Announcing the price before the features is a move by Nintendo to curb some criticism and expectations.
Nintendo's response to Kotaku sounds like Nintendo's pleading the 5th in an online services tribunal.
The service is $20 a year. It's great that Nintendo is up front about what they expect people to pay for their online service but I think it's way to get people fixed on the price and not what they're getting, relative to Xbox Live and Playstation Plus vs. the actual value and content you're going to get at the end.
Not much has changed since they were announcing the paid service other than they pushed the date back to 2018 and took SNES out of the wording on their website.
It just raises more questions about how they're going to go about Virtual Console and whether the a la carte model for purchasing VC games and whether a discount will carry over to people that purchased the same games on the Wii U or 3DS will carry over in any capacity ... or whether VC is done in favor of this unnamed monthly "Netflix" service.
Are My Nintendo rewards in limbo until the paid service launches? ... or are they going to sample what to expect in terms of discounts and freebies before the lead-up to the 2018 launch.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the first real online multiplayer experience for the Nintendo Switch from Nintendo. As it stands now, it's less reliable in both regional and worldwide matches than the Wii U version is. From my experience with the Switch version of MK8 ... Worldwide matches are entirely unreliable with either the game stalling when entering spectator mode leading to a communications error (it seems like the game has trouble syncing with other players, stalls, and kicks you out of the game). Collision detection and some incredible delays with item rolling lag.
Battle Mode sometimes doesn't properly keep score even though my character reacts to a successful item hit. I've seen Balloon Battle matches where half the players didn't score one hit even though I've visibly seen them throw a bomb or shell successfully at another player.
I went back to the Wii U version of Mario Kart 8 and it was a MUCH smoother experience. The game lobby and tract selection roll didn't stall. The spectator mode worked, didn't stall even if the race was over. I never got the impression the game froze or was ready to disconnect like the Switch version.
The review copies of ARMs that some reviewers received a couple of days ago and the ARMS Test Punch either have a much smaller user base. It's either reviewers playing each other or people that have been available to play in one of Nintendo's hourly timeslots.
From what I understand with Splatoon 2 (and it is something that may be true for ARMS as well), is the netcode was dialed back a bit to give a smoother experience. Pretty sure Digital Foundry or another outlet tested this with Splat 2.
It will be interesting to see how use-case scenarios work with the smartphone application coming out this summer.
Nintendo needs to soft launch at least what they vaguely promised (NES games, discounts, voice chat) this year.
