Pikmin 3 Deluxe for Nintendo Switch Announcement Imminent?

For the last several months, Pikmin rumors have been increasing more and more like a burning flame with unlimited fuel. Many of the rumors talk about the possibility of a Pikmin 3 port for the Nintendo Switch, but up until the last few weeks, that's where the rumors would typically end. Recently, a name has been leaked identifying the Pikmin 3 port as the “Deluxe” edition. This has been mentioned by several “insiders", who post their information on twitter, talking about a Pikmin 3 Deluxe port being announced "very soon". Insiders have even suggested that Pikmin 3 Deluxe‘s development has been completed and ready to go for some time now. Backing up all these recent leaks, fresh postings on Amazon France's website revealed several unannounced titles, confirming 4 unreleased 1st party games to be released this year. With all of these leaks and so many reputable sources making the same claims, we can only be extremely hopeful for a imminent announcement of some kind! A pipe-dream rumor also points to the possibility of Pikmin 1 and Pikmin 2 being included in Pikmin 3 Deluxe as a bundle, but I would take that with more of a grain of salt than the general Pikmin 3 port leaks, which are more likely to be true.

For years, Pikmin fans have anxiously waited for some new information about their beloved little flower critters. The last time we heard anything from Nintendo concerning Pikmin was back in 2017, when Shigeru Miyamoto stated that Pikmin 4 was, "Progressing". This statement followed a comment made by Miyamoto in 2015, where he mentioned that Pikmin 4 was, "Very close to completion". To this day, there is a lot of speculation on these two statements.

One possibility is that there was a misunderstanding with communication and Miyamoto was referring to 'Hey, Pikmin!' That released for the Nintendo 3DS in July 13, 2017. Simply put, my mind is just to resistant to this theory to imagine this as the truth. 'Hey, Pikmin!' is, mechanically and gameplay speaking, a completely different game from the base installments and is the series' first dive into the mobile gaming market. It doesn't make sense, in my mind, to correlate 'Hey, Pikmin!' with any of the past titles because of how different they are.

Another speculation is, Nintendo either scrapped the original Pikmin 4 project to rework the game from the ground up in favor of Nintendo Switch over the Nintendo Wii U, or at the very least, had to make a great deal of adjustments to allow the game to work on Nintendo's new home-console-handheld. The Wii U not only had 2 less CPU cores to work with, but It also had 2GB less RAM to work with as well. Backing up the extra cpu power and additional RAM for the system and GPU, the newer architecture powering the Nvidia Tegra X1 inside of the Nintendo switch would also provide visual and performance benefits. Not that Pikmin 3 didn’t look great on the switch, but imagine the ability to sustain 60 FPS in both docked and portable modes, with slightly improved graphics and larger game worlds with more depth than we’ve seen so far in a Pikmin game, made from the ground up on the Nintendo Switch!

With all our dreams aside, many fans just can't add any of these possibilities up to account for such a hug gap in time since we have last heard about Pikmin from Nintendo directly. If the game was almost done in 2015, but had to be reworked for the Switch's 2017 launch, that would mean Nintendo has had over 5 years of development time from that date to have the game at least announced by now. The only plausible situation that I can imagine, based off the timeframes we have known about and the lack of information since then, is that the rework didn't begin until the final year leading up to the Nintendo Switch’s launch. Nintendo may have thought about the missed opportunity of launching their 4th base Pikman game on a console that not only wasn't selling well, but within a year their next gen console would replace. That would mean Pikmin 4 would have been in development for less than 3 years, which makes a lot more sense on why we may have not heard anything about the next game in the series.

With Pikmin 3 Deluxe supposedly being announced and launching soon, it is possible we may see a Pikmin 4 announcement alongside it. Considering the game has been "progressing" since 2015, it wouldn't be crazy if Nintendo announced Pikmin 3 Deluxe with a month or two launch date from its announcement with a Pikmin 4 announcement for a 2021 release. This is one of the less likely scenarios, but wouldn't be unrealistic if it happened with the aforementioned timeframes leading up to these "possible" announcements! One can only dream and stay hopeful, but for now, everything you’ve read today is all leaked rumor and (hopeful) speculation! Thank you for reading.