It’s time for another round of Nintendo Switch 2 speculation, as one of the latest Switch games, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, reportedly has support for 4K resolution in its codebase.
Spotted by dataminer RibShark, a section of code for the game refers to a 3,840 x 2,160, or 4K, resolution. RibShark writes: “There seems to be code for handling 4K resolutions in the new Paper Mario TTYD remake. No idea if this is normal for Switch games or not but I thought it was interesting.”
After hearing about the discovery, users took to social media to speculate on what the code in question could be for. Some are pointing to the Switch’s successor potentially being capable of not only supporting 4K resolutions outright, but that it will be able to enhance existing Nintendo Switch games via backwards compatibility patches.
However, it’s entirely possible that the truth of the matter is a lot more mundane. This 4K resolution support could simply be for allowing Nintendo to take high-quality screenshots for press and marketing material. This is something we’ve seen with prior Nintendo Switch titles, such as Nintendo Switch Sports.
We’re still not entirely sure on what to expect from the Nintendo Switch’s successor, including whether or not it’ll be able to output resolutions up to 4K. That said, company president Shuntaro Furukawa recently hinted that the Nintendo Switch 2 moniker is an “appropriate” way to describe the upcoming hardware.
Shareholder Q&A sessions from last year have also brought to light the possibility that the Nintendo Switch 2 will be backwards compatible. If this ends up being true, it means that enhancement patches for existing Nintendo Switch titles certainly aren’t off the table. And in that instance, there may be some truth to the future console supporting higher resolutions.