The Nintendo Switch 2's Most Exciting Feature Is Around The Corner

Nintendo showed off its upcoming Switch 2 console last week in New York, and it included several buzzy games like Hades 2, Hogwarts Legacy, and Civilization 7. But in talking to developers, we got the sense that many of them were looped into the ultra-secretive processes of Nintendo quite late in the timeline. There were a few admissions of just that, but the strongest evidence is that some of the more experimental features — involving the new mouse function and C button especially — aren’t quite ready to be shown off just yet in popular games, despite the console’s looming June launch date. In other words? The best uses of the new Switch functions might roll out much later than expected — and innovative game functionalities might still be around the corner.

Hades developer Greg Kasavin puts some of this in perspective. When you’re developing a game, you don’t really ever know what consoles will look like when it comes out. “Rewind four years ago, we had no idea people would still be playing Nintendo Switch games by whenever this game is done,” Kasavin tells Inverse. “We didn’t know the Switch 2 was going to be a thing.”

So how did Kasavin manage to have something ready for the Switch 2’s showcase? Luckily, Kasavin’s team at SuperGiant had the foresight to predict that Hades fans would still want to play the game on a handheld device — even if the Switch 2 was not announced and they had to play on a possibly five-year-old hand-me-down. So Hades 2 was always built with the Switch in mind, thanks to its massively splashy run the original game had.

That was a through-line we saw throughout several hours at the Nintendo demo hall. Not everyone has had a chance to add Nintendo’s shiniest new toys — the mouse controls, social features, and AI visual upscaling — to their games yet. Nintendo itself offers a shoulder shrug to this observation. Nintendo’s entertainment planning producer Kouichi Kawamoto tells Inverse that Nintendo is leaving many of these decisions up to individual developers to figure out.

Nintendo’s ‘buffet’ spread

Hogwarts Legacy has said it will work with mouse controls on the Switch 2, and players can expect to be able to draw more precise brush-strokes with the mouse-like Joy-Con to cast spells. But when I asked if I could try this feature out myself, a public relations representative from Warner Bros. demurred. The spokesperson declined to say if the feature is still currently in development or why it couldn’t be shown off immediately.

And of course, you could potentially just not see those features added in.

For instance, the new Switch 2 runs on an unnamed Nvidia chip and supports its AI-powered feature, DLSS, which helps graphics upscale to a max of 4K resolution. But don’t expect all of 2025’s games to now run with the max number of pixels. Not every developer is going to use DLSS, as Nintendo is simply giving “a lot of options for developers to choose from,” says Kawamoto.

Mouse controls are another story. Nintendo’s senior vice president of product development Nate Bihldorff says that each game is free to turn off those mouse controls all the same. Some games are simply not going to support mouse controls, and will instead serve you an old school drop-down menu that you scroll through and hit the A button on. “The idea that you can detach the Joy-Con in an area where you want to just use gyro controls — that feels really good,” Bihldorff says. “But then simply turning your wrist automatically turns on mouse control. Obviously, it's not something that everyone has to do. You'll probably find developers who don't want anyone to accidentally do that, so they'll hide mouse control behind a settings menu, which is fine. But being able to access that if you want to — both for our own developers and our partner developers.”

Another exciting prospect is Nintendo’s recently announced C button, which opens up game chat features, letting players screen share and talk. This one apparently took SuperGiant’s Kasavin completely by surprise.

“The C button stuff, I saw the announcement for the first time myself this morning,” Kasavin says. “It’s interesting to see that it has broad potential across any number of games. We’re a single player game, but even with single player games, they have these applications, like you know, seeing a friend beat a boss that you might be struggling with.”

Does that mean we could potentially see games like Elden Ring and Hades 2 pop open an image of your friend’s agonized face as they lose yet again to another formidable foe? The feature hasn’t made it into Hades 2 yet, as the team just found out about it, but the prospect is certainly intriguing, Kasavin says.

“It’s like you just spread this buffet,” Bihldorff says, “Let us help you bring your vision to life. Whatever game you want to make.”