In the wake of its launch tomorrow, on March 3, the Nintendo Switch’s day one patch has officially gone live, but no one seems to know whether or not it’s been able to completely resolve the game breaking Joy-Con syncing issues.
With Nintendo Switch’s review systems getting into the hands of reviewers and publishers over the whole of last week, a large number of reports have surfaced about one of the Joy-Cons losing sync with the system. This seems to happen when the Joy-Cons — especially the left one — are being used while not attached to the system, as in, when the switch is docked, or is in table top mode. Several experiments by publishers such as GameXplain and Digital Foundry suggest that the problem may partly be due to obstructions between the Joy-Con controllers and the Switch itself.
The problem seems to be virtually non-existent for some users (such as those over at GameSpot have encountered no such issue while reviewing their copy). For all others, it’s made it annoyingly difficult to play the highly awaited The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where de-syncing can lead to frustrating deaths as the players suddenly lose all control of Link’s movement at all the wrong times.
Nintendo has not explicitly addressed any of these issues yet, but there was always some hope that the day-one update would actually resolve or at least mitigate them. With the update now live, the results have been unclear.
Several users, including a few on Reddit, have discovered that the update seemingly fixed their issues entirely. While others have found that the issue still hasn’t been fixed, which in turn led to further speculation and guess work that the Joy-Cons need to be attached to the docked system when it reboots immediately after downloading the update in order to receive the necessary fix. However, Digital Foundry tried this as well and found that the problem still persists.
