Thinking about it, the rumble functionality of game controllers is a rather abstract feature. It’s hard to put down just how much it really adds to game experiences and how necessary it is and even harder to directly think of good examples of it being used in games.
In the following of the Nintendo Switch’s big presentation event on January 12 and a bit of disappointment from some due to its higher than they expected price, quite a few user comments could be found who thought that Nintendo better should’ve saved costs by amongst other things not including a new tech with the controllers that Nintendo is calling “HD Rumble” - a new advanced haptic engine that’s allegedly precise enough to mimic the feel of real life objects -, angrily seeing nothing in it than another useless, typically Nintendo, expensive gimmick.
Put short, I really don’t agree with them and don’t think Nintendo shouldn’t have included it.
Although information is of course still scarce at the moment, weeks ahead of the console’s launch, and I’ve not tested it myself, and even though it was hard for me to even evaluate the relevance of just normal rumble, I was immediately convinced by HD rumble during the presentation. As an example, Nintendo claimed in the video that the rumble feedback of the Switch’s so-called Joy-Con controllers would allegedly be good enough to mimic the feel of a glass filled with different numbers of ice cubes and the feel of the glass then being filled with water as well as this all even reacting live and precisely to your motion holding the controller. Perhaps a bit baffled to see this interesting tech really being part of the console and of all Nintendo being the first to make something more meaningful out of it beyond ‘mimicking the feel of an analog button’, I was rather impressed and didn’t saw a gimmick, but in opposite something very innovative that I directly thought could be used greatly for a gaming console.