GameChat on Nintendo Switch 2 Makes Playing Games with Friends Hectic as Hell
In usual Nintendo fashion, the Switch 2 isn’t making online play easier to access; it’s making it stranger by far. GameChat, the online video chat functionality for Switch 2, lets you stream your friends’ gameplay and friends’ faces to your own game system while you play. Nintendo is devoting a hefty amount of system power to this feature, and the result is games that are far more chaotic than without it. That is all to say, I enjoy the hell out of it—at least what it accomplishes despite low-resolution picture quality.
GameChat is a heavy dose of Discord-like functionality for Nintendo’s handheld. You can talk over voice chat with up to 12 other people using the Switch 2’s built-in microphone. This means you could see your friend’s perspective as they bully you with red shell after red shell in Mario Kart World. But it also means you can watch as they play an entirely different game. You can have up to four of these streams running at once; the on-screen interface resembles what you’d find in your typical video calling app like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, with everyone streamed in their own respective window.
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Finally, there’s the Nintendo Switch 2 Camera. This 1080p stand-up webcam sits on your TV stand and faces toward the player. If playing in two of the main GameChat modes, either “Standard” or “Expand Main Screen,” you’ll see your friend’s streams and their mugs on top of them. Nintendo told us you can’t move the stream window (yours or another person’s) away from the right corner. If you want to shrink them to help see more of their screen, you’ll need your fellow player to physically move their camera farther away to capture less of their body.
I couldn’t imagine a 1080p webcam and small in-built microphone would be quality enough to pick up my mug and voice with any amount of fidelity. As I sat down three feet from the TV stand bedecked with the Switch 2 dock, I started talking with two other people in different parts of the room—plus one player chiming in remotely online. We were inundated with a wave of chatter as several people tried to talk over each other. The audio wasn’t exactly pitch-perfect. Everybody was talking to their console several feet away. Once the gabbing calmed a bit, I could start to make out different voices.
The 40-minute online demo didn’t offer enough time to truly test out latency or test how far from the mic you can be before you completely lose audio quality. We did get to test out how this looked while playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords through Nintendo’s + Expansion Pack, a Nintendo Game Boy Advance game that was notoriously difficult to play together back in the days when you needed several link cables. I could see what every other player was doing on their screens. The noise, the cameras, and the screens all added to the sense of chaos as every one of our players started smacking each other with swords, rebounding off each other, and sending all of us tumbling to our collective doom on every moving platform.
If co-op with your friends was already chaotic before you could literally screen cheat on each other’s gameplay, then GameChat merely creates anarchy. The functionality is actually more endearing than the camera specs. In certain games, including Mario Kart World and Super Mario Party: Jamboree, the camera will actually display your face above your character. This works both online and with each of you on the couch. In Mario Kart World, when you get beaned by a red shell, your camera will spin as your character spins out. Seeing your compatriot’s twisted expression as you send a blue shell their way is priceless, especially since you no longer have to look away from the screen to witness their agony.
Nintendo knows it can get away with hardware limitations so long as the features remain fun. Still, I would like to see some actual fidelity with a kind of hardware—webcams—we’re already intimately familiar with. The $55 Switch 2 camera combined with the handheld’s software can crop out a background, offering a morsel of more screen real estate. In our short demo, the camera struggled to separate our bodies from the sofa we were sitting on. Even when it found the right shape of my body, the image appeared jagged on-screen. It’s a factor of using a webcam that records at such a low resolution, but I couldn’t get over the general unappealing look of each image. The image quality was dull and washed out and resembled a cheap $20 web.
GameChat with video is mainly supposed to work in docked mode, though it is usable in handheld mode if you want to connect the camera. Currently, there’s the 480p Piranha Plant camera from Hori that can also attach directly to the console through its top USB-C port. This may allow for better picture quality if the camera no longer has to zoom in on each person sitting several feet away. There’s a chance a better webcam will improve the picture quality. Nintendo has yet to say which third-party webcams the Switch 2 supports. If I had a better-looking webcam, one dressed up like Lakitu from Super Mario 64 holding a camera, it would be the perfect accessory to bring more couch co-op chaos to Nintendo’s handheld.
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