I don't really care about massive upgrades to a Switch 2, but here's what I want from it
If you follow me on Firefish, you've probably seen me talk about Nintendo quite a lot. I've grown up with Nintendo products, I didn't really grow up with any other companies products (I've never used an Xbox, and my PlayStation 4 is sorta gathering dust).
Lately, there's been a lot of rumours about a successor to the Nintendo Switch releasing sometime after April 2024 (Nintendo does not have any plans to launch a new console in the current fiscal year). I want to make this article today to express what I'd like to see from this new console.
First of all, the Switch 2 needs to have a physical game slot, and it needs to be backwards compatible with the original Switch. If the console was digital only, I wouldn't be very likely to buy it in all honesty. I've seen a few examples where I can't trust Nintendo to run a digital storefront for longer than 12 years, and I can't trust Nintendo to allow me to redownload stuff from that digital storefront, even after it closes for forever. Feel free to take a look at the months long Wii Shop Channel and DSi Shop outage in 2022 (https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/07/rejoice-the-wii-shop-channel-and-dsi-shop-are-finally-back-up). Backwards compatibility is crucial for me, it means I don't have to find the original Switch if I want to play Breath of the Wild or something (although I don't actually own BotW lol). I don't see any need for Nintendo to have a different cartridge format for the Switch 2, since I feel like Nintendo should be able to fit way more space into a cartridge than Sony and Microsoft is doing with discs right now, I would hope that you could at least have 256GB cartridges anyways (current Switch goes up to 32GB cartridges, although the only first party game that uses them so far is Tears of the Kingdom since it's a little under 16GB) considering you can get tiny SSDs for stuff like the Steam Deck which go up to 2TB. I'd expect it would be costly using big cartridges though and I assume physical copies of stuff will skyrocket if companies use big cartridges.
Let's talk about the display on the Switch 2. I will be completely honest but I really don't care about the Switch 2 being potentially 2160p. Considering most TVs do a good upscaling job from 1080p, I just don't see the point of a native 4K Switch. It would be nice if the handheld screen was 1080p though. I know there's quite a lot of rumours about the screen being LCD, but I feel like it's a complete missed opportunity not making it OLED. When the Switch is docked, I feel like the handheld screen could be used in some sort of way since it isn't used at all when docked. You could have cool animations when changing cartridges, or you could have alarms display on the handheld screen when they go off. It's really a missed opportunity that Nintendo didn't do anything with the regular Switch.
For storage on the Switch 2, it would be nice if Nintendo would allow people to choose how much storage they want when buying it. For example, with the Steam Deck, you can choose 64, 256 or 512GB if I'm not wrong. It would be nice if Nintendo had options for like 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB instead of being stuck with either 32GB or 64GB.
For battery life, I feel like Nintendo needs to at least make sure that the Switch 2 has at least 3.5hrs of battery life. I don't know whether it's just me, but the Switch seems to run out of battery faster than any other Nintendo console (I think even the Wii U GamePad lasts longer lol). I'm hoping that we do get at least 3x the performance of the original Switch with having this amount of battery life.
Finally, I just want to talk about a bit about the OS that the Switch 2 will run on. If I'm being honest, I'm not a huge fan of the OS on the Switch right now. Apps like the eShop and the Nintendo Switch Online app can be slow and unresponsive, which is a stark contrast to the Wii U, where apps like those feel more responsive despite having longer load times. It would be fun if the Switch 2’s OS had more character, like practically every other Nintendo console. The Switch is lifeless with no home menu and it's very basic. I'd love to see Nintendo bundle in a few more apps with the Switch 2’s OS, like an actual music player app. The 3DS and DSi had one, albeit it was very basic and very slow (at least on 3DS, I never really spent any time with the DSi app since I never had an SD card in my DSi XL). You would be able to add stuff to the Switch’s music library by plugging it in to a computer, or games could potentially add some stuff to the library (I'd love seeing Tears of the Kingdom or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe showing up in a music library).
Anyways, I'm going to stop with my unreasonable desires for a Switch 2 and beg everyone reading this to subscribe to the blog and share it around. Thanks!