Finally!
It’s been a long wait, but Nintendo has finally shown the Nintendo Switch 2. Its existence was already officially confirmed months ago as “the successor to the Nintendo Switch” with a promise of more news before the end of the fiscal year, and unofficially it’s been known of since 2022 when the illegal Nvidia hack exposed critical details about the system. These included the “NVN2” Application Programming Interface (API) and the in-development system-on-chip (SoC), the T239 (codenamed “Drake” for famed comic book character Tim Drake), along with details about its Nvidia Ampere GPU architecture and the 12 Streaming Multiprocessors contained within. And the trailer was… not bad! Informative, at the very least, showing the original Switch first so its individual parts could switch (heh) to the Switch 2 equivalents. But I did feel it was rather underwhelming compared to the original Switch reveal trailer, for a few reasons – even putting aside the rampant hardware leaks of the last couple of months that spoiled a few surprises.
October 21, 2016
Looking back on this nearly decade-old reveal, it’s hard to argue it doesn’t do at least a somewhat better job. It introduces the hybrid concept well, with staged shots of people actually using it in the ways Nintendo intended – some realistic, others that come across as a little silly nowadays, but all at least communicating feelings of variety, joy and social gaming.
It’s all about showing off how the Switch can fit into people’s lives, at home and outside (the former unfortunately being a little more common nowadays), and through that it showed us a bit more than this new Switch 2 “First Look”. Most obviously filmed footage as opposed to a purely CG hardware showcase, but also a wide variety of first-party and third-party games (compared to the 5 seconds of new Mario Kart footage) and the Pro Controller (we still do not know what the Switch 2’s iteration of the Pro Controller will look like, though I’m hoping for it to be a pair of Pro Joy-Con that combine together).
Now We’re Playing With Power
A lot of people might look at this trailer and see it as a sign that the Switch 2 will be “boring” – a purely iterative console, nothing more than a more powerful Switch. It’s certainly worth pointing out that the 2016 trailer had the benefit of introducing a whole new “hybrid console” paradigm, as opposed to “the thing you already bought but better”. However, I wouldn’t be concerned – partly because a more powerful Switch is itself exciting after years of Switch games that can’t hold their framerate targets. Rumoured clock speeds and RAM bandwidth point to a system that’s above and beyond a PS4 even in the handheld mode, meaning not just better performance, but also an incoming flood of third-party games that have been unavailable in portable form outside of Steam Deck/Windows handheld owners. Elden Ring, Star Wars Jedi, Alan Wake 2, multiple new and remade Resident Evil titles… these are the kinds of games I hoped to see in the first Switch 2 trailer, trying to make a new “Skyrim moment” – but in the end, their absence from the trailer doesn’t mean much as long as they eventually make it.
Mouse-Con-Firmation
Another thing that wasn’t fully confirmed by the trailer but rather hinted at, is a very interesting take on mouse support. Consoles have offered the ability to plug in third-party keyboards and mice for a while now, though a general lack of interest has naturally resulted in a lack of support, lessening interest further – a vicious cycle that the games industry is no stranger to. But Nintendo seems to be fixing this problem by actually building mouse functionality into their Joy-Con. Discussion of “Mouse-Con” has been around for a while, since some leaked photos of in-production Joy-Cons ended up online, but now we can see the big hint in Nintendo’s own trailer – each controller has a small sensor of the same kind you see on mice. There were still questions about whether this would be for actual mouse functionality or some other feature, but the trailer shows the controllers sliding around on their sides in exactly the way you’d expect when they’re used as mice – the wrist straps trailing behind them like tails make it even more obvious. This will be a fantastic additional control scheme for the already-multifunctional Joy-Con-enhancing both shooter games like Doom Eternal and Splatoon, as well as strategy games like Civilisation.
DLSS and Ray Reconstruction
Nvidia’s advances in machine learning-based upscaling and acceleration of ray-tracing are well known to a great many gamers these days, especially PC gamers. One of the coolest things about the Switch 2 is that, not only will it see a substantial increase in raw graphics power, it’s going to be the first “RTX console”, using Deep Learning Super Sampling and (hopefully) Ray Reconstruction to build on that basic level of power and stretch it further than you’d expect from a hybrid console. DLSS is even useful at very low internal resolutions – this Doom Eternal recording by Youtube user Enkidu shows how even 360p, which offers less pixels than most PS2 games, can be upscaled to 1080p and look shockingly decent even on a large screen. Now imagine it applied to the roughly 8-inch screen of the Switch 2. Combine that with the same kind of power the PS4 was using to render games at a native 1080p, and you start to realise the possibilities.
Final Thoughts
Look, the trailer could’ve been better. I think it would’ve been smart to have someone playing Doom Eternal in Handheld Mode only to sit at a public table, engage tabletop mode and start precisely aiming with Mouse-Con, or to see some surprisingly heavy RT effects, or just to see something huge like Elden Ring that would spread like wildfire. Frankly, the roughly ten-week wait for Switch 2 Direct makes the whole thing feel even more bare-bones. But these games and features are coming, and it’s my belief that the Switch 2 is going to be a hell of an enjoyable system once it’s in our hands – and I think that’s going to be sooner than some people think. The fact that the global Switch 2 Experience hands-on events end in early June has prompted a few people to assume the release must be months down the road, but history suggests otherwise. The Switch also had hands-on events in 2017, and the final one ended on March 5 – 2 days after the official release. Switch 2 for June? I certainly hope so.
