Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’ve been chewing on. Today, Francisco considers a small addition to the Joy-Con that could help make the upcoming “Switch successor” stand out…
Nintendo can’t resist an enticing hardware innovation. Think 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 efforts, one hardware feature has eluded Nintendo for decades.
This powerful tool can travel miles in an instant 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 it in 2015. Your finger might be within reach of one right now. What long-neglected wonder am I referring to? The scroll wheel of a computer mouse.
As today’s creative sandboxes struggle with inventory management and menu crafting, straining our existing UI inputs to their limits, this tool, first popularized in 1996 in Microsoft’s IntelliMouse, would be well positioned to made its belated debut on ‘Switch 2’.
Time to spin the wheel
My first argument is pure convenience. We’ve gotten used to the familiar compromises that multiplatform games use to compensate for the absence of a scroll wheel. Directional or radial options can switch between weapons and powers in the 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 mind-blowing capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom runs into all sorts of limitations that existing controllers simply aren’t designed for.
Once was enough. Now that menu crafting and packed inventories have permeated 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 boredom – like Persona does with such remarkable panache – but as we get more bogged down in menus, easing the low-level swiping that underlies those endless grids and lists becomes a necessity.
We saw at the last Direct how even the upcoming top-down version The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom also adopts 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 – scrolling through the thing in search of the right Chuchu Jelly made up an inconvenient chunk of my 80-hour playtime. This problem has been going on long enough. Especially when it’s so easily enhanced with the precision of the scroll wheel.
By comparison, holding down an analog stick feels like spinning a roulette wheel; random and with minimal speed control. Overshoot and you have to flip the stick back 180 degrees to go back. Pushing the directional buttons is an even more unpleasant option, more tension to hold, more effort to enter precise sequences just to select the right Minecraft item.
A designer’s 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 appeared in a wondrous 3D Hyrule in Ocarina of Time and Mario stepped into a magical Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario 64, we continued to navigate 3D spaces with 2D inputs. Up or down. Left or right. As many different angles between them. Essentially, it’s no different than controlling a UFO hunter with a push of a button to interact with a third plane of motion.
We often manage, but with creative modes that require the ability to control a player character and any number of in-game objects, the precision we need to manipulate 3D objects is not yet there. 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 mind-blowing capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom runs into all sorts of limitations that existing controllers simply aren’t designed for. Ultrahand had me haphazardly spinning wooden planks like a novice nunchaku fighter, a destructive hazard to myself and anyone within a 20m radius, doomed to create piles of useless debris rather than engineering achievements for the ages.
Add a scroll wheel to the mix and watch those problems melt away, like seeing 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 flip objects with the precision that even Zonai adhesive gloop and Nintendo’s polished physics detection system couldn’t achieve.
It’s not just Link who wins. With a huge number of Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox choosing mobile and PC over consoles, solving this problem makes Nintendo make the Switch 2 the destination for an untapped market of creative gamers.
(Game) meeting with fate
The convenience and design tricks are great, but are they enough to justify such a bold new feature? What else can the scroll wheel do?
Some obvious examples come to mind: In last year’s diving/restaurant simulation Dave the Diver, it’s easy to imagine using the wheel to angle Dave’s harpoon underwater, or precisely angle the spout when serving green tea to Dave’s sushi customers . Elsewhere, it can be used to carefully calibrate the tension on Link’s bowstring before firing a devastating bomb arrow.
For more ideas, just take a look at Panic’s Playdate, the little yellow side-cranked handheld that quickly painted a vibrant development scene eager to explore its possibilities.
A crank isn’t a wheel, but they do work on the same rotating axis, and it demonstrates how a small hardware tweak can make the Switch 2 stake its claim as the home of unique mechanical experiences that you simply can’t find anywhere else (at least until Steam Deck v3 tried to intervene).
Early releases of Playdate give a glimpse of these new ideas: A Balanced Brew casts players as a unicycle barista tasked with delivering coffee orders while dangerously spinning his unicycle back and forth. And for Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi opts for a fourth dimension rather than a third: his game has you play a winding robot racing toward a hot date, the crank taking you back and forth in time, realigning timeline to avoid the obstacles between Crankin and his true love Krankett.
More recently, Return of the Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope has been drawn to exploit these hardware capabilities and recently launched Mars After Midnight, a Playdate exclusive and typically complex title that uses a variety of clever crank controls.
The Switch’s successor deserves equally unique titles from developers of this caliber excited to explore these new possibilities. Plus, we know for sure how Nintendo’s stable of world-class designers will rave after the wonders they’ve done with motion and touch controls – I’m especially keen to see what WarioWare can cook up.
There are valid concerns. With Joy-Con drift’s poor track record, adding yet another possibility of mechanical failure to its successor might seem risky. Finding the right ergonomic placement can also be more of a challenge. Personally, I agree with Sakurai: the shoulder buttons turned into clickable wheels add functionality without additional buttons, and certainly beat a back position like the “Z” button on the Nintendo 64 controller.
I’m sure if they put their minds to it, the Nintendo developers could make it happen. As the saying goes, “Where there’s a wheel, there’s a road”.
