My Switch 2 Direct Predictions
So Close
A few days away, at least at time of writing.
It’s been a hell of a long wait. The Switch 2 has been expected for years now, partially because of a major Nvidia hack in 2022 that exposed the nature of some of the hardware within (and convinced many people, including myself, that it was much closer to launch than it actually was), but also because of the simple fact that it’s been a long damn time since the original Switch launched. As I write these words it’s been a little over 8 years, and we haven’t really seen proper Switch 2 game footage yet – 6-7 years is the usual amount of time with a few exceptions, but the massive success of the Switch (150 million-plus sales and counting) has allowed Nintendo to, for better or worse, put off the launch of a successor for as long as it likes We’ve gotten a slow drip of official info – first the confirmation of the Switch successor’s existence last year, then the proper first-look reveal in January. But now we’re just a few days away from the first proper Switch 2-focused Nintendo Direct. So I thought I’d lay out my expectations on what we’re going to see – some of it educated guesses, some wild speculation, some just utter cope.
The Technical Details
Don’t expect to see anything like this at the Direct, as important as it may be to the Switch 2 under the hood.
Let’s get this out of the way first – I don’t really expect Nintendo to go in-depth on technical minutiae at this Direct. I don’t expect to see things like clock speeds, GPU architecture or DLSS discussed, as Nintendo always loves to keep that kind of thing in the background, with a focus more on the play experience their customers can expect. Right now, the most I’d expect would be some very basic multiplication comparisons to the preceding Switch – “double the memory”, “9x the power”, straightforward wording that will sell the device to the more casual types viewing the video. The only way I can see them getting more technical here is if their marketing collaboration with Nvidia has gotten closer to the point that they actually include appearances from Nvidia’s own people in their Directs, there to speak on hardware and software features specific to their company. If that’s not the case, I assume they’ll let the hardware and games speak for themselves.
Hardware Features
Ah, I C.
One hardware feature I’m sure we’ll see discussed is the nature of the C button – this is an extra button on the Switch 2’s right Joy-Con that has been openly discussed in the leak community for months now, but was obscured in the Switch 2 reveal video. However, the new Nintendo Today mobile news app has included the Switch 2 render image with the C button fully revealed. Its functionality, however, remains a mystery. There’s been a variety of theories and reported leaks. Is it a Cast button, to allow for wireless connection to the dock? Probably not, as shipping data appears to show no wireless semiconductor chip in the dock. Is it a Connect button allowing you to connect to a Switch 1 in order to use it as a controller? This is a claimed leak from the past few days, but I struggle to believe it, since it seems like something you’d do in the menu for the games that required it. Maybe it’s a dedicated shortcut for social features, a Community button? Or even some kind of AI assistant button, short for the service’s name? I honestly can’t nail down a preferred theory at this point, but the willingness to expose the button on the Nintendo Today app tells me it’ll absolutely be there.
The first controller feature that they’ll absolutely discuss is the (hopefully it’s actually called this) Mouse-Con functionality, something that was basically guaranteed with the controllers racing around in the First-Look video and outright confirmed when some Nintendo patents became public that closely detailed the mouse sensor functionality. Published on the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s website, they provide most of what you’d need to understand how it all works, but there’s nothing like seeing it demonstrated on video, being used to play actual games, so the big Mouse-Con blowout is one of the things I’m 99% certain will be there.
Another thing I expect to see is a proper look at the new Switch 2 Pro Controller. This is, if anything, overdue at this point, as the original Switch Pro Controller was shown off in the October 2016 Switch reveal, so if Nintendo was following the same playbook, we’d have seen it already. This gets me thinking that they might be doing something a little more special this time, so here’s one of those cope moments – I’m hoping the “Pro Controller” will be revealed as a pair of “Joy-Con Pros” instead. Essentially, a pair of larger Joy-Con with proper grip design and larger batteries that can be locked together to form a single Pro Controller, but also freely used separately like any Joy-Con, similar to many of the third-party options currently available from companies like Hori with their Split Pad Pro. This would make for a really fun and useful advancement with real purpose behind it, and would make the accessory marketable even to handheld-only Switch 2 users – apparently a pretty significant chunk of the base. Am I sure about this? Hell no. But I have hope.
First-Party Games
The most obvious choice – it’s the only one I have a screenshot of!
This is one of the biggest questions – just what kinds of games from their own studios are Nintendo going to show off here (apart from the new Mario Kart, the only Switch 2 game already shown off)? Or even external studios, but exclusive and published by Nintendo? Well, I think we know the one we all expect, or at least I do. “3D Mario”, a term specifying the Mario sub-series that began with Super Mario 64 and continued up to Odyssey (as opposed to 2D Mario), is possibly Nintendo’s most important franchise. Now, 2D Mario only recently got an installment in Super Mario Bros Wonder, so that’s unlikely to show up until well into Switch 2’s life. 3D Mario, on the other hand, got its last full game in 2017, and so is pretty much expected to get something here – otherwise it would have already arrived. But what will it be like? Well, note what I just said – Odyssey was the last full 3D Mario game. After that came Bowser’s Fury, a smaller extra game that came along with the Switch version of Super Mario 3D World – notable for pushing the Switch harder than these games often do, set in an open world and enforcing a 30fps framerate in handheld mode. A lot of people interpreted this as a sign of Nintendo testing concepts for a future Mario game on more powerful hardware, and I agree – while I don’t expect the game to literally be “Bowser’s Fury 2”, I do expect the DNA of that game to show up.
Next on the lineup is The Legend of Zelda – I personally don’t see this showing up quite yet, since the series has had a couple of relatively recent entries in the form of Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom. If there is a Zelda game at launch, I would expect it to be some kind of remake – maybe one of the Oracle games being handled by Grezzo? I’ve even seen some speculating on a from-the-ground-up Ocarina of Time remake, which would be a gangbusters announcement for a lot of people. But a legit follow-up to Tears of the Kingdom? I did see a suggestion of it possibly being in development by a different team since before the TotK delay, but no, I’m betting against this one. Kirby is in a bit of a similar situation to Zelda, with Kirby and the Forgotten Land having come out in 2022, though that’s long enough that I could see an early announcement of a sequel.
Super Smash Brothers? I honestly wonder what a new Smash game would even look like. Any attempt to top Smash Ultimate feels like a pipe dream, to the point that I’d really expect an enhanced Smash Ultimate before a true sequel – unless they decided to take the game crossover concept in a totally different direction, but then it wouldn’t be “Smash”, would it? I expect the same from Pokémon – that already has upcoming announced games for Switch, so a Switch 2 exclusive ain’t in the cards yet. Splatoon 4, though, feels especially likely, for reasons I’ll get into later.
Third-Party Games
What better showcase of mouse aiming than the series that started it all?
It’s funny – to quite a few people, the idea of third-party games showing up at the Switch 2 Direct in large numbers, or even at all, is unlikely, and I kind of get the logic. The first big blowout for their new console… I could understand Nintendo wanting the focus to all be on themselves, and the idea of the Direct acting more as a “starting gun” for third parties to start confirming their games for Switch 2 on their own terms, whether in other showcases or on their own social media. But I do disagree, for a couple of reasons. One is that third-party releases are more important to a successful console now than ever before, with the constant stream of money Nintendo receives from sales of games they had no hand in developing constantly growing. But the other is simply that the Switch 2 first-look trailer was already thought by some to be a starting gun for third parties, a signal for them to start confirming their games for the system, and yet that hasn’t really happened. We haven’t seen a pile of legacy game announcements, nor have we seen new games get announced for Switch 2 alongside other platforms. To me, that points to the Direct absolutely having at least some third parties show up.
So who will be there? I think it’s going to be largely big, recent games. Games you couldn’t get on Switch 2. Elden Ring, GTA, etc. Big, crowd-pleasing AAA games, alongside maybe a few indies – the consistent lack of news on Hollow Knight Silksong, despite it being rated in South Korea last April, has me wondering if it’s being held for Switch 2. I also expect to see some third parties included in the Mouse-Con portion – when you’re demonstrating mouse functionality, you really need to show off the aiming in some shooters. This is where I expect to see Splatoon 4 show up, but this would also be a good time for an id crossover with Doom: The Dark Ages, or MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Capcom’s Resident Evil titles over the past few years are also good candidates, having previously been restricted to Cloud Editions on Switch, if they arrived at all.
Upgraded Games and Backwards Compatibility
This footage from YouTuber NoBigDeal La uses enhanced emulation, demonstrating what Tears of the Kingdom could look like with a Switch 2 Edition release.
Backwards Compatibility with Switch titles was one of the main Switch 2 features confirmed even before the first-look trailer, but there are still more details yet to come. Gone are the days when a new console simply playing the games of its predecessor was considered sufficient – now, since the advent of upgraded mid-gen consoles and successors with even greater increases in power, it’s become expected for new machines to leverage their extra power on old games automatically. Resolution and framerate caps are set in stone for the most part, but with many Switch games using dynamic resolution and framerate, there’s a lot of potential for improvement here – especially on the rougher games like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, both of which see brutal drops to both image quality and framerate simultaneously. I’m certain this is going to be a feature of the Switch 2 – this ability to use the extra GPU power automatically is apparently just part of how backwards compatibility works now, rather than something specific to any one company – but I’m less sure of another feature that I want, which is the possibility of choosing to run a Switch game in docked mode on the Switch 2 while handheld, and then upgrading that. With the Switch 2 looking to have a 1080p screen, this would be an excellent feature that lets the vastly stronger GPU flex its muscles even further.
But then we get to the next question – if Nintendo lets older games use Switch 2’s power without any intervention on their part, what can we expect in terms of actual, intentional updates? Well, we might have already been half-spoiled on this one. The official information page for Nintendo’s new Virtual Game Cards system contains a disclaimer: “Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive games and Nintendo Switch 2 Edition games can only be loaded on a Nintendo Switch 2 system.” “Switch 2 Edition games”? Oh my, first we’ve heard of that. So now we know the official term for what I can only assume will be actual, dedicated versions of Switch games ported to Switch 2, complete with DLSS and even ray tracing features. But if you consider it further, this doesn’t explicitly confirm all sorts of old games getting lavishly-produced Switch 2 ports. It could just refer to cross-gen games coming to both consoles from launch onwards – for example, I fully predict that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, with its currently vague 2025 release date, will be confirmed to be dropping on Switch 2’s launch day with both Switch and Switch 2 Editions. But honestly, I do think we’re going to get more legacy games on Switch 2 directly with proper Switch 2 Editions – Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom at the absolute minimum, and probably other evergreens like Super Mario Odyssey and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, hopefully free for current owners or at most with Sony-style $15 upgrades. The titles I’m less sure of would be stuff like the Bayonetta or Xenoblade Chronicles series – less high-profile, but which could really use the technical boost. Switch 2 Editions will, I think, be a major section of this Direct.
Price and Launch Date
I’m really looking forward to using the magnet system for the first time.
My predictions here are pretty simple – US$399 (probably AU$ 650 locally) for price, June for launch. A new article from Insider Gaming directly claims the June launch alongside an April 9 pre-order date, but honestly, June has been the most likely month since the April 2 Direct date was announced. A late March date was theoretically possible – the Switch released a mere 50 days after its January presentation – but June gives them a little more leeway. It was never going to stretch to the holidays, not with mass production having been going on since late 2024. The April 9 pre-order claim is interesting, since I was expecting pre-orders to go up right as the Direct ended (or maybe a few hours after), so this will be interesting to see.
Final Thoughts
Finally, having a halfway decent kickstand will make Tabletop Mode so much more appealing.
I’m thoroughly hyped for this show – it’s easy to think of it as the culmination of a years-long wait, but in truth it’s only the beginning of something new and fantastic. The Switch’s success is well-deserved, as the hybrid concept has made for a wonderful new gaming experience for a lot of people, but it’s hard not to look at the device and see something that felt quite dated only a few years in. The Switch needed to be rushed out after the failure of the Wii U, and as such was not as capable as a 2018 or 2019 version could have potentially been. While I do have some questions about the decisions with the Switch 2 hardware, it’s coming across as a much more “complete” device, with Nvidia’s feature advantages over AMD helping it punch above its weight in areas like upscaling and ray tracing. I’m truly excited to see how this translates to actual games running on the thing, and I hope at least some of my predictions come true. Bring it on, Ninty.
