To what extent would you tolerate a 'gimmick controller' on the NX?

No more gimmicky than what the DS4 offers.

Just make it a standard controller that feels great, has excellent battery life, and most importantly has some freaking analog triggers.

I don't want a stupid touchscreen LCD on my controller. I don't want to have to look down at my controller while playing on a home console, that is what handhelds are for.

@emgesp: I hope they can replicate the Wii U Pro's insane battery life. 80 hours on a single charge is crazy.

None. Nil. Nix. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Motion controls are a guaranteed "no buy" for me because I'm done with their bullshit gimmicks. The U's gamepad is usable but still shitty as all get-out. I will not buy a poor quality shitbox touchscreen remote, and nintendo just get away from the motion controls, everyone knows they're annoying crap at this point.

Create a real gaming controller please, k thx.

@doozie78: Something like this?

I thought the Wiimote worked very well when it was implemented properly (a la Skyward Sword and SMG), and I actually like the Gamepad. I might be in the minority when I say this, but I don't mind Nintendo introducing "gimmicky" controllers as long as they use them properly.

@charizard1605 said:

@doozie78: Something like this?

That with analog triggers would suffice. Nintendo should keep their gimmicky controllers optional.

Their Wii U controller completely turned me off to the system - anything like that their new system and I'm not interested.

It makes perfect sense if you wish to humor a bit of revisionism and act like Nintendo had any inclination at the time of the Wii's design that VR was in any way a glimmer or ambition in their eyes at that point. It wasn't. Let's be honest and call the Wii for what it was: a massive marketing success predicated upon the gullibility of the masses and gamers alike combined with the false promise of a tech that just wasn't there, of which Nintendo KNEW wasn't there. I don't believe the Wiimote deserves any credit past the cheap garbage that it was. That thing probably cost Nintendo a whopping $20-30 per production unit to manufacture, if that.

Aside, this is not to mention that Nintendo holds no interest in VR, in fact Reggie came out and spoke against the very nature of it and how exclusionary is to other players during last E3. I don't believe Nintendo can be credited with the Wii being ahead of its time in relation to any tech VR may end up offering, but this is difficult to say since Oculus Touch's nor Vive's control interface have been released yet so we can't see what they're truly capable of, but even so, as the Wii has had its due limelight, I can see what that afforded.....and it amounted to jack shit. Waggle fucking GARBAGE. If I were to bet, I'd wager that those VR interfaces are going to mop the floor with the functionality found in the Wiimote....and their cost (and the experiences they offer) will reflect as much.

Any gimmick controllers should be optional, IMO. Putting them in every box would no doubt make the system less powerful and more expensive, which are very bad things for them to consider at this point...

@MirkoS77: I'm sorry, MirkoS, you know I greatly appreciate and respect your opinion on these things, but I think there is a bit of your natural slant against, and distaste of, the Wii that is speaking up here.

Of course Nintendo did not intend for the Wii to be any kind of segue into VR (demonstrated by the fact that they did not in fact follow up the Wii with a WiiR, or any such thing). But making this about intention would be missing the point- no one intends for a new innovation to be what it ultimately becomes. Did Coca Cola imagine that it would be setting off an entirely new industry? Did Henry Ford think his manufacturing technique would become the standard for manufacturing around the world? Did IBM ever imagine the PC would be as prolific and open a standard as it became? Did Steve Jobs ever think that the iPhone would lead to an explosion of an entirely new sector of the software industry, one that had never existed less than a decade ago, but is now worth billions of dollars? Did Nintendo themselves think that touch screens would one day be as ubiquitous as they are right now when they conceptualized the DS? Did Microsoft imagine DLC would be so persistent and so important a source of revenue for publishers when they designed support for that in their infrastructure for Xbox Live?

The answer is no, none of them did. That's precisely why they were all ahead of the curve, they made the product not with the intent to lay the foundation for any future paradigm shift, they created a product that was unwittingly well suited to said paradigm shift in some ways, without even conceiving of what the paradigm shift may be. In this case, these products were so far ahead of their time that they were extremely well suited for things that had not even happened yet, that the market at large could not even have conceived of. That's why the Wii was ahead of its time, because it brought motion controls to the table, and it even demonstrated that they were suitable for video games - well, as long as they weren't shoehorned and thrown in your face all the time anyway - which of course would turn out to be prescient just a few years later, as VR finally started to take of, and motion controls turned out to be the most viable form of control for them.

I also want to point out that the Wii, especially with the Motion Plus, had some rather excellent motion control technology- the issue with the motion controls on that system come largely from the fact that no developer, largely, knew how to make games that utilized the tech properly, Nintendo included. The best motion games, like Wii Sports, were games that didn't try to replace traditional button pressed with swings and motion, but those that were built around motion from the ground up. Was there waggle? Yes, a lot of it, but most of it was publishers looking for a cheap cash in on the Wii Sports mania, and replacing button presses with a waggle of the wrist in the name of 'immersion.' It was shovelware, and awful, but not exactly reflective of the tech in the Wii at large.

Will the VR motion tech be better than Wii's? I hope it is, it'll be coming a decade after the Wii, after all, it better be better. But again, that isn't taking away from the Wii at all. Any argument to dismiss the Wii's motion controls here is short sighted, and missing a lot of points- motion controls today are pervasive in gaming, not as the primary input, sure, but they are everywhere. The PS4, PS VIta, Wii U, and 3DS all include gyroscopic and accelerometer powered motion controls, which of course work best as supplements to traditional game controls, rather than replacements.

Anyway, to return to our original point- the Wii was pioneering with its motion controls. One would argue it was too far ahead of its time, what with the tech that could power motion controls properly at a mass market cost not being available for a few years (Motion Plus), nor the tech that would most benefit from motion (VR). Did Nintendo intend for it to be a cheap gimmick to make bank? Sure, let's go with that. Let's assume that they never intended for it to segue into VR at all. That doesn't change the fact that the motion controls on the Wii were a precursor for motion controls in gaming in general, including in VR, and they do deserve credit for that.

I've never attempted to hide my disgust for the Wii. I loathe what that console represents and for a variety of other reasons, and don't try to hide it.

If you believe that paradigm shifts await before somebody comes along and unintentionally moves it largely by chance, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to vehemently disagree with you my man. New paradigms are very deliberately envisioned and forcibly shifted towards by people who drive exceptionally hard towards it for many years. That demands an amazing degree of intent, passion, and dedication. Of course certain conditions must exist for that change to be embraced to any impactful degree and take hold, fate is involved to an extent, but that's a moot point because it doesn't take into consideration whether intent was a factor, which IS the point. If credit is to be given, intent should be present. Many of those you mentioned (Steve Jobs, for one) were hardcore visionaries who didn't just stumble into fortuitous circumstances for which their product just so happened to exist in the right place at the right time and exploded, they saw that opportunity and helped define it, and their achievements were far from accidents.

Nintendo may have helped define motion controls in gaming as we know them today, but they didn't give one shit about them or its future at any point. This was reflected in the quality (or lack thereof) of the Wii, evidenced by both their inability to get it to work (or holding no real ideas for it) a majority of the time, and a lack of pursuing/evolving it further with their next machine. It was a convenient means to an end that paid off at the time. I think it's evident in retrospect that even Nintendo held no idea as to why the Wii was such a hit....they were as shocked as everyone else. That's even more of an indication to me that there's no intent to accord respect to the tech they (at the time) fully appeared to embrace, and that people now attempt to give them acknowledgement for in lending influence to the development and proliferation of VR. If I were to give credit to Nintendo in any sense with the Wii, it would be that they worked a marvel at selling a lie. Marketing genius 101.

Nintendo wasn't ahead of the curve in terms of motion controls, what they were ahead of the curve in was exploiting the gullibility of people to the false promise of them, and I don't give credit for a precursor that is predicated upon false promise. Why? Because it can harm just as much as help. Many people now despise motion controls in the manner that Nintendo presented them, and this sentiment unfortunately now permeates into anything even remotely motion related. I see so many blanket dismissals now of VR under the rationale of "it's another trash motion gimmick", which makes perfect sense because that's precisely what Nintendo offered us. This wouldn't be so bad if they genuinely held an interest in motion controls and its advancement, but they didn't/don't. It was a move of nothing so forward-thinking or progressive to the technology other than to fully exploit its promise for their own immense fleeting monetary gain, only to then apathetically toss away the drained corpse (and peoples' terrible perception of its possibilities they helped create) once it had served its purpose of filling up their vault.

I cannot respect nor ever admire a company that does that.

@MirkoS77: I expect we shall have to agree to disagree here. I do agree with you that Steve Jobs was a meticulous visionary, albeit not necessarily in the example I cited. I just think that I don't view the Wii with as much cynicism, I think Nintendo did have plans or a vision for the console that they got waylaid from- for various reasons.

I do share your distaste of the Wii, it's one of my least favorite consoles of all time. But on the whole, no, I think we shall have to agree to disagree with each other on the console's place in history.

Fair enough.

Would you mind elaborating on the bold? Don't worry, I'm not looking for an argument that I'll make into another essay, I'm just genuinely curious as to the reasons you think so.

Well, I admit my ideas are based on no concrete facts, but just based on their handling of the DS, and the successors to the DS and Wii- but I think Nintendo's idea had not been to make a quick buck with the Wii with necessarily shallow games, but instead to capture mass casual audiences with an accessible hook (which motion gaming provided for, in their view), and then slowly graduate them to more sophisticated games. From Wii Sports to Skyward Sword. From New Super Mario Bros. to Mario Galaxy 2. This is generally something I came to believe for a few reasons:

• This was exactly the path Nintendo followed with the DS, where they used the allure of Brain Age and Nintendogs to graduate audiences on to Mario Kart, Advance Wars, Professor Layton, and Pokemon;
• Nintendo's own output would grow more... 'traditional,' I suppose, with time. 2006-08 saw Nintendo release a whole host of Wii branded software, 2009 onwards saw them slowly attempt to create more traditional Wii games, albeit still simplified variations of their classic franchises, with a de-emphasis on the Wii branded games. My assumption is that Wii Fit and Wii Sports were meant to segue into New Super Mario Bros., and then Super Mario Galaxy 2 (using a pathway of motion controls->getting into games->trying more sophisticated (but still accessible) games from company they can trust->trying still more sophisticated (and ultimately 'core') games featuring the characters they already knew and liked), or similar pathways for Zelda and Metroid and Donkey Kong and Kirby, and so on.

This entire thing was also reflected in the DS and Wii successors, where right from the beginning, Nintendo was pitching them as a more 'core' proposition than the Wii or DS had been (compare early DS or Wii ads to early 3DS and Wii U promos to see what I mean), although I think this point makes for an entirely separate debate.

Anyway, I guess the point here is that Nintendo's vision with motion controls, while not VR, was to get a lot of users hooked into gaming with an accessible hook, and then to graduate those users to more sophisticated games- expanding the gaming market in the process. Meaning that even if they got a smaller share of the overall pie, the pie would be substantially bigger, so they'd be able to subsist off of it anyway. Not just subsist, potentially thrive.

What waylaid them? I think it was a simple combination of three factors- unexpected success, unexpected third party support, and the iPhone. I think any company would have been waylaid by the kind of money the Wii was making, and promising- and while I am displeased personally with the direction the Wii ended up taking rather than one that I think it should have taken, I can't necessarily hold it against a corporation when it was the decision that made the most sense in context of making money, even while I recognize this was simple greed. The Wii burned me, and Nintendo lost my support as a result of that for a while. But it made them a lot of money, which is a corporation's reason for existence. The second reason, I think, has to do with third party support. Personally, I think Nintendo's own games on the Wii were fine- Wii Fit and Wii Sports may not be up your (or my) alley, but for what they were, they were exceptionally good. The third party titles on the system, however, largely were not. Third parties saw the Wii as a system to make cheap games with minimal investment, and they exploited the Wii Sports craze to hook audiences in. Their games were not well made- they were cynical copies of far better products, and eventually these ended up burning the audiences that bought them. For Nintendo, however, this was another source of revenue- they had, technically, more third party support than any of their consoles had ever had- and this is true, you know. It might not be the kind of third party support you or I want, but it was third party support, and more importantly, these kinds of games on the Wii sold. So, yet again, we had greed informing one of their decisions.

The final problem was the iPhone- the sudden appearance of that device, and its promise of further low priced, readily accessible and casual games, probably threw a wrench into any larger ideals and ideas Nintendo may have had about expanding the gaming audience- simply because they no longer had the primary attention of the audiences they had hoped to graduate to more sophisticated products, the Wiis were being put away in closets in favor of Doodle Jump and Angry Birds. And that caused a disruption in whatever it is they may have planned.

This is just my take on things, of course. I don't have any way of knowing that Nintendo planned for this- but none of us have any way of knowing what Nintendo planned for with the Wii. I do think, however, that one thing is evident, which is that the Wii was ultimately not what Nintendo may have envisioned it to be.

Sorry about the extremely long answer, I know you said no essays haha, but this wouldn't have made sense if I'd condensed it.

Want them to go back to normal controller, with gyro/motion control *optional* ...imagine a normal controller with gyro & using that to play Splatoon 2 instead of the clunky gamepad... that's about it..no 2nd screen crap..Nintendo have prove they have no idea what the hell to do with 2nd screen anyway. :P

If they want to have a 2nd screen at least have the option to completely switched off the screen on controller when choose to play on TV, only 1 or 2 games that allows this..nothing more annoying than having to watch a cutscene playing then in the corner of the eye its also playing on the gamepad. :P

What defines a controller as a gimmick is if the character on screen doesn't actually do what the controller is doing. In other words, like many Wii games, it's faking it or like all WiiU games, it's unnecessary.

The only new controller that will be acceptable is one which can be tracked in 3D space so that the punch you throw or the swing you perform is translated to Mario or Link on screen correctly (and not triggering a prerecorded animation).

No trouble, I enjoy these discussions of ours.

No, I think you're right on point in Nintendo's actions and plan, and I agree. Unfortunately, that plan was plagued with faulty assumptions combined with a lack of being able to see where the market was headed (iPhone released in '07) that came back to bite them in the ass later on. Nintendo's biggest miscalculation was overestimating the degree of investment their new audience actually held towards gaming. The App Store exposed these casuals for what they were.

But going back to what we were talking about, motion controls were nothing but a means to an end in the execution of this strategy, and because of that, it bothers me when anyone says, "VR and all motion controls henceforth since the Wii owe Nintendo a big debt of gratitude since they pioneered them with the Wii". The truth is, the audience that Nintendo gained using motion controls could not possibly be more opposite from the audience that is interested in VR. They exploited those controls for an entirely different purpose and then tossed them away once it had served that purpose (that pisses me off), so it's hard for me to agree when anyone attempts to bring the Wii into the light and give it the precursor nod when VR is spoken about.

I just think that if something is to be labelled "ahead of its time", intent is paramount, both in its actual technological implementation (the Wiimote wasn't created for VR at all) and overall strategy (the Wiimote being merely a hook to a more ambitious goal that had nothing to do with the technology itself or its advancement/expansion).

Eh, my head's been all over the place these past few nights. Maybe I'm not making sense.

I did like the sound of the back buttons having roller like functions like the middle of a Mouse.

I took more time to think about it. Basically, if the controller is bigger than my face I want nothing to do with it.

@MirkoS77: Well, you are entirely making sense, and I do see where you are coming from as well- you don't want to give something credit if it wasn't intended to be a pioneer in a field that it may have ended up unwittingly being a part of. That's fair, it's a reasonable way to look at things. That said, I usually think it is okay for something to inevitably have been a pioneer of something that it may not have been intended to kickstart in the first place- maybe this happened because the thing it was pioneering would have happened thanks to advancing technology anyway (as you pointed out, D-Pad, shoulder buttons, analog sticks, wireless controllers, touch control, and rumble all fall into this category); maybe it was made with some other intent, and even exploited for some other purpose, but unwittingly foreshadowed some other, far more viable use for itself entirely, which is the category the Wii falls into.

I think that's good enough for something to qualify as pioneering. It is my opinion that things that fall into these second categories were almost too far ahead of their time- so far ahead that their real use wouldn't even be conceived of for years after they were released. It's a prescience I appreciate and give credit to.

As I said, we disagree here- but I do see where you are coming from.

@charizard1605 said:

@doozie78: Something like this?

Yes with gyro built in..that should be their controller for NX.

lol..you made it funny..thanks for the laugh...true though. :D

Pretty much this. If a game can utilize an alternate scheme well, then awesome. But its great to have the option of normal control schemes. And its happened throughout gaming history, not just with Nintendo. Think of trying to play Centipede or Marble Madness without a trackball, or Tempest without a rotary knob. On the flip side, Street Fighter 2 without a proper stick. No thanks.

I just want a Nintendo system to be....Not Second rate

• Keep standard Pro Controllers but add in Analog Triggers and Buttons
• Keep Wii Remote & Nunchuck B/C Functionality
• Ditch the moronic Tablet GamePad completely
• If the New buttonless "tablet" becomes standard, that would be a deal breaker

It's past time Nintendo quit gimmicky controllers and keep up with their competitors in console specs or go to a software only company.

I would love something like this if its the standard. I didnt like the gamepad nor how they implemented and even ignored it on their own first party games.

@emgesp said:

@charizard1605 said:

@doozie78: Something like this?

That with analog triggers would suffice. Nintendo should keep their gimmicky controllers optional.