Soapbox’s features allow our individual editors and contributors to express their opinions on trending topics and random topics they’ve been thinking about. Now, Francisco is considering a small addition to the Joy-Con that could help distinguish the next “Switch successor”…
Nintendo can’t resist a tantalizing hardware innovation. Think 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 has eluded Nintendo for decades.
This powerful tool can cover miles in the blink of an eye or take you from a satellite view to the lowest ant in an instant. Sakurai introduced it for the GameCube. Nintendo filed a patent for this product in 2015. Your finger may be within reach right now. What long-neglected wonder am I referring to? The computer mouse scroll wheel.
As today’s creative sandboxes tackle inventory management and menu creation, straining our existing user interface inputs, this tool, first widely seen in 1996 on Microsoft’s IntelliMouse, would be well placed to make its anticipated debut on the ‘Switch 2’. ‘.
It’s time to spin the wheel
My first argument is simple convenience. We’ve become accustomed to the familiar compromises that cross-platform games use to compensate for the lack of the scroll wheel. Directional or radial options can switch between weapons and powers in quick selection menus. The shoulder buttons rotate pages in your inventory, rather than scrolling through a long list, or they can toggle camera zoom in Civilization VI.
For all its mind-blowing possibilities, Tears of the Kingdom hits all the limits that existing controllers simply aren’t designed for.
Once was enough. Now that crafting menus and stocked inventories have infiltrated every genre you could name, it often feels like you spend as much time in glorified spreadsheets as you do in the game world. Of course, you can disguise boredom – like Character done with remarkable panache – but when we get more and more bogged down in menus, easing the low-level drag underlying those endless grids and lists becomes a necessity.
We saw in the last Direct how even the upcoming top-down version of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is also adopting sandbox elements; the only part of the game I’m sadly not looking forward to is how it reuse Tears of the Kingdom’s endless ‘quick’ menu – scrolling through this thing looking for the right Chuchu jelly takes up an embarrassing proportion of my time 80 hours of gaming time. This problem has been going on for quite a long time. Especially when it’s so easily enhanced by the precision of a scroll wheel.
In comparison, holding down an analog stick is like spinning a roulette wheel; random and with minimal speed control. Overtake and you must flip the stick 180 degrees to reverse. Jabbing directional buttons present an even less palatable option, more pressure to hold down, more trouble entering precise sequences just to select the right Minecraft item.
A design tool for a creator’s world
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 emerged in a marvelous 3D Hyrule in Ocarina of Time and Mario set foot in a magic mushroom kingdom in Super Mario 64, we still continued to navigate the 3D spaces with inputs 2D. Up or down. Left or right. However, there are many variations of angles between the two. Basically, it’s no different than operating a UFO sensor, with a simple press of a button to interact with a third plane of motion.
Often we get by, but with creative modes requiring the ability to control a player character and a number of in-game objects, the precision we need for manipulating 3D objects isn’t there yet . And there’s a reason why the mouse wheel is a key tool for graphic artists and level designers: it adds a whole new dimension.
For all its mind-blowing possibilities, Tears of the Kingdom hits all the limits that existing controllers simply aren’t designed for. Ultrahand had me twirling random wooden planks like a beginner nunchuck, a destructive peril to myself and anyone within a 20 meter radius, doomed to create piles of useless rubble, not technical achievements for the ages.
Add a scroll wheel to the mix and watch these problems disappear, like a sighting of Princess Zelda far away in the Gerudo Desert. You don’t need to switch between levitating objects between three axes. Better yet, with naturally rotating input, you can now spin objects with a precision that even Zonai’s sticky gloop and Nintendo’s refined physical sensing system couldn’t quite achieve.
It’s not just Link who benefits. With a large number of Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox By opting for mobile and PC over consoles, solving this problem inspires Nintendo to make the Switch 2 the destination for an untapped market of creative gamers.
A (Play) rendezvous with destiny
The convenience and design tricks are great, but are they 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 sim, Dave the Diver, it’s easy to imagine using the wheel to tilt Dave’s harpoon underwater, or precisely tilt the spout to serve green tea to Dave’s sushi customers. Elsewhere, it could be used to carefully calibrate the tension of Link’s bowstring before unleashing a devastating explosive arrow.
For more ideas, just take a look at Panic’s Playdate, the little yellow handheld with a rotating side crank, which quickly attracted a vibrant development scene eager to explore its possibilities.
A crank isn’t a wheel, but they operate on the same axis of rotation, and it demonstrates how a small hardware tweak could make “Switch 2” its claim as a home to unique mechanical experiences that you can’t quite get at just find it nowhere else (at least until Steam Deck v3 tries to establish itself).
Early Playdate releases give a taste of these new ideas: A Balanced Brew casts players as a unicycling barista, tasked with delivering coffee orders while dangerously spinning its unicycle wheel back and forth. And for Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi opts for a fourth dimension, not the third: in his game, you play as a hand-cranked robot who runs to a date, the crank you guides you back and forth over time, readjusting yourself. along a timeline to avoid the obstacles that stand between Crankin and his true love, Crankette.
More recently, Return of the Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope has been brought in to exploit these hardware opportunities and recently released Mars After Midnight, a Playdate exclusive and typically complex title that makes use of various nifty crank controls.
The Switch’s successor deserves equally unique titles from developers of this caliber, eager to explore these new possibilities. Plus, we know full well how wild Nintendo’s world-class designers would go, after the miracles they’ve worked with motion and touch controls – I’m especially excited to see what WarioWare could cook up.
There are valid concerns. With the unfortunate track record of Joy-Con drift, adding another chance of mechanical problem to its successor may seem like a risk. Finding the right ergonomic placement can also be a bigger challenge. Personally, I agree with Sakurai: shoulder buttons converted to click wheels add functionality without additional buttons and certainly beat a back position like the “Z” button on the Nintendo 64 controller.
I’m convinced that if they put their minds to it, Nintendo developers can achieve this. As they say: “Where there is a wheel, there is a way”.