I love my Nintendo Switch. But I don’t love taking it with me in its much-vaunted portable form. The new Switch Lite won’t fix that—if anything, it will make it worse.
So what’s the problem? I won’t tease you: it’s that games are often too hard to see on the small 6.2-inch screen. Those of you blessed with perfect vision might not notice this, but it’s been a fairly consistent complaint about switch games since the very beginning. And to be fair, this isn’t exactly Nintendo’s fault: it’s more a problem with the game developers (often including Nintendo’s internal studios) not taking the practicalities of the Switch’s form factor into account.
Take a look at this screenshot from Breath of the Wild. It’s pretty standard stuff for an action-RPG: the menu system has to get a lot of information to you in an efficient way. And it’s plenty comfortable on the 55-inch TV in my living room, where almost all of my Switch gaming is done.
Now take a look at the same game menu on the Switch’s tablet screen, barely one-tenth of the size. It’s no bigger than my Galaxy Note phone screen, with one quarter the resolution and a notable drop in clarity on Nintendo’s cheap LCD panel.
Playing Zelda in handheld mode is an exercise in frustration for me. Ditto for Smash Bros, where the fighters are about the size of a Tic-Tac when the camera zooms out on a big battle. It’s telling that, when Nintendo released Smash Bros. on the 3DS in 2014, it gave players the option to have easy-to-see borders around the fighters, an option that’s unfortunately absent in the Switch-exclusive Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Trying to read text formatted for a television on a tiny handheld screen was the one real downside of playing one of my all-time favorites, Mark of the Ninja, on the go.
Take Fortnite, the biggest game in the world right now. Developer Epic has copied the interface from the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation versions more or less exactly on the Switch…and in handheld mode, the smallest type on the screen is literally one millimeter high. On the 5.5-inch Switch Lite with the same 720p resolution, it will be even smaller.
I’m no developer, but I’m going to guess that part of the problem is that the Switch has enjoyed such a robust library of ports from home consoles and indie PC titles on Steam. These games don’t take a huge amount of time or resources to port (at least compared to original development), and I’ll wager that developers and quality assurance teams test them almost exclusively on monitors and televisions, the format for which they were initially designed. Testing for a long time in handheld mode wouldn’t be practical, but as reviews show, it’s necessary.
The problem isn’t universal. Games designed with portable play in mind, like Pokemon Let’s Go, don’t have the same issues. Whether it’s the fact that the game comes from a long legacy of Game Boy and Nintendo DS portable games, or that it’s intended primarily for a much younger audience, the text in Pokemon is big and eyeball-friendly. Ports from iOS and Android like Fallout Shelter, not to mention Nintendo’s own 3DS, seem to fare a lot better. The principle is pretty easy to distill down: games designed to be viewed on a tiny screen don’t suffer from playing on a television, but games made for a TV can be brutal on a small display.
The Switch Lite is all portable, all the time, with no option for docked play on a television. And its screen is even smaller than the typical 2019 phone screen. Playing some of the Switch’s most popular games on it is going to be brutal.
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Source : The Switch Lite Exacerbates Nintendo’s Portable Problems
