Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’re pondering. Today, Francisco ponders a small Joy-Con addition that could help make the upcoming “Switch successor” stand out from the crowd…
Nintendo can’t resist a tantalizing hardware innovation. Think of the Game & Watch’s D-pad, the SNES’s sophisticated shoulder buttons, or the Wii’s revolutionary motion controls. And we haven’t even scratched the surface of its long tradition of groundbreaking video game controllers. Despite its best efforts, one hardware feature has eluded Nintendo for decades.
This powerful tool can travel miles in the blink of an eye, or take you from a satellite view to the smallest ant in an instant. Sakurai proposed it for the GameCube. Nintendo filed a patent for it in 2015. Your finger could be within reach of one right now. What long-overlooked wonder am I referring to? The computer mouse scroll wheel.
With today’s creative sandboxes putting a lot of effort into inventory management and menu building, and pushing our existing user interface input capabilities to their limits, this tool, first widely seen on Microsoft’s IntelliMouse in 1996, would have a good chance of making its long-overdue 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 make to compensate for the lack 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 a long list, or they can toggle the camera zoom in Civilization VI.
Despite all of its overwhelming capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom encounters limitations that existing controllers simply aren’t designed for.
That used to be enough. Now, crafting menus and jam-packed inventories have infiltrated every genre you can imagine. It often feels like you spend as much time in glorified spreadsheets as you do in the game world. Of course, you can hide the boredom – like persona does so with such remarkable panache – but as we become more and more bogged down in menus, it is necessary to reduce the underlying burden that underlies these endless grids and lists.
We saw at the last Direct that even the upcoming top-down game The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is adopting sandbox elements; the one part of the game I’m not looking forward to is the reuse of Tears of the Kingdom’s endless “quick” menu. Scrolling through that thing looking for the right Chuchu Jelly makes up an embarrassing portion of my 80 hours of playtime. This problem has been around long enough. Especially when it can be so easily improved with the precision of a scroll wheel.
In comparison, holding down an analog stick feels like spinning a roulette wheel; random and with minimal speed control. If you overshoot the target, you have to turn the stick back 180 degrees to get back. Pressing directional buttons is an even less palatable option, holding down requires more effort, and it’s more tedious to enter precise sequences just to select the right Minecraft object.
A designer 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 into a wondrous 3D Hyrule in Ocarina of Time and Mario entered a magical Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario 64, we continued to move through 3D spaces using 2D inputs. Up or down. Left or right. However many different angles there are in between. Essentially, it’s no different than operating a UFO catcher, where you interact with a third plane of movement with the press of a button.
We can often get by with this, but creative modes that require controlling a player character and any number of in-game objects don’t yet have the precision we need for 3D object manipulation. And there’s a reason the mouse wheel is an important tool for graphic and level designers: it adds a whole new dimension.
For all its overwhelming capabilities, Tears of the Kingdom pushes all sorts of limits that existing controllers simply aren’t designed for. Using Ultrahand, I was left to haphazardly whirl wooden planks like a novice nunchuck-fighting player, a destructive threat to myself and everyone within 20 meters, doomed to leave piles of useless rubble in my wake, and not an engineering feat that will last forever.
Add a scroll wheel and watch those problems disappear, like a sighting of Princess Zelda in the distance of the Gerudo Desert. No need to switch back and forth between floating objects on three axes. Even better, with a naturally rotating input, you can now rotate objects with a precision that even Zonai sticky slime and Nintendo’s sophisticated physics detection system couldn’t quite match.
Not only Link benefits from this. With a large number of Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox By choosing mobile and PC rather than console, Nintendo is able to address an untapped market of creative gamers by solving this problem.
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?
A few obvious examples spring to mind: In last year’s diving/restaurant sim Dave the Diver, it’s easy to imagine using the wheel to aim Dave’s harpoon underwater, or precisely tilt the spout when serving green tea to Dave’s sushi customers. Elsewhere, it could be used to carefully calibrate the tension of Link’s bowstring before firing a devastating bomb arrow.
For more ideas, all you have to do is look at Panic’s Playdate, the little yellow handheld with the crank attached to the side that quickly attracted a lively developer scene eager to explore its possibilities.
A crank isn’t a wheel, but they do spin on the same axis of rotation, showing how a little hardware tweaking could see Switch 2 stake its claim as the home of unique mechanical experiences you won’t find anywhere else (at least until Steam Deck v3 tries to catch on).
Early Playdate releases give a taste of these new ideas: In A Balanced Brew, players take on the role of a unicycle-ridden barista who must deliver 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, not the third: In his game, you play a wind-up robot racing to a hot date, the Crank taking you back and forth in time, readjusting along a timeline to avoid the obstacles that stand between Crankin and his true love, Crankette.
More recently, Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, has decided to take advantage of these hardware possibilities and recently released Mars After Midnight, a Playdate exclusive and typically complicated game that uses various nifty crank controls.
The Switch successor deserves equally unique titles from developers of this caliber who are excited to explore these new possibilities. Plus, we know exactly how Nintendo’s top-notch designers would go crazy after the wonders they’ve accomplished with motion and touch controls – I’m especially excited to see what WarioWare could come up with.
There are legitimate concerns. Given the unfortunate track record of Joy-Con drift, adding another opportunity for mechanical failure to the successor is a risk. Also, finding the right ergonomic placement could be more of a challenge. Personally, I agree with Sakurai: shoulder buttons converted to clickable wheels expand functionality without additional buttons, and are certainly better than a rear location like the Nintendo 64 controller’s “Z” button.
I’m convinced that Nintendo’s developers can do it if they really put in the effort. As the saying goes, “Where there’s a wheel, there’s a way.”