At minimum they should provide copies of the software to anyone who paid a subscription, and then enterprising individuals would figure out how to get private servers running

Or they could just, I don’t know, not burn out console after console running them constantly so they don’t have to spend exuberantly.

1. You’re grossly overestimating the number of consoles they would “burn through” by having a few of their original original hardware set up in their museum. If you’re worried about them running constantly, they could easily have a couple consoles per station that get swapped between throughout the day so that no one console is ever on for more than a few hours. People used their regularly NESes and SNESes for several years, I’m sure you could stretch that to decades of you had the expertise and resources of the company that invented the hardware behind you.

2. You’re grossly overestimating the amount of money it would cost to maintain original hardware. As another user said, hobbyists can maintain an original system themselves for decades using mostly off-the-shelf parts. The rare occurrences where a proprietary Nintendo part needs replaced wouldn’t cost tens of millions of dollars. There’s thousands of shops that can manufacture small runs of custom ICs or circuit boards for a few thousand bucks. They wouldn’t need to maintain a custom multi-million dollar facility.

to produce old and completely antiquated hardware that they can already emulate on there current hardware.

Then emulate on your current hardware, if you’re going to use emulation! Don’t use a Windows emulator from who-knows-where, when you’ve repeatedly made clear that you’re against other parties emulating your hardware! That’s certainly more embarrassing by the way, if your Windows emulator crashes and museum goers are greeted by a Windows BSOD or whatever, instead of the Switch home screen or the Nintendo Online interface.

What do think Nintendo does there development on?

We’re talking about NES/SNES games here (which Nintendo doesn’t develop anymore, btw), because that’s what they were caught using a Windows PC and a Windows emulator for. So either they’re using someone else’s emulator, or they ported the emulator that runs on the switch to run on Windows (which would be a huge undertaking, considering the architecture and OS differences between a Nintendo Switch and a Windows PC).

If you mean Switch emulators, that’s just piracy

Emulation is not piracy.

I thought they had included ripped ROMs

Some of the ROMs on their official library contained signatures from popular ROM rippers, which indicates they straight up just downloaded them from one of the various ROM sites they’ve been trying to shut down for the last couple decades.

It’s there IP, they can choose what’s allowed to be done with it. If they want to emulate it, they can.

That’s fine, I don’t have a problem with anyone emulating anything, including Nintendo. My problem lies with their hypocrisy. If they want to emulate NES/SNES games in their own museum, go for it. But at least use your own emulator on your own hardware, given they have the ability to easily do that. Using a Windows PC and a Windows emulator for that is hypocritical.

That would just be wasteful

I disagree. If they actually care about the preservation of their history (which is the whole point of museums), they should be willing to invest a tiny fraction of their incredible wealth to do that, if they want to run it themselves.

Your forgetting that Nintendo emulates there own games all the time, literally since the GameCube.

I’m not forgetting anything. That’s my whole point. Nintendo has their own emulators, in both software and hardware. Why are they running some Windows emulator on a Windows PC in their own museum? It makes me think that they just took one of the myriad open source emulators (that they’re probably trying diligently to get shut down) and installed that, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re playing ripped ROMs on it, given that they include ripped ROMs on their own emulation libraries (that they charge people to access, btw). Because they’ve proven that they’re hypocrites when it comes to emulation.

There argument has never been about what they can do, it’s about what you can do.

Right, again, that’s my point. Emulation is fine and dandy when Nintendo does it, but not when anyone else does it, yet they still benefit from those other emulators. That’s shitty.

Do you want wait hours/days before you can actually play?

I’m suggesting that they build in an interface where you can select certain cities/regions or particular flight paths, you know, small chunks of stuff, and it would display how much it needs to download/cache up front. Give you a little progress bar and let you queue up multiple locations, if you have the bandwidth/room in your data cap. Let the user have control. Worst case, if you want to download a large area, start it at night, it downloads while you sleep, then it’s ready in the morning, ezpz. Give the user control, instead of invisibly doing everything in the background without giving the user any way to monitor/control bandwidth/data usage.

You do that by, hear me out, playing! And the game figures out where exactly you want to play and what you need.

I want to have more control over that process than just booting up the game, taking flight, and hoping I don’t hose my roommates watching Netflix because my flight path is slightly off course and the game starts streaming gigabytes of textures I didn’t think I’d need.

it probably will be an option to preload anyway but I don’t know enough about MSFS

If that’s the case, great, problem solved, as long as I can also turn off the auto-streaming feature.

And in the case of preloading, you would hit the exact same data cap.

If the game let me control what textures to download more granularly, instead of automatically downloading a bunch of shit in the background, I have control over when/if it that cap is reached. If I’m getting close, I can make the decision to wait until next month to download the New Zealand textures or whatever.

And if you a data cap, I’m sorry for you. That’s a real bummer.

You’re being awfully dismissive about this, but it’s a huge problem. Most of the USA and Canada still has data caps. That’s nearly half a billion people, and probably a good chunk of the overall audience for MSFS are from the US, using data capped Internet plans. Making a game intended for that audience that downloads huge amounts of data without a way to control it other than “just never fly in new areas 4head” is asinine. I don’t think that wanting more control over what the game downloads is that ridiculous of a request.

But, I don’t know why i have to keep repeating this point, the amount of data is at worst the same!

Granted, but I want control over when that data is downloaded, and I only want it to be downloaded when I tell the game to download it. I don’t want the game making that decision for me invisibly in the background.

But this is the exact same as with preloading…

No, it isn’t. There’s a monumental difference between the game deciding to download 100Gb of textures invisibly in the background while I’m playing the game and other people in my household are also trying to use that shared Internet connection, and me telling the game to download those textures overnight when no one else is using that bandwidth, and after I’ve confirmed that it isn’t going to incur fees by pushing me over my data cap.

Thats why there is a cache, so you don’t re download every time… So only new locations you visit will be streamed

K so why not just include that with the initial installation, if you’re gonna need to store it locally anyways?

it will still be way less than having to pre install maps with locations you might never even visit in game…

Or allow users to decide what areas of the map they want to fly in and just download that subset when the user requests it?

Implicitly streaming that much data seems like a good way to piss off your users when they unknowingly saturate their bandwidth or bump up against their data cap.

Do you manually download all your maps from google maps/earth every time before you use it?

No, but Google maps doesn’t potentially use gigabytes of data per hour, and isn’t something I use for hours on end multiple times a week like a video game, except in relatively rare occurrences like road trips/vacations.

So is bandwidth

You pay for storage once and that’s it. You pay a subscription for bandwidth, plus fees if you go over your data cap. Bandwidth is absolutely more expensive than storage, and should be optimized for.

Other games store those png tiles locally. Which, sure, increases the installed size of the game. Storage is cheap though, might as well use it right? Like, even if this article is off by an order of magnitude, 8Gb/h is still a ton of data to stream just to play a video game. If other games also do that, that’s news to me. But i was under the impression that games try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to networking. Storing all your texture tiles in the cloud and making your clients download and redownload them seems the opposite of efficient, or at least that they optimized for the wrong thing.

Oh no, poor Nintendo, how could they possibly afford a custom IC fab? They only have more money than God.

The way I see it, they have two choices. Make the investment to supply their museum with original hardware, or be ok with emulation. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it too, and that’s shitty.

That seems like a wildly inefficient way to render things

They’re fucking Nintendo. They made the consoles they’re showing off in their museum. They absolutely have the ability to supply that museum with equipment and maintain it in perpetuity, because they fucking invented it

Thank you, forgot the PS5 has been out for a while lol

I think they’re implying a comparison to the PS4. It was notoriously difficult to get a PS4 for months after it’s release because it was constantly sold out

Agree to disagree then. I highly doubt they’re suing over the capture mechanic. If they ever had a patent for that, it would have expired already.

the mechanic is capturing a creature by weakening them and throwing a ball at them. Not just throwing a ball.

And like I’ve said before, Shin Megami Tensei did this before Pokemon. This concept was not original to Pokemon, and exists in several other creature catcher games.

None of the creatures I’ve seen are entirely new designs, but rather hybrids of existing, well known Pokemon.

Then you haven’t seen a large portion of Pals. Plenty of pals are unique. Some of them look similar to Pokemon, sure, because they’re based on the same real world animal.

outright lying to defend them and ignoring obvious facts does

🙄🙄🙄

It’s fine to admit that a thing you like has flaws, and admit that those flaws need addressing.

K, Palworld has flaws. Never claimed otherwise.

We’ve run far field of the point though. Palworld is being sued for patent infringement. If there was ever a patent on the “weaken creature then capture” mechanic, it’s long expired, so they’re not being sued over that. They’re not being sued over art or Pal designs, because that would be copyright infringement, not a patent violation.

Given those facts, what do you think Palworld is being sued for?

but not capturing by weakening the creature and throwing a ball at them.

If you think “throwing a ball” is a patentable (or even copyrightable) mechanic, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Palworld explicitly copies the style of creature design from Pokemon

Some pals are similar to Pokemon, sure, but a lot are quite distinct. If you have a problem with that though, take it up with The Pokemon Company, because they did it first.

The developers knew exactly what they were doing, so to claim it wasn’t intentional is disingenuous at best.

Of course it was intentional to make a game in the same genre as Pokemon, with similar mechanics. That’s how video games in the same genre work. You make them similar to things you know people like, so that there’s a greater chance they’ll like your game too, but you also introduce new, unique things so that you’re not copying. Yes, Palworld did that intentionally.

None of that is illegal though, or shouldn’t be anyways, unless they’re straight up stealing assets/code from a Pokemon game and using it in Palworld.

K first of all, the mechanic you’re referencing was already an established mechanic before Pokemon Red/Blue came out. The Pokemon Company didn’t invent the “creature catcher” genre of video games.

Second of all, as I’ve said already, the catching mechanic in Palworld is absolutely distinct enough to be considered as drawing inspiration from Pokemon, and not copying. If you wanna get into the nitty gritty, I’ll meet you down there, but if you’re just gonna continue to spout meaningless contrarianisms I’ve got better things to do

Third of all, “cell shaded anime art style” describes hundreds if not thousands of video games, not just Pokemon games. You can’t realistically claim that Palworld copied Pokemon’s art style* just because it uses a cell-shaded anime style, especially because Pokemon has only used that art direction for the last two generations of games, and the style has been in use long before sword and shield came out.

Copying would imply a one to one duplication. The catching system in Palworld differs in multiple ways from the Pokemon system. I think that’s enough to call it borrowing and not copying.

Palworld is an open world survival crafting factory/base building game, that happens to borrow the catching mechanic from Pokemon (who borrowed it from Shin Megami Tensei).

Those of pure enough heart to weild a Keyblade will know how to login - all you need to do is trust your heart, and follow the light!

Yeah playing quickplay in Overwatch has all the sweaty counterswapping and flaming for off meta picks as competitive, except with a 5-10 minute queue time instead of 20-30

We learned at the end of 2020 that Overwatch is at its best when it’s constantly updated and always feeling fresh. The patch cadence was never faster than it was at the end of 2020, and the game felt amazing.

In my opinion, 6v6 won’t work unless the patch cadence speeds up to what it was back then. 6v6 means long DPS queue times, and was unbearable at the end of OW1. If OW2 want looming around the corner back then, the game would have died. The fast patch cadence keeping the game fresh somewhat makes up for the 10, 15, 20 minute queue times.

That being said, the current implementation of 5v5 misses the mark as well. DPS and Support players are somewhat spoiled with 5v5, both with queue times and gameplay. But the Tank role suffers mightily. Over the years the game and hero design philosophy has shifted to be dependent on 2 tanks being able to soak up enemy cooldowns, cover for each other, and protect the team. Putting all that responsibility on one player sucks.

Aaron’s blog post makes me hopeful that they’re gonna try stuff beyond 1-2-2 5v5 versus 2-2-2 6v6 though, which is exciting. I don’t envy the dev team because this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve, but it seems like they’re willing to get more creative about trying to solve it than they have been in the past, which is nice.