Everything You Need To Know: A Nintendo Switch Rumour Round-Up

November 20, 2016

After leaking a range of correct details prior to the reveal trailer for the Nintendo Switch, Eurogamer, Laura Kate Dale at Let’s Play Videogames and Emily Rogers have opened the metaphorical floodgates and have begun leaking new information at a steady clip. While everything in this article is a rumour and should be taken with a grain of salt, these writers and outlets have proven to have accurate sources in regards to the Nintendo Switch and so these new rumours all carry a certain weight behind them.

Laura Kate Dale has easily been the most prolific of all Nintendo Switch leakers so far, having confirmed that she has multiple sources in multiple different production and development studios who have fed her information over the past few months. The biggest leak she has posted recently, and one of the most recent, surrounds the actual launch of the Switch and the games you can expect to see on launch day. The most exciting prospect from this leak is that the new 3D Mario title shown in the official reveal trailer will in fact be a launch day release, as will Bethesda’s port of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While details are scant, her sources have indicated that the new Mario title will feature a hub world similar to Super Mario 64, a two-player co-op mode and will move away from the formula created in Super Mario 3D Land, and followed by the Wii U’s Super Mario 3D World. The port of Skyrim looks to mirror the recent re-release, as opposed to being a port of the original game, and will introduce mod support post launch.

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The same rumour also includes details on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which she states will now miss the launch window and has been delayed until later in the year. This mirrors an earlier rumour from Emily Rogers that also stated that Breath of the Wild would miss launch day. Continuing the launch news, this same rumour states that the Splatoon port shown in the reveal trailer will not only be a launch day game, but that it will also be the pack-in game in a more expensive Switch SKU. The separate Switch SKUs, with the more expensive of the two including more memory and a pack-in game, were leaked in an earlier post from Laura Kate Dale and she also states that they will cost 199.99 and 249.99 pounds respectively. While there is no such thing as a RRP in the UK, this would point to the Switch launching at 50 pounds less than the WiiU and therefore a sub-$AU400 price in Australia. In a separate post, Laura Kate Dale also announced that brand new Mario and Rabbids crossover RPG is being developed by Ubisoft for launch day and that it will feature a large focus on Yoshi as a character.

The final rumour from Laura Kate Dale, is that there is indeed a port of Super Smash Bros. WiiU coming to Switch some time after launch. In fact, according to that post it has been posited that the remaining amiibos waiting for release (including Cloud and Bayonetta) have been delayed to launch with the Switch port of the game.

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In a separate post by Emily Rogers made on the same day, some more information on Mario Kart Switch was revealed. Emily Rogers reports that the Mario Kart game shown in the Switch reveal trailer is in fact a port of the WiiU’s Mario Kart 8 and will include ‘brand new tracks, new playabale characters and a new-and-improved battle mode’. She also reports that development has already concluded on the game and that it will release within 3 months of the Switch’s launch.

Separate to all of these rumours, Eurogamer has advised this week that Pokemon Sun and Moon will in fact be coming to the Switch in the form of a third game, currently codenamed Pokemon Stars. They report that Pokemon Stars has been developed in parallel with Pokemon Sun and Moon, with development pausing for a short time in the months before Friday’s launch as Gamefreak polished the 3DS versions. Supposedly, we have already seen some of the HD assets that will be used in the Switch version of the game, with Eurogamer advising that a model for Pikipek seen on the screen of a Gamefreak worker in an earlier trailer was in fact for Pokemon Stars. The article also advises that Pokemon will be tradeable between the 3DS and Switch games via the Pokemon Bank and that there may be more Pokemon to catch in the new version, although they could not get confirmation from all sources in that regard. This would mark the first time that a true Pokemon game has appeared on a Nintendo home console and would point towards the true convergence between the Handheld and Console teams that the Switch points towards.

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While everything in this article is rumour until officially confirmed by Nintendo, they paint an incredibly pretty picture. Ports of largely popular games that either haven’t been on a Nintendo console or were missed by many by virtue of being on WiiU, as well as two brand new Mario games at launch, point towards a well-stacked launch lineup. Multiple games coming by the end of the year, both ports and original games, show better early support of a platform than we have seen from Nintendo for quite some time. If these rumours do turn out to be true, and I am of the belief that many, if not all of them will be, than the Nintendo Switch is shaping up to be an incredible exciting platform.