Cases that don’t crack, screens that don’t scratch
While drifting Joy-Con took some time to materialise at a large scale, from the early days of Switch reports of scratched screens and warping cases, with the worst cases of the latter even resulting in cracks. While teething problems with new, unproven hardware are to be expected, perhaps, you’d hope that Nintendo has learned enough over the past six years to launch new hardware that avoids these pitfalls.
‘Switch 2’ Wishlist
And now we move into the ‘not-a-dealbreaker-but’ section…
An OLED screen from the start
You can never go back. If, as rumoured, the screen in Nintendo’s next handheld isn’t an OLED, it’s going to have to be one sexy piece of kit to make us forget the vibrant colours and high contrast of the OLED model’s gorgeous screen.
Honestly, we almost put this in the ‘Essential’ section, but it’s also true that there are great non-OLED screens available, and ultimately it’s not going to be a dealbreaker. It’s just going to be hard to swallow if the screen on the ‘new’ Switch, regardless of resolution, doesn’t look as vibrant and lovely as the one many of us have right now.
Decent in-built voice chat
We kinda got tired of asking for this, didn’t we? Yes, we all just hit Discord or another app when we want to play online and interface with other human units, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could just do it on the system itself without getting our phones involved, hmm?
Non-fiddly cart slot cover
If you’re of a nervous disposition or you bite your nails for any other reason, you’ll probably have had trouble getting the Switch’s cart slot cover open. It’s not a biggy, but it would be great if this was tweaked to be a little clicky door.
More internal storage
The Switch OLED model doubled the system’s internal storage to a whopping 64GB, but games — even Switch games — are pretty hefty these days, and even if you’re a physical-only gamer, the number of required downloads and updates you’ll need to store means that 64GB isn’t adequate anymore. If you buy your games digitally, there are several Switch titles that simply won’t fit on the system unless you’ve got a micro SD card. Our total file size for NBA 2K24, for example, is sitting at 61.4GB at the time of writing. Well, that’s under 64GB, so you’re alright!’ we hear you say, but Switch’s operating system and firmware take up a chunk of the internal storage, so no, if doesn’t fit.
Realistically, almost everyone does supplement internal storage with a hefty memory expansion, and the prices are relatively modest these days, but the more onboard memory the better in our book. We’d like to see ‘Switch 2’ coming with at least 1TB.
Analogue triggers
Not a huge deal, but it would be nice to have a little extra analogue control in racing games that assign the brakes and throttles to shoulder buttons. Having a binary on-off and not being able to gently feather the gas results in us spinning out, and while we can often remap the accelerator to a stick to get the precision we want, it would be nice to have analogue parity with other consoles and get back the shoulder control we enjoyed back in the GameCube days.
FLUDD in Super Mario Sunshine would certainly appreciate it.
Themes
Would we take themes over a zippy non-nonsense menu system? Not if we were forced to choose, no, but blimey Nintendo, how about some colour options? Surely throwing in a ‘Purple’ or ‘Orange’ option alongside the regulation White and Black isn’t going to strain the chipset to breaking point!
Yes, natty 3DS-style themes and folders would be the ultimate goal — and we’d do bad things to get some catchy music in the home menu or eShop — but just a splash of colour would be great.
StreetPass
Ah, how we miss ye, StreetPass. Our lovely video producer Zion has been on a mission this year to keep the 3DS StreetPass candle burning in 2023, and the feature’s absence on Switch has certainly made it a less ‘fun’ portable to have about your person. The social element it brought to 3DS — not to mention the fun little StreePass game catalogue — was a delight, and one we’d love to experience again on new Nintendo hardware.
Slicker online, and adios to Friend Codes
A couple of perennial favourites here. Switch made some progress with friend suggestions and social media connections via Facebook and Twitter, but it would be nice to have a slicker system for adding friends on a new system.
And, of course, there’s the old online chestnut. For the Nintendo faithful among us, years of just putting up with online foibles and unconventional approaches to seemingly solved problems has left us a little drained and hopeless. Switch isn’t the worst, it could just be simpler than it is. Could this be the time Nintendo comes out with an online system that just connects simply and works consistently?
There are plenty of other things we’d like to see come to a potential new Switch that aren’t existing problems to fix rather than pitfalls to avoid. As well as hopefully migrating the Nintendo Switch Online subscription offerings to the new console, Switch has notably gained various accessibility and quality-of-life functions throughout its lifecycle via firmware updates. Starting from scratch would be a mistake, especially when it comes to bare-minimum options such as button remapping and the ability to zoom text.
There’s still much room for Nintendo to advance in those areas, and there’s absolutely no need to be going ‘backwards’ by hitting reset on the gradual UI and feature improvements we’ve seen roll out since 2017. The Switch we have in 2023 is the absolute baseline from which to build. We don’t want to be writing about why ‘Switch 2’ doesn’t support Bluetooth headphones or anything like that.
Those are our hopes for the next console, but what about you? Let us know the issues you think most need addressing with ‘Switch 2’ in the poll and the comments below.
