Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

It seems like the days of revolutionary consumer electronics are over.

This looks nice, for sure. But it’s really more of the same. Not surprising. It does surprise me that there’s such emphasis on it, though. There’s the name, of course, and then the entire video is based around “it’s the same thing but a little better.”

Game console updates used to be big deals. The SNES was a revolution. PS2 was huge. Now… PS5? What’s different from PS4, again? Is there a 6? What’s different about that?

I don’t blame Nintendo or the others. I have no idea what they could do here they would be revolutionary. I think the design space has just been thoroughly explored by now and that’s where we are.

This pattern repeats all over the place. TVs are maxed out, with better visual quality than people care about, and size limited by wall space. Computers get a little faster every year. This year’s phones are last year’s phones with a minor performance bump and slightly better cameras. And again, I don’t see what they can do better, and that’s probably how it has to be at this point.

But it’s still a little shocking to see a company lean so far into the theme of “we made incremental improvements to this thing we released 8 years ago.”

I've found more incredible improvements in AI than in consumer electronics these days. I'm still daily surprised at just how good ChatGPT is at understanding my pretty complex queries.

Maybe that will be the next big thing in games. Finally deliver on the promise of living, breathing worlds, instead of breaking the illusion when the character scripts start to repeat and you realize “your choices matter” means you can pick from one of three different endings.

I think this is it. Once a console can run an LLM you will see open world games with immersion that we’ve never seen before

Procedurally generated worlds are one thing but imagine exploring an endless world where you can talk to every NPC and never have the same conversation twice

It sounds like a good idea at first, but would people really care after the first few conversations? After all, the conversations are unlikely to be related to any of the gameplay, and even though you could drip feed worldbuilding to the player, you only have so much source material. After a while I suspect it would become obvious which things are part of the official world source material, and which things are being made up on the fly without any consistency from conversation to conversation.

That said, though, I can definitely see a use for making the world feel more alive. Watch_Dogs: Legion put a lot of effort into having tons of voiced NPCs with interesting conversations and phone calls, but you could go even further by having an LLM generate text to be read by an AI TTS system.