With Joy-Con Drift, What Does Nintendo Have To ‘Fix’ With ‘Switch 2’?

Cases that don’t crack, screens that don’t scratch

While the Joy-Con was on the move, it took a while to materialize on a large scale, with the Switch reporting scratched screens and warped cases from the early days, with the worst cases of the latter even resulting in cracks. While increasing problems with new, unproven hardware are to be expected, you might hope that Nintendo has learned enough over the past six years to launch new hardware that avoids these pitfalls.

‘Switch 2’ wish list

And now on to the ‘not-a-break-but’ section…

OLED screen from the start

You can never go back. If, as rumored, the screen in Nintendo’s next handheld it is not OLED, it will have to be one sexy piece of equipment that will make us forget the vivid colors and high contrast of the beautiful screen of the OLED model.

To be honest, we almost put this in the ‘Basic’ section, but it’s also true that there are excellent non-OLED displays available, and ultimately this won’t be a problem. It’s just going to be hard to swallow if the screen on the ‘new’ Switch, regardless of resolution, doesn’t look as vivid and beautiful as the one many of us currently have.

Decent built-in voice chat

We’re getting a little tired of looking for this, aren’t we? Yes, we all just hit Discord or some other app when we want to play online and face other human units, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could do it on the system itself without turning on our phones, hmm?

Inconvenient trolley slot cover

If you’re nervous or bite your nails for any other reason, you’ll likely have trouble opening the Switch’s cart slot cover. It’s not big, but it would be great if this could be tweaked to be a bit of a clicky door.

More internal memory

The Switch OLED model doubled the system’s internal storage to a whopping 64GB, but games — even Switch games — are pretty hefty these days, so even if you’re just a physical gamer, the number of downloads and updates you need to store means that 64GB more not enough. If you buy your games digitally, there are a few Switch titles that simply won’t fit in the system unless you have a micro SD card. Our total file size for NBA 2K24, for example, is 61.4 GB at the time of writing. Well, that’s less than 64GB, so you’re good!’ we hear you say, but the Switch’s operating system and firmware take up some of the internal storage, so no, if it doesn’t fit.

Realistically, almost everyone works supplement the internal storage with a large memory expansion, and the prices are relatively modest these days, but the more built-in memory the better in our book. We’d like to see a ‘Switch 2’ with at least 1TB.

Analog triggers

It’s not a big deal, but it would be nice to have a little extra analog control in racing games that assign brakes and throttle to the shoulder buttons. Having binary on-off and not being able to give the throttle a little makes us spin, and while we can often map the accelerator to the stick to get the precision we want, it would be nice to have analog parity with other consoles and bring back the shoulder control we enjoyed in the GameCube days.

FLUDD in Super Mario Sunshine would certainly appreciate it.

Themes

Would we download themes via a quick, no-nonsense menu system? Not if we were forced to choose, no, but for God’s sake Nintendo, how about some color options? Adding a ‘Purple’ or ‘Orange’ option in addition to regulating white and black certainly won’t stress the chipset to breaking point!

Yes, cool 3DS-style themes and folders would be the ultimate goal — and we’d do bad things to get catchy music in the home menu or eShop — but just a little color would be great.

StreetPass

Ah, how we miss you, StreetPass. Our wonderful video producer Zion has been on a mission to keep the 3DS StreetPass candle burning in 2023 this year, and the lack of that feature on the Switch has certainly made it a less ‘fun’ portable device for personal use. The social element it brought to the 3DS — not to mention the fun little StreePass catalog of games — was a delight, and we’d love to experience it again on Nintendo’s new hardware.

Slicker online, and goodbye to friendly codes

Here are some perennial favorites. Switch made some make progress with friend suggestions and social media links via Facebook and Twitter, but it would be nice to have a more polished system for adding friends on the new system.

And, of course, there’s the old internet chestnut. For the Nintendo faithful among us, years of just putting up with internet weaknesses and unconventional approaches to seemingly solved problems has left us a little jaded and hopeless. The Switch isn’t the worst, it just could be simpler than it is. He could this one is it about time nintendo comes out with an online system that simply connects and works consistently?

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There are plenty of other things we’d like to see on a potential new Switch that aren’t existing problems to fix rather than pitfalls to avoid. As we hope moving the Nintendo Switch Online subscription offer to the new console, the Switch has received various accessibility and quality-of-life features throughout its lifecycle via firmware updates. Starting from scratch would be a mistake, especially when dealing with minimal options like button remapping and the possibility of zooming the text.

There’s still plenty of room for Nintendo to improve in these areas, and there’s absolutely no need to go ‘backwards’ by pressing reset on the incremental UI and feature improvements we’ve seen roll out since 2017. The Switch we have in 2023 is an absolute a baseline from which to build. Me do not i want to write about why ‘Switch 2’ doesn’t support bluetooth headset or something.

Those are our hopes for the next console, but what about you? Tell us in the poll and comments below which issues you think Switch 2 needs to be addressed the most.