(ThyBlackMan.com) If you ask about the Splatoon 2, it’s one of the best Nintendo Switch games, but as far as the Nintendo Switch Voice Chat App is concerned, it is confusing and literally a disaster Nintendo wants you to pay for in 2018.
When you hold Nintendo Switch, you want to forget all the terrible mistakes the company made with its previous-gen consoles, and for some time, you would want to forget Xbox One and PS4 when you play Zelda or Splatoon 2 on Switch. What spoils the fun is the company’s hard-to-understand strategy that resulted in a messy, useless Nintendo Switch Online app.
Nintendo has always struggled to make communication easy for
players. A large number of multiplayer games require players to communicate with each other. Nintendo understands this fact, but what the company doesn’t understand is that the solutions should be real solutions. If an idea is being implemented, it should solve problems, but when you download the Switch Voice Chat App and start voice chat by inviting your friends for multiplayer battles, you are bound by weird restrictions Nintendo has placed with the app.
Why everyone’s mocking the Nintendo Switch voice chat app?
Rather than adding voice chat into the console itself, Nintendo released a companion smartphone app. The idea behind the mobile app is not bad as the application allows the Switch users to communicate with friends through text and voice, access game data, and plan multiplayer matches online.
Nintendo plans to add each game in the application so that users can simply log in to their Nintendo Account and access the stats, check match history, buy new gears and make in-game purchases.
Everything looks pretty good except the communication part. Here’s why everyone is mocking the voice chat app.
When a player invites friends to join a match, everyone gets the notification for the same on their Nintendo Switch. The problem here is that players will have to join the match from the game’s menu and they will join the voice chat from the smartphone.
The frustration reaches the next level when you start a voice chat and you have to make a choice between the in-game sound and chat audio. If you don’t want to miss any of them, wear multiple pairs of headphones because this is how it is.
One more problem with the Nintendo Switch Voice Chat App is that it restricts you from switching to any other app. Dare to open some other app or take a phone call during the voice chat, all the players will be disconnected from the room as a result. The connectivity can only be resumed when you open the Nintendo Switch Online app again and keep it active. The feature is useful when someone is on call, but there seems no reason behind not allowing player to check other apps when they are using the voice chat option.
There’s Hope
The Nintendo Switch Voice Chat App is a half-baked idea and the company has already clarified that there’s so much more coming to the app in future. Until the Nintendo Switch Online Service launches in 2018, the mobile app will be free. It means that before asking the players to pay for the mobile app, Nintendo will most likely address the problems. The company is working on introducing headphones that combine the audio coming from two sources – but if you’d want it, you’ll have to pay for it, of course.
The best solution would be the ability to host voice chat from the Switch itself, but Nintendo decided to rely on an external application, Nintendo Switch Online app that too is made for an external device. According to Nintendo, requiring the Switch players to access voice chat from an external device is a better and more robust solution.
Communication on the Nintendo Switch Voice Chat App doesn’t really seem to be any closer to what Nintendo thinks, but there’s hope that someday Nintendo will successfully justify the decision.
Staff Writer; Corey Shaw
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