some wastelanders that the post-apocalyptic MMO lacks enough mood-appropriate microtransaction merch. "I really dislike how skewed the shop is towards whacky stuff," one player recently wrote. "I just want items to best blend my camp into the wasteland," another responded. "Junk items please!" Instead, this week's discounts were on more Nuka Cola bundles.
Warframe players trade tales of the game's worst grinds. The list includes: Corrupted Holokeys, Pathos Clamps, Grendel, Dagaths unique resources, Duviri intrinsics, Hema research, and Mining in Cambion Drift, to which EducatorTough9264 wrote, "HOLY FUCK, SAME!! fuck heciphron."
Dune: Awakening players died a lot in the recent closed beta, but a tally of the carnage last month revealed that sandworms were only slightly more dangerous than dehydration.
A Path of Exile fan shares their one-of-a-kind collection of rare loot you can't get in the 10-year old game anymore. "These are all 100% clean items and untouched," wrote Present-Plankton-734. "This is the only collection and first collection to ever have all untagged."
Patch Notes
Manor Lords version 0.8.024 introduces bridge building, stone wells, new maps, and more. Cliffs are "less ambiguous" now, stall setup is instant once workers are assigned, and marketplace grain reserves are less vulnerable to hungry peasants. "Instead of eating from the marketplace, villagers sometimes eat straight from the granaries to reduce the marketplace supply fluctuations."
Valorant patch 10.00 adds new hero Tejo and switches from episodes to a year-long season roadmap consisting of six individual acts. Other changes include a new type of cosmetic called FLEX which are basically custom fidget spinners.
Attack on Titan Revolution version 2.5 lowers the armored shard cost to 24,999, extends the battle pass 2 by 14 days, and reworks Fritz with new passive abilities. It's a Roblox game I don't understand at all but I love this note: "Maybe fixed losing random body parts when ragdolled(?)"
Forza Motorsport update 16 tweaks the 1976 BMW #1 BMW 3.0 CSL for the GTX Sportscar Series multiplayer races. Its tires were upgraded from stock to 325 front and 375 rear and the engine power was increased 22 percent.
Halo Infinite's final winter 2024 operation adds a capture the flag mode called Castle Wars that takes place across eight eclectic maps including one called Megalopolis that looks ripped right out of Rocket League.