It’s my favorite week of the month, when Nintendo Switch 2 rumors start circulating again. To be honest, I’m almost going to be sad when they finally do announce this thing and put all the speculation to rest. It’ll be for the best though, considering this week&rsqu♊o;s rumor is a thing we all already kn🗹ow: the upcoming successor to the Switch is said to be an iterative design on the Switch, rather than a total reimagining of the console.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Switch is getting close to surpassing the DS as the best selling Nintendo console of all time, and Nintendo would be foolish to throw it out and start from scratch. The design is sufficiently meeting people’s needs as a hybrid portable console. Improvements need to be made on the next version, but I fully expect it to essentially be the♛ same console, just beefed up and꧂ ripe with quality of life improvements.
That means better hardware to run more graphically-dem♏anding games. It would be nice to play Tears of the Kingdom or Pokemon Scarlet & Violet at (at least) a steady 30fps, and maybe some get better parity when it comes to multi-console releases like Mortal Kombat 1. It’d also be nice to h🐭ave some controllers that don’t drift, and if they wanted to make the new Joy-Cons a touch bigger for my large man hands, I wouldn’t complain about that either.
🦋Dave The Diver Made Me Finally Fall In Love With My Switch
I never used my Sw🥂itch at all. Then I got acquainted with Dave the Diver
It’s Nintendo, so of course it's going to cram in bells and whistles that no one wants. I fully expect the next Switch to have a camera on the front. It will be used for exactly two games: a mini-game bundle that will cost full price but should have been a pack-in, and a spin-off Monster Hunter that will let you use a selfie in the character creator. Maybe it will have a screen that slides up two inches to reveal a smaller display underneath, or GPS attachment that works with some kind of Captain Toad geocaching game. I don’t know what kind of new features the Super Switch will have, but I know there’s only one thing it needs: a functional eShop.
I only visit the eShop when I get a gi𝓰ft card for Christmas and birthdays, so I intentionally limit my exposure to it. Every time I open the store I hope things will have improved, but it’s always the same. Thanꦜks to a poor layout, missing search features, and an endless barrage of shovelware, discoverability on the eShop is basically non-existent. Unless you’re looking for a first-party Nintendo game or you know exactly what you want to play, you have little hope of finding anything of value in that god forsaken wasteland of a marketplace.
A little curation 𓃲would go a long way on the eShop, but just giving us more filters an🍒d search options would be good enough
There's a profound lack of curation in the Nintendo eShop, which is blatantly apparent when you look at the Recent Releases menu. Instead of being a place to discover newly released games, it's an endless list of junk you wouldn't even download for free on your phone. I swear, every time I open the eShop there's a new alarm clock app and a game with a title suspiciously close to Call of Duty at the top of the Recent Releases page (today it's Warzone Chronicles). Who is this serving? Surely Nintendo doesn't want its customers to be faced with so much low quality junk on its platform, but that's exactly what's happening.
The only useful page on the eShop is the Featured tab, but it still needs a lot of attention. It shows a mix of first-party games, sales, new releases, pre-orders, games with recent updates, and a smattering of full-price, semi-recent games that don't fit into any of those categories. If each of those things had their own curated tab the eShop would be a lot more useful, but putting everything on one never-ending menu just causes fatigue.
Nintendo is often criticized for falling behind the industry when it comes to things like graphics and online services, but it's clear that staying out of the technological arms race has given Nintendo a leg up in many ways. Curating the eShop isn’t about rising to an industry standard though - lord knows Steam has its own curation issues - it’s about providing the best experience possible to its customers. Nintendo makes great games, but it also makes shopping for them miserable. If there’s one thing the Switch 2 can improve, it’s the useability of its eShop.
