Comment by ampersandrew@lemmy.world on Nintendo Switch 2 finally officially revealed

A Direct is announced for April 2nd to cover the games.

Are you prepared to have to buy the game again to do that? I don’t know it for sure, but it’s how I expect Nintendo to operate.

They are claiming backwards compatibility, and I assume that means for physical copies as well. If not, eh we’ll see!

There’s a disclaimer that says not every Switch 1 game will work, but I think it will play on the new Switch with the same lousy performance it has now unless you buy the Switch 2 version.

That is how every previous Nintendo back-compat implementation has worked.

GC on Wii
Wii on Wii U
Game Boy on Game Boy Color
Game Boy/Color on Game Boy Advance
Game Boy Advance on (New) Nintendo (3)DS
Nintendo DS on Nintendo DSi
Nintendo DS/i on Nintendo 3DS
Nintendo 3DS on New Nintendo 3DS

In every case, the system drops back to the earlier console’s hardware specifications. There are hybrid cross-gen games on some of the handhelds which offer improvements on the newer hardware, but up to this point, older games have never been updated to get the improvements of newer hardware. That doesn’t necessarily mean the same will hold, but I’d suggest you assume it will and be pleasantly surprised if they buck the trend.

I’m those cases isn’t it because they had separate hardware built in for backwards compat? This is more of a PC style hardware upgrade rather than totally different hardware (compute wise) so it might be different for that reason?

Sort of, though Wii and Wii U are a bit more complicated than that so this somewhat of an oversimplification. The ELI5 answer is that some hardware components are directly upgraded and can run in a compatibility mode, other components are just the original hardware thrown in separately.

New3DS is the most recent and most notable exception. It’s directly upgraded 3DS hardware, but the CPU downclocks to run at 3DS specs on all legacy titles (and there are almost no native New3DS games so this upgrade was pretty pointless). Softmodding can unlock the full clockspeed, and most games do work fine this way but there are a few rare bugs.

I expect Switch 2 will just be the same architecture upgraded, because that’s a lot easier to do now, while the old style of true redundancy would inflate costs too much today. It’s also worth noting that Switch titles already expect variable performance in order to support handheld and docked modes, so I doubt much would break if allowed to overclock. But I could also see Nintendo not even trying to support it if even one bug might exist somewhere.

Just adding on to this, I do think the “up-specced OG hardware” approach something Nintendo has done before. Upgrades like GC to Wii and Game Boy to Game Boy Color are really just boosts to the clock speeds and RAM, they don’t have anything specifically included for BC reasons (unless you’re counting GameCube memory card slots). They really are just iterations on the same hardware. Similar to the New 3DS, on modded consoles you can run GameCube games at Wii clock speeds and they almost all work without issue.

On that subject, the fact that Nintendo says the compatibility won’t be 100% is potentially encouraging. If the Switch 2 was just going to downclock compatible parts to their Switch 1 performance and was otherwise identical, you’d expect all games to work. The reduction in compatibility could be because games are going to be running with Switch 2 clocks across the board, which most games should handle just fine and a small handful may not.

Sure, but the game sets the resolution, not the console. The game might get a performance boost or a more stable frame rate on better hardware, but unless it gets a patch to detect which system it’s running on and adjust the resolution accordingly, most games will still run in 720p.

Another commenter elsewhere mentioned that things like Labo or Ring Fit won’t (likely) work because of the different sized controllers. I would be surprised if other games that don’t use special extra hardware work just fine.

Normally I’d disagree (because games written for a single console don’t do well with hardware upgrades), but since the old console already runs at different speeds when handheld and docked, I’d expect most games to be able to handle faster processors safely. We’ll have to see how that shakes out. If it really does run them better, and it has drift-proof sticks, I’m quite interested. Otherwise, I’ll wait a year or 2 until there’s a good, cheap library of games for it.

Ah so upgrade cost identical to what Sony did? I can see them doing that … The problem with that is that the games already have the ability on the cartridge. Remember the datamine of Paper Mario TTYD remake and the higher resolution data on the cart?

I would not put it past Nintendo to charge you $70 for Tears of the Kingdom again so that you can run it at reasonable resolutions and frame rates this time.

I don’t think they’ll go that far, but the “upgrade” will probably be $15 or $10 extra

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Nintendo Switch 2 finally officially revealed(venturebeat.com)

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