Back when the Nintendo Switch was first launched, it was received by the gaming audience at large quite positively. A few months later, however, issues started arising with players noticing that their Joy-Con analogue sticks would occasionally drift.
According to IGN, the company has continued to stay quiet about the issue potentially popping up again on the Nintendo Switch 2. In a roundtable Q&A, general manager at Nintendo’s Technology Development Division, and senior director at its Technology Development Department, Tetsuya Sasaki, spoke at length about how the Joy-Con 2 controllers saw a major ground-up redesign.
“As you may have witnessed and felt, the new Joy-Con 2 controllers for the Nintendo Switch 2 have been really designed from the ground up, from scratch, and they’ve been designed to have bigger movement and also smoother movement,” Sasaki said. However, he didn’t say anything about stick drifting being a potential issue again.
Switch 2 producer Kouichi Kawamoto also spoke about the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller, emphasising that they have been made much quieter when compared to the previous iteration of the Pro Controller.
“Aside from the color, the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller may look indistinguishable from the previous controller at first glance, but it was also redesigned from scratch,” said Kawamoto during the Q&A. “In particular, the left and right control sticks are quieter and don’t make noise, even when they’re moved quickly to the edge. Also, they glide very smoothly, so we’ve taken to calling them ‘smooth-gliding sticks.’”
Sasaki also spoke about the “smooth-gliding sticks”, talking about how there have been concerted efforts at Nintendo to design what could be considered the “pinnacle of all controllers.” Whether this ambition has played out in the way the company would hope, however, will only be seen once the console is out.
“As they’re calling them ‘smooth-gliding sticks,’ we made efforts to reduce the feeling of bumping when you tilt them,” said Sasaki. “In fact, there’s been a long-running project at Nintendo with the grand ambition of developing the ‘pinnacle of all controllers,’ and we’ve been researching it hard for a long time now.”
While we don’t yet know what kind of technology is being used for the Switch 2’s analogue sticks, a patent application from back in 2023 indicates that we might be seeing a major upgrade in that regard. The patent described a technology that would make use of a “magnetorheological fluid” somehow.
The patent also indicates that the viscosity of this fluid can be changed depending on how the player uses the joystick. This could be technology similar to what we see in third-party controller with Hall Effect joysticks, which make use of magnetic fields to detect the position of the analogue sticks.
The Nintendo Switch 2 will be hitting stores on June 5. The console will be launched alongside quite a few games, including first-party title Mario Kart World. There will also be a console bundle that includes a copy of Mario Kart World, priced at $499.99, while the base console itself will be priced at $449.99.