Gaming Do we lose anything through game control conformity?

+1 great post, all games seem the same. its nice when a game comes out with truly innovative controls.

 

I am so badly coordinated it's not funny, so as a result I tend not to be as good at picking up control systems as your average person. What this has led to is that over the years I've figured out what general layouts work for me for different types of games/control systems. Whenever I'm faced with an enforced layout my blood boils. XBOX ports are the worst culprits. What is so wrong about allowing customisation for those who want it? I basically gave up playing GTAIV because of the controls.

 

Yep, plenty of people out there obviously think that these games are still worth their hard earned cash. It's painful to say it, but if that's what the majority thinks is good then who's to say they aren't? Those who want something more than X Button Simulator 2012 are becoming a minority in the growing gaming audience and, unfortunately but understandably, are losing their say in how games should be.

Double mice, independent control of each of the character's arms! Legs are controlled by driving sim-esque foot pedals!

Jokes aside, there's definitely got to be more out there, both in input devices and in in-game control schemes. The devices are moving forward, touch and motion capture are steadily marching onward into the home, but control schemes seem to have hit a plateau. I think once these devices start becoming standard or at least widely accepted we'll see some unique ideas coming up. Imagine playing something like League of Legends where you input gestures on a touch screen to perform actions. It could interesting to see what ideas come up.

 

When I first saw kinect I swear to you the first thing I thought was a magic type game where it read your inputs as spells. you'd start off with simple spells and more difficult ones would give you better and cooler spells.

Hell I'd pay for a game where it allowed me to be a literal wizard.

That said I do agree, over-simplifying controls are terribly annoying. More than one death has been had because we could not re-map our actions to something else. After all, who wants to climb a wall but instead end up hopping stupidly?

The world of GTA does.That's who.

 

I remember becoming so amazing at the Turok 1 controls on N64, having to aim with your left thumb on the middle joystick and moving and strafing with the yellow C buttons on the right side of the controller was totally backwards to any other FPS, even ones on that same system such as goldeneye which had a more basic FPS layout. To this day, that game has stuck with me and I honestly believe that those controls were far better than any of the goldeneye controls because the controller had only 1 joystick and by using your left hand to aim you could strafe and move like in modern duel-joystick games and still hold your gun and aim it wherever you wanted without having to stop or pull up some funky aimer to get more accuracy. Now that modern gamepads tend to have duel-joysticks this is something we won't see in the future most likely but for it's time, it was miles ahead.

 

Mouse & keyboard still wins for the majority of the PC games that I play, but occasionally I do play PC games with an Xbox 360 joypad. I played Skyrim using a joypad, primarily because I wanted to play it on my TV and there is no comfortable way to have a mouse & keyboard on my coffee table. The cables reach just fine - or used to, before we moved to a bigger flat and the PC was relocated to a different room - but it means hunching over the coffee table and making my shoulders and back ache. Whereas with the joypad I can slouch on the sofa in whatever position I want.

Most of the games I play on the PC these days are either FPS, third-person, or RTS. Some FPS and third-person games I occasionally play using a joypad; in these cases, I am eternally grateful for standardisation of controls. Many major games support the Xbox 360 controller on a PC, and it means that I don't have to spend ages re-mapping and re-configuring my controls. I can just pick up the controller and know that it will work - I may have to learn which buttons are mapped to which actions/functions, but that only needs a quick look at the controller config. Even then you can almost guarantee that that: left stick is for movement, right stick for look, triggers for primary/secondary fire and A will be the primary "action" button.

For games played with a mouse and keyboard, the "standard" control layout just feels right: your right hand is used for aiming and primary controls, and, in addition to WASD for movement, your left hand has easy access to a large number of keys mapped to different functions. I do also occasionally play racing/driving sims, and in those cases I wouldn't consider using anything other than a steering wheel and pedals. I often find myself having to configure the controls for my hardware, but I don't mind that: it gives me the opportunity to tweak settings such as force feedback strength, wheel "weight", throttle/brake/steering deadzones, etc. In games where I may be changing gear ratios, aerodynamic wing angles, suspension stiffness, etc, tweaking the steering wheel config really isn't a problem.

There's room for innovation in controls, but it has to appeal to the mass market for it to be successful. Like it or not, the mass market in gaming is consoles; that's not to say that PC gaming isn't a big industry, but consoles are the primary focus for most major publishers and developers.

For the PC, I don't think you can go wrong with a mouse and keyboard for the vast majority of games. If you're playing RTS games with a joypad however, you do need to be shot .