Assassin’s Creed on Switch? Nintendo takes steps towards a cloud gaming service

Assassin’s Creed running on the Nintendo Switch? One of the more surprising announcements from this week’s Nintendo Direct livestream was the incoming arrival of the next installment of Ubisoft’s AAA stealth-action series, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.


You might be thinking, how did it manage that? The main criticism that still sticks to Nintendo’s hybrid console is the lack of graphical power, and the difficulty of porting the AAA games you find on the console's more powerful PS4 and Xbox rivals.

But Nintendo seems to be further circumventing those hurdles by looking to the cloud.

What is Assassin's Creed Odyssey ?

Assassin's Creed Odyssey will take the series to Ancient Greece during the Peloponessian war in 431 BC, before the events of 2017's Assassin's Creed Origins, and will allow players to fight for either Athens or Sparta and choose between two playable characters with branching decision-based story paths.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey's DLC 

Assassin's Creed Odyssey's DLC plan was also revealed, and will contain two new stories and a remaster of Assassin's Creed III. The Legacy of the First Blade and The Fate of Atlantis will each have three episodes and will be released around six weeks apart.

 Assassin's Creed Odyssey release date

Assassin's Creed Odyssey will launch on October 5, 2018 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, and the cloud version for the Nintendo Switch will be released on the same day.

Head in the cloud

Cloud gaming has been floating around for a few years now, with some attempts proving more successful than others. But both Nvidia GeForce Now and Playstation Now offer a way to stream AAA games, with clear intentions to focus more on this style of play in the future.

Xbox is rumored to be planning a cloud-only gaming machine, Xbox Scarlett Cloud, for release in 2020, which could feasibly ditch the disc drive and high-end processor to focus on cloud-based play – and make for a cheaper console alternative to the mainline Xbox Scarlett / Xbox Two.

Despite the Switch’s runaway success, Nintendo has been sluggishly cautious on the matter of online functionality. The paid Nintendo Switch Online service is finally launching this month, a total of 18 months after the console first came to market – and we’re still not entirely sure what the end product will look like.

But there’s a strategy that recognises the growing shift to online play. Nintendo’s long-running Virtual Console has been scrapped in favour of a monthly subscription service that nets you access to retro games, and it’s not hard to imagine this expanding to include a Games Pass-style download service for more modern Nintendo titles, or ports from third-party publishers.

When you consider the smaller scale and less-demanding specs of most Nintendo titles, and the scaled-down versions of third-party games – they’re made to be played on a handheld, after all – Nintendo could be well placed to launch their own streaming service, one that doesn’t need to match a 4K display or require nearly as much data to play over the cloud.

So it seems like early days for the House of Mario, but if the company can already pull off limited AAA cloud gaming at home, it’s only a matter of time before it expands further afield.


Nintendo Switch Online to launch on September 18 – but what comes bundled with the service?