It’s fair to say that GameChat, one of Nintendo’s purported marquee features for the upcoming Switch 2, did not show well when it was first revealed. The introduction to the feature in the Switch reveal trailer looked choppy and poor quality. While I and others gave them credit for showing the feature in a “warts and all” state, it was a confusing choice to center so much of the presentation around a video-sharing function that looked, well, bad. Having now spent some time with GameChat at an extensive hands-on preview, I can’t say I’m confident that the final quality will be any better than we saw–but I am sure that the ease of use and system integration make it a nicer prospect than it first appeared.
Unlike our first hands-on with the Switch 2, GameChat was fully enabled for this session, which meant I was free to poke around the options and see how it all worked. GameChat is a main-menu option right alongside others like the Nintendo eShop and controller settings, so it’s easy to find even without the dedicated button. But the C button does call up the menu quickly, which is nice for toggling its various options on and off.
Those options include voice, video, and game sharing–the latter being the less-than-stellar game feed from your friends. You can turn on any combination of these options, and as promised, you can bring up your friend’s game screen to watch them. It came up after a short delay and ran more smoothly than the choppy video shown in the Direct, when it was the main video feed. I should say, though, that the game being showcased for this feature was Zelda: Four Swords Adventures running through the GBA Classics app, so it wasn’t exactly a game that was taxing system resources like Mario Kart World. The connection was also running via LAN rather than Wi-Fi, so that could have also conceivably improved my experience.