Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’ve chewed on. Today, Francisco weighs in on a little Joy-Con accessory that could help differentiate the upcoming “Switch successor”…
Nintendo can’t resist a tempting hardware innovation. Think of the Game & Watch’s D-pad, the SNES’s nifty shoulder buttons, or the Wii’s revolutionary motion controls; and we’ve barely scratched the surface of its long legacy of pioneering video game controllers. Despite its efforts, one hardware feature eluded Nintendo for decades.
This powerful tool can travel miles in the blink of an eye or take you from a satellite view down to the lowest ant in an instant. Sakurai designed it for the GameCube. Nintendo patented it in 2015. Your finger might be within reach of one right now. What long-overlooked wonder am I referring to? Computer mouse scroll wheel.
As today’s creative sandboxes push inventory management and menu creation hard and push our existing UI inputs to their limits, this tool, first widely seen in 1996 on Microsoft’s IntelliMouse, would be well-positioned to making its delayed debut on “Switch 2”. ‘.
It’s time to spin the wheel
My first argument is sheer convenience. We’ve gotten used to the familiar compromises that cross-platform games use to compensate for the absence of a scroll wheel. Directional or radial options can toggle between weapons and abilities in quick select menus. The shoulder buttons flip the pages of your inventory instead of scrolling through one long list, or they can toggle the camera zoom in Civilization VI.
For all its stunning capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom hits all sorts of limits that existing controllers simply aren’t designed for.
Once was enough. Crafting menus and a loaded inventory has now permeated any genre you could name, often feeling like you’re spending as much time in glorified tables as you are in the game world. Sure, you can disguise boredom—like Persona it does with such remarkable panache – but as we get more and more mired in menus, easing the low-level drag behind those endless grids and lists becomes a necessity.
At the last Direct, we saw how the upcoming top-down The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom also embraces sandbox elements; one part of the game I’m sadly not looking forward to is how it reuses Tears of the Kingdom’s endless “quick” menu – traversing this thing to find the right Chuchu Jelly represents an embarrassing chunk of my 80 hour playtime. This problem has been going on for long enough. Especially when it’s so easily improved by the precision of the scroll wheel.
By comparison, holding the analog stick is like spinning a roulette wheel; randomly and with minimal speed regulation. Overshoot and you have to turn the stick back 180 degrees to undo. Scoring directional buttons is an even less palatable option, more effort to hold, more work entering exact sequences just to pick the right Minecraft item.
A design tool for a world of creators
The bigger problem is that when you think about it, the 3D revolution happened on our screens, not our controllers.
Even with the analog stick, when Link appeared in the amazing 3D Hyrule in Ocarina of Time and Mario stepped into the magical Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario 64, we still continued to navigate 3D spaces using 2D inputs. Up or down. Left or right. However, many variations of angles in between. At its core, it’s no different than controlling a UFO catcher with pressing a button to interact with the third plane of movement.
We often get by, 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 just isn’t there yet. And there’s a reason the mouse wheel is a key tool for graphic designers and level designers: it adds a whole new dimension.
For all its stunning capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom hits all sorts of limits that existing controllers simply aren’t designed for. Ultrahand had me haphazardly spinning wooden planks like a novice nunchuck fighter, a devastating danger to me and anyone within 20 meters, doomed to create piles of useless rubble, not the technical achievements of the ages.
Add a scroll wheel to the mix and watch those problems melt away like you see Princess Zelda in the distance of the Gerudo Desert. You don’t need to switch between levitating objects between three axes. Even better, with a naturally rotating input, you can now rotate objects with a precision that even Zonai’s glue and Nintendo’s polished physics detection system couldn’t quite achieve.
It’s not just Link who benefits. With loads of Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox Opting for mobile and PC over consoles, solving this problem will make Nintendo target the Switch 2 for the untapped market of creative gamers.
(Play) date with destiny
Comfort and design tricks are great, but is it enough to justify such a bold new feature? What else can a scroll wheel do?
A few obvious examples come to mind: In last year’s diving/restaurant simulator Dave the Diver, it’s easy to imagine using a wheel to tilt Dave’s harpoon underwater, or to precisely tilt the spout when serving green tea to Dave’s sushi customers. Elsewhere, it could be used to carefully calibrate Link’s bowstring tension before launching a devastating bomb arrow.
For more ideas, just take a look at Panic’s Playdate, a yellow lil’ handheld with a rotating side crank that quickly created a lively development scene eager to explore its possibilities.
The crank isn’t a wheel, but they work on the same axis of rotation, and it shows how a little hardware tweaking could make the “Switch 2” bet home to unique mechanical experiences you just can’t find anywhere else (at least until Steam Deck v3 tries to get involved).
Early Playdates give a taste of these new ideas: A Balanced Brew casts the player as a barista on a unicycle tasked with delivering coffee orders while dangerously spinning the unicycle back and forth. And for Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi opted for the fourth dimension, not the third: in his game, you play a stretch robot racing to find a hot date, the crank takes you back and forth in time and adapts to you. along the timeline to avoid obstacles between Crankin and his true love Crankette.
Recently, Return of the Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope has been drawn to take advantage of these hardware opportunities and recently launched Mars After Midnight, a Playdate exclusive and typically complex title that uses a variety of slick crank controls.
The Switch’s successor deserves equally unique titles from developers of this caliber who are excited to explore these new possibilities. Plus, we’re pretty sure Nintendo’s stable of top designers would be in a tizzy after the wonders they’ve done with motion and touch controls – I’m especially curious to see what WarioWare can cook up.
There are valid concerns. Given the unfortunate track record of Joy-Con drift, adding another chance of mechanical failure to its successor might seem like a risk. Finding the right ergonomic placement can also be a bigger challenge. Personally, I agree with Sakurai: the shoulder buttons converted to click wheels add functionality without additional buttons, and certainly beat the back position like the Nintendo 64 controller’s “Z” button.
I’m confident that the Nintendo developers can make it happen if they put their minds to it. As the saying goes, “Where there’s a wheel, there’s a way.”