[frik]

The Nintendo Switch seems like a nice tablet form factor game console.

I am a bit underwhelmed by their decision to compromise the usability of the right Joycon - moving the analog stick below the digital buttons is certainly bad for US/European bigger hands, bad for ergonomic reasons, an unreasonable trade off.

I am underwhelmed by their decision to add no additional fan to the Dock. It's just s piece of very cheap locking plastic that might scratches your screen. It could have cooled the Switch and get out more performance out of the GPU (now they have to underclock it).

I am a bit underwhelmed by the Joycon grip, that is not very ergonomic for larger hand, and is just a piece of cheap plastic. The Pro controller looks good, but it costs extra $ 70 ($ 20 mote than PS4/X1).

I am a bit underwhelmed that the Joycons have no analog trigger buttons. Already with Wii U the analog triggers were greatly missed in e.g. Lego City Undercover, the car acceleration was all or nothing which pales compared to GTA gameplay on PS4/X1/PC.

I am a bit underwhelmed about the tear down, while good executed it lacked the final tear down and analytics of the core components like the "haptics engine" and the SoC board incl ARM chips.

I am looking forward to a revised model at the end of 2017 that fixes things. Maybe even a XL or XS version would be great - like the New 3DS XL which was a greatly improved and better for larger hands. The ergonomics of the Wii U gamepad better than the Switch too, maybe they can adopt ideas in a revised version.

[Pxtl]

Maybe im just old, but analog trigger buttons seem underused-enough that they could be sacrificed for cost. It seems to be basically only serious racing games that really celebrate them, since casual "kart" games have you flooring it all the time and non-racing games don't use them at all.

The disappointment for me is the high cost of the controllers even after sacrificing something like this.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah, I'm a big Nintendo fan but so far I'm meh so far.

I am not clear why they are having performance issues but the NVIDIA Shield I have, based around the same or even earlier version chipset, is capable of outputing 4k games to my TV at quite excellent frame rates.

The touch screen should always be available in both modes, otherwise not useful to developers.

A second screen experience would have been nice so they could unify DS and Switch developer experiences.

They should have by default made people's Wii U virtual console purchases transfer to the Switch, as a token of good will and to encourage initial purchases of the console before other games are out.

There's no compelling reason to buy it for the new Zelda game as the Wii U version is just as good as the Switch version (so that's what I bought).

Unfortunately unless this product drops a bunch in price and takes over their DS niche, I am not sure it's going to do that well.

[vlunkr]

Using a single screen unifies them with every other developer experience though. Currently if you're porting to the 3ds you have to think of some use for the second screen and make you code support it. It seems like this time Nintendo is trying to get a larger dev audience, by supporting Unity, Unreal, etc. so you can send your game to the switch just as easily as every other platform.

EDIT: I also agree that they should let you transfer purchases. They seem intent on making everyone buy Super Mario Bros over and over. Tjey might lose some profit there, but it would buy them so much in their customer relationships.

[slantyyz]

>> I am not clear why they are having performance issues but the NVIDIA Shield I have, based around the same or even earlier version chipset, is capable of outputing 4k games to my TV at quite excellent frame rates.

Could it have anything to do with Zelda's engine?

When Street Fighter V moved to the Unreal Engine, it used way more resources than its predecessor even though it didn't really look that much better.

I went from being able to play Street Fighter IV in 4K/60fps at max settings to 1080p/60fps at slightly less than max settings for Street Fighter V on my laptop with a GeForce 860M.

While I don't have hard facts, I suspect the engine change might have had a lot to do with the lower performance.

[bicubic]

> It could have cooled the Switch and get out more performance out of the GPU (now they have to underclock it).

It wouldn't really need this extra performance.

When docked, the Switch goes from 720 to 1080p. This is 2.25 times more pixels. When docked, clock rate goes from 302 to 768 Mhz. This is 2.5 times more ops. This design means that developers can write the game optimized for 1080 and 720 will perform more or less the same without any modifications.

Increasing the power envelope for docked mode would only work if developers had to put the effort of selectively toggling some effects in portable mode and actually profiling the game for both 720 and 1080 separately. That's a lot of extra development costs for what I can only imagine to be a modest perf gain with better cooling and clocking higher.

[pikzen]

The memory bandwidth only increases by ~20% by docking it. Which is why Breath of the Wild actually performs worse when docked.