Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’re mulling over. Today, Francisco takes a look at a small Joy-Con addition that could help set the upcoming “Switch Legacy” apart…
Nintendo can’t resist compelling hardware innovation. Think Game & Watch’s D-pad, SNES’s convenient shoulder buttons or Wii’s revolutionary motion controls; and we’ve barely scratched the surface of the long legacy of pioneering video game controllers. Despite its efforts, one hardware feature has eluded Nintendo for decades.
This powerful tool can travel miles in the blink of an eye or take you from satellite view to the lowest ant in an instant. Sakurai introduced it to the GameCube. Nintendo patent filing for it in 2015. Your finger is probably within reach of one at this point. What is this long-overlooked miracle I am referring to? Scroll wheel of a computer mouse.
Since today’s creative sandboxes focus heavily on inventory management and crafting menus, straining our existing UI inputs to the maximum limit, this tool, designed First widely seen in 1996 on Microsoft’s IntelliMouse, it would be fitting to make its overdue debut on the ‘Switch 2’.
It’s time to spin the wheel
My first argument is sheer convenience. We’re used to the familiar compromises that cross-platform games use to compensate for the absence of a scroll wheel. Directional or radial options can be switched between weapon and power on the quick select menu. The shoulder buttons turn pages in your inventory instead of scrolling through a long list, or they can toggle camera zoom on/off Civilization VI.
For all its incredible capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom suffers from all sorts of limitations that current controllers aren’t designed for.
Once, that’s enough. Now that creating menus and packing inventory has infiltrated just about any genre you can name, it often feels like you’re spending as much time in glorified spreadsheets as you do in the real world. gaming world. Sure, you can disguise the tedium — like personality done with such remarkable panache – but as we become increasingly bogged down in menus, easing the low-level drag on these ever-evolving grids and lists becomes a necessity. set.
We saw in the last Live the top-down arrangement The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is also applying sandbox elements; part of the game, sadly I don’t expect it to be reused Tears of the KingdomThe endless ‘quick’ menu – scrolling through that thing to find the right Chuchu Jelly took up an embarrassing proportion of my 80 hours of play. This problem has gone on long enough. Especially when it’s easily improved by the precision of the scroll wheel.
By comparison, holding the analog stick feels like spinning a roulette wheel; randomly and with minimal speed control. Go overboard and you have to flip the lever back 180 degrees to reverse. Hard-press navigation buttons create an even less appetizing option, harder to hold, more bother entering exact strings just to select the right one Minecraft item.
Designer tools for a creator’s world
The bigger problem is that, when you think about it, the 3D revolution happened on our screens, not on our controllers.
Even with the analog stick, when Link emerges into magical 3D Hyrule in Ocarina of timeand Mario steps into the magical Mushroom Kingdom Super Mario 64, we continue to navigate 3D space using 2D input. Up or down. Left or right. However there are many different angles in between. It’s essentially no different than operating a UFO catcher, by pressing a button to interact with a third plane of motion.
Normally we do, but with creative modes that require the ability to control the player character and any number of objects in the game, the precision we need to manipulate 3D objects are not yet available. And there’s a reason the mouse wheel is such an important tool for graphic and level designers: it adds a whole new dimension.
For all its incredible capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom suffers from all sorts of limitations that current controllers aren’t designed for. Ultrahand had me rotating wooden planks haphazardly like a budding nunchaku fighter, a destructive hazard to myself and anyone within a 20 meter radius, doomed to create piles of Useless rubble, not ancient engineering achievements.
Add a scroll wheel to the mix and watch these problems melt away, like a scene of Princess Zelda in the distant Gerudo Desert. You don’t need to switch between levitating objects between the three axes. Better yet, with native rotation input, you can now rotate objects with a precision that even Nintendo’s Zonai glue and slick physics detection system couldn’t achieve.
It’s not just Link who benefits. In huge quantities Minecraft, Fortress And Roblox Choosing mobile and PC over console, solving this problem helps Nintendo make the Switch 2 a destination for an untapped market of creative players.
A (Play)date with destiny
The convenience and design tricks are great, but are they enough to justify such a bold new feature? What else can the scroll wheel do?
Some obvious examples come to mind: In last year’s diving/restaurant sim Diver Dave, it’s easy to imagine using the wheel to tilt Dave’s harpoon underwater, or accurately tilting the spout while serving green tea to Dave’s sushi customers. Elsewhere, it can be used to carefully adjust the tension of Link’s bowstring before launching a devastating bomb arrow.
For more ideas, just look at Panic’s Playdate, the yellow handheld with a side-mounted crank that quickly attracted a vibrant development scene keen to explore its possibilities.
The crank is not a wheel, but they operate on the same axis of rotation and it shows a small hardware tweak that could make ‘Switch 2’ claim to be the home of unique mechanical experiences that you can’t find anywhere else (at least until Steam Deck v3 tries to get involved).
Early Playdate releases offer a taste of these new ideas: A balanced beer casts players as a unicycle-riding barista, tasked with delivering coffee while dangerously spinning the bike’s wheels back and forth. And give Crankin’s time travel adventure, Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi chose the fourth dimension, not the third: his game puts you in the role of a robot racing to a hot date, the crank guiding you back in time time, adjusting himself to the flow of time to avoid the obstacles that come between Crankin and his true love Crankette.
More recently, The return of the Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope was drawn to exploit these hardware opportunities and recently launched Mars after midnighta Playdate exclusive title and one that is often complex using a variety of sophisticated hand-crank controls.
The Switch successor deserves equally unique titles from developers of this caliber who are excited to explore these new possibilities. Plus, we know for a fact how Nintendo’s stable of world-class designers would rebel, after the wonders they’ve done with motion and touch controls – I especially want to see something WarioWare can cook.
There are legitimate concerns. Given the Joy-Con’s sorry track record for drift, introducing an additional possibility of mechanical failure to its successor seems a risk. Finding the right ergonomic position can also be a bigger challenge. Personally, I agree with Sakurai: the shoulder buttons converted into clickable wheels adds functionality without the need for an extra button, and certainly beats a rear placement like the controller’s ‘Z’ button. Nintendo 64 console.
I believe that if they put their mind to it, Nintendo developers can make this happen. As people often say: “Where there are wheels, there is a road.”
