Now that most of the industry is done with Summer Game Fest and all its orbiting events, Nintendo is jumping into the summer video game announcement fray with its own Nintendo Direct. After plenty of speculation and rumors floating around the internet, the company has confirmed the showcase will take place tomorrow, June 18, at 7 a.m. Pacific/10 a.m. Eastern. Thankfully, that’s an hour later than the usual ass-crack of dawn 9 a.m. Eastern slot the company typically chooses for these showcases.
According to Nintendo’s announcement post, the stream will last about 40 minutes and will specifically focus on Switch games coming out in the second half of 2024. So if you, like me, were hoping to see a glimpse of Pokémon Legends: Z-A, tuck that for a bit, because that game’s coming out in 2025. As previously announced, this Direct won’t have any mention of the Switch successor reportedly coming out next year. Good on Nintendo for keeping expectations in check, but that won’t stop a subset of the internet from being mad when it doesn’t show up. The stream will go live on YouTube at this link.
As for what we might see during the show, Nintendo has been pretty quiet about what its 2024 line-up will look like by year’s end. Some theorize this might be because the Switch successor was going to be released this year but has been delayed into 2025, requiring the company to shift its schedules around for the latter half of 2024. In a way that’s refreshing because now we might have a fair bit of surprises, but a lack of specificity always opens these things up for disappointment as people’s expectations get too high. Will Metroid Prime 4, which has been missing in action since its announcement in 2017, finally make an appearance? Get excited for it at your peril. Whatever the case, we’ll get a better sense of the Switch’s twilight year by this time tomorrow.
