What if your controller could sense your next move? That’s hardly science fiction—after all, rollback netcode is used in many leading fighting games to do just that—but a patent has been spotted by Tom’s Guide and Game Rant which hints that Nintendo could look to include it in Switch 2 at a hardware level.
The patent was filed by the Japanese company in August 2024 and published on January 23rd of this year. It appears to be a system that tracks button presses and directional movements with the goal of predicting the next possible input sequence.
The apparent upside is that the system will be able to “learn” from your button inputs in certain games and use that data to speed things up, such as commonly repeated menu selections. Rollback netcode does a similar thing, but in that mechanic, the system is predicting the next input and “rolling back” if the player’s input is different, rather than memorising a sequence of inputs.
As with any patent, it’s important to note that just because it has been filed doesn’t mean it will actually happen. However, it’s certainly an interesting prospect and one of the many ways Nintendo could make Switch 2 different from its forerunner.