Newly-released court documents from within Microsoft’s ongoing court case in its bid to acquire Activision Blizzard have not only revealed that The Elder Scrolls 6 will definitely be skipping PlayStation as a release platform, but thanks to a look at some internal Activision emails (once again via The Verge) we now know that Activision was briefed on the successor to the Nintendo Switch as early as 2022.
Activision higher-ups reportedly met with Nintendo executives to talk about about the next generation of Nintendo hardware in December 2022, and a document was prepared by Activision summarising the new console and shared in an internal email chain. While the contents of said document have naturally been scrubbed harder than my saucepan the morning after I cook chilli, it does suggest that the new Nintendo console will be more closely aligned in performance with the previous generation of PlayStation and Xbox hardware.
According to The Verge, the communications read, “Given the closer alignment to Gen8 platforms in terms of performance and our previous offerings on PS4 / Xbox One, it is reasonable to assume we could make something compelling for the NG Switch as well. It would be helpful to secure early access to development hardware prototypes and prove that out nice and early.”
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Image: The Verge and US Courts.
This might conflict slightly with some folks’ expectations after reports that a recent showing of the Switch successor at Gamescom had a version of the Unreal Engine 5 demo The Matrix Awakens running, complete with ray-tracing and NVIDIA DLSS technology and visuals “comparable” to the same demo on the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Obviously, final spec could have changed in the time between and still could differ in either direction before Nintendo’s ready to talk about this new hardware publicly.
You can read more on this story here, which also touches on the prospect of Call of Duty titles on future Nintendo hardware.
