ZephyrXeroSwitch 2 cartridge format leaked via patent
I’m impressed they’re sticking with cartridges, since that has been a source of issues with some games. I appreciate it myself. I like them.
This guy is kind of silly for saying that this has been the only time there have been games that fit into the old system, since you could totally put Gameboy Color games into the Gameboy Pocket, they just wouldn’t work. They’d scold you and be like “This game can only be played on the GameBoy Color!”.
I hope there’s no forward compatibility, where games must target the lower spec hardware, since that’s the same thing holding the Xbox Series X/S, I hope there’s backwards compatibility though, it’d be nice to tuck my old Switch into storage.
What games has the cartridge form factor been a source of issues?
Modern consoles install games off the disk, because discs are so slow.
It’s not really an issue for the games, but an issue with the publishers, I guess, since quite a few 3rd party games have you download basically the whole thing instead of storing it on the cart.
UKFilmNerdThe problem was Nintendo charged publishers more money for the larger carts. So a lot of publishers simply took the option of the smallest cheaper cards and made you download the rest.
Trying to preserve Switch games by buying the carts has been a bit pointless really. I know Diablo 3 was entirely on the cart, publishers were very pleased with that.
This kind of thing didn’t used to bother me at all before it very much bothered me and now I’m somewhere in the middle. I think cartridges/discs for consoles should not require an Internet connection to play them. That said, this isn’t the PS2 era anymore. Many games release with patches day 1 and most will have at least some updates post launch. A lot of games kept offline end up missing out on a ton. Keeping a physical copy of a game is only preserving a portion of the game for a future without the servers to supply the final version, which is my main concern when it comes to physical vs digital media. We still have to rely on hacked consoles running custom firmware or emulation to properly preserve games.