The Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to share their opinions on current topics and random things they’ve been chewing over. Today, Francisco considers a small Joy-Con addition that could set the upcoming ‘Switch successor’ apart…
Nintendo can’t resist a tempting hardware innovation. Think of the D-pad of the Game & Watch, the handy shoulder buttons of the SNES or the revolutionary motion controls of the Wii; and we’ve barely scratched the surface of the long legacy of groundbreaking video game controllers. Despite its best efforts, Nintendo has evaded one hardware feature for decades.
This powerful tool can travel miles in an instant, or take you from a satellite image to the smallest ant in the blink of an eye. Sakurai threw it in front of the GameCube. Nintendo filed a patent for it in 2015. Your finger may be within reach at this time. What long overlooked wonder am I talking about? The scroll wheel of the computer mouse.
While today’s creative sandboxes are cracking down on inventory management and menu creation, pushing our existing UI inputs to the limit, this tool, first seen widely in 1996 on the IntelliMouse from Microsoft, is well placed to make its belated debut on the ‘Switch 2’. ‘.
It’s time to spin the wheel
My first argument is pure convenience. We’ve become accustomed to the familiar compromises that multiplatform games use to compensate for the absence of the scroll wheel. Directional or radial options can switch between weapons and powers in quick select menus. Shoulder buttons turn the pages of your inventory, instead of scrolling through one long list, or they can turn the camera zoom on and off in Civilization VI.
For all its stunning capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom encounters all the limitations that existing controllers simply weren’t designed for.
Once that was enough. Now that creating menus and extensive inventories has infiltrated every genre you can 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 the boredom – like Persona does this with such remarkable panache – but as we become increasingly bogged down in menus, it becomes a necessity to reduce the low resistance underlying these endless grids and lists.
We saw during the last Direct how even upcoming top-down The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom also adopts sandbox elements; The only part of the game I’m unfortunately not looking forward to is how it reuses Tears of the Kingdom’s endless ‘quick’ menu – scrolling through that thing looking for the right Chuchu Jelly is responsible for an embarrassing chunk of my 80 hours of playtime . This issue has gone on long enough. Especially when it can be so easily improved by the precision of a scroll wheel.
By comparison, holding down an analog stick feels like spinning a roulette wheel; randomly and with minimal speed control. If you shoot too far, you have to turn the stick back 180 degrees to go backwards. Poking directional buttons offers an even less savory option, more effort to hold down, more effort to enter precise sequences just to select the right Minecraft item.
A designer’s tool for a maker’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 entered a wondrous 3D Hyrule in Ocarina of Time and Mario entered a magical Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario 64, we were still navigating 3D spaces with 2D input. Up or down. Left or right. However, there are many different angles in between. Essentially it’s no different than operating a UFO catcher, where you interact with a third plane of motion at the touch of a button.
Often we make do with it, but with creative modes that require the ability to control a player character and any number of in-game objects, the precision we need for manipulation of 3D objects is not yet present. And there’s a reason why the mouse wheel is an important tool for graphic designers and level designers: it adds a whole new dimension.
For all its stunning capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom encounters all the limitations that existing controllers simply weren’t designed for. Ultrahand had me haphazardly spinning planks of wood like a novice nunchuck fighter, a destructive danger to myself and everyone within a 20-yard radius, doomed to create piles of useless rubble, no engineering feats for eternity.
Add a scroll wheel to the mix and watch these problems melt away, like a sighting of Princess Zelda in the Gerudo Desert. You don’t need to switch floating objects between three axes. Even better, with a naturally rotating input you can now rotate objects with the precision that even Zonai’s self-adhesive glue loop and Nintendo’s polished physics detection system couldn’t quite achieve.
It’s not just Link who benefits from this. With large numbers of Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox By opting for mobile and PC over consoles, solving this problem gives Nintendo the opportunity to make Switch 2 the destination for an untapped market of creative players.
A (play)date with fate
Convenience and design tricks are great, but are they enough to justify such a bold new feature? What else can a scroll wheel do?
Some 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 tilting the spout when serving of green tea to Dave’s sushi customers. Elsewhere, it could be used to carefully calibrate the tension of Link’s bowstring before launching a devastating bomb arrow.
For more ideas, just take a look at Panic’s Playdate, the yellow little handheld with a rotating, side-mounted crank, which quickly attracted a lively development scene eager to explore its capabilities.
A crank isn’t a wheel, but they operate on the same rotating axis, and it shows how a small tweak to the hardware could allow ‘Switch 2’ to stake its claim as the home of unique mechanical experiences that you simply can’t find anywhere else can find (at least until Steam Deck v3 tries to intervene).
Early Playdate releases give a taste of these new ideas: A Balanced Brew cast players as a unicycle barista, tasked with delivering coffee orders while spinning his unicycle wheel dangerously 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 a wind-up robot that races to a hot date, the crank guides you back and forth in time, pushing yourself re-adapts along a timeline to avoid the obstacles between Crankin and his true love Crankette.
More recently, Return of the Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope was tapped to take advantage of these hardware capabilities and recently launched Mars After Midnight, an exclusive and complicated title for Playdate that uses several devious crank controls.
The Switch successor deserves equally unique titles from developers of this caliber, who are excited to explore these new possibilities. Plus, we’re sure how Nintendo’s stable of world-class designers would revolt after the wonders they worked with motion and touch controls. I’m especially curious about what WarioWare could come up with.
There are legitimate concerns. With Joy-Con drift’s unfortunate track record, adding another chance for mechanical error to its successor may seem like a risk. Finding the right ergonomic placement can also be more challenging. Personally, I agree with Sakurai: shoulder buttons converted to clickable wheels add functionality without extra buttons and certainly beat a rear position like the Nintendo 64 controller’s ‘Z’ button.
I’m confident that if they put their mind to it, Nintendo’s developers can make this happen. As they say, “Where there’s a wheel, there’s a way.”