Nintendo NX, the mysterious new hardware in the bowels of production over at the Big N, may still be a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but that hasn’t stopped developers from across the industry expressed their tempered excitement.
Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, is one such advocate, telling IGN that he considers the NX to be a “fantastic machine” that will offer a fundamentally “different experience from what exists today.” Bold words, of course, but Guillemot’s stature at Ubisoft, a publisher that all but pulled third-party support from the Wii U following pitiful sales, leads us to believe that the NX could well live up to early expectations.
Per IGN:
“They have built in something that will give us chance to really have a different experience from what exists today,” he said. “That’s what I like – that they come with something new that is adapted to what we actually want now.”
Lending credence to this, Pokemon boss Tsunekazu Ishihara appeared to let slip to the Wall Street Journal that Nintendo NX will indeed launch next year as a console/handheld hybrid, one that potentially supports cartridges in lieu of traditional discs. According to Ishihara-san, NX “is trying to change the concept of what it means to be a home console device or a handheld device.”
Circling back to Guillemot’s interview, the Ubisoft head honcho was pressed about the possibility of backwards compatibility on NX, to which he replied: “It’s difficult to answer that [before NX is revealed]. What we see is that Nintendo has learned from the Wii U. All publishers learn from what they do, and then come with something new and more attractive, which I think is the case here.”
As things stand, Nintendo NX is earmarked for release during the opening stages of 2017, when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will land as the marquee launch title. That means a reveal ought to be right around the corner, and we’ll be keeping tabs on the nebulous console as this story develops.