Rockers Delight

# April 22nd, 2010 at 1:20 pm

I’ve had exactly the same problem with the reload button, I’ve had my moments where I’ve gone to all the trouble of remaining undetected only to hit the portable EMP blast and announce my presence to every enemy for miles around. I don’t know if you can remap the buttons in the options, because I’m too lazy to check, and I do tend to adapt to new control schemes pretty quickly anyway.

Still, it is annoying that every developer seems to have differing opinions on which buttons should do what. Obviously all games have different controls because the mechanisms you use to control your character are nearly always bespoke, but there are features that are common to all of them, and in my opinion, buttons should be reserved for those.

I think the problem with Splinter Cell Conviction is not so much that reload isn’t where you expect, but that they put such a potentially self destructive action in its place. It wouldn’t be so bad if X was simply “interact” or something similar because most of the time you wouldn’t have anything selected and it’d have no effect. It stinks to me of something that was put in early in development by a programmer who probably thought “someone will make a proper decision later” and then everyone on team just got used to it.

Microsoft did a very good thing with the “default” options in the guide for games that must be enforced, such as whether you want your Y axis inverted in FPSs etc, but I wish it could be a bit wider ranging, to force developers to stick to a convention.

I had loads of arguments with the designers when we were making Perfect Dark Zero about the analogue stick layout. Those who’d been around since the “old days” of Goldeneye and the original PD refused to accept that having turn left and right (as opposed to strafe) on the same stick as move forwards and backwards just wasn’t the norm any more. That was a control scheme that was necessary for single stick control, but I argued that with dual sticks, Halo’s popularity (as much as I hate Halo) had pretty much defined the convention to the way most games work now. I think I won out in the end, I think the “default” in PDZ was the Halo style, with the old school method as a configurable option.

# April 24th, 2010 at 6:52 pm

I’m in two minds over control schemes. As people of the web (I’m reluctant to use any words beginning with D), we welcome standards, we LOVE them and wish that everybody would use and support them (yeah, I’m talking to you Internet Explorer). Many things have become standardised in games, such as analogue stick use, triggers to fire or to accelerate and brake. It tends to be the face buttons that get juggled around just to piss us, the users, off.

I wonder whether it’s developers thinking that *this* is how we want you to play our game but the logic for us as players is non-existent. I hate jumping, for example, between two FPS games with entirely different schemes it always leaves you asking WHY!? Is it a cock fight of who knows best, has no one ever got together and had some kind of discussion and though… “This is a good idea?”

While I think that all games, especially within the same genre, should be set to a standard default control set up, I personally believe that game controls should be totally customisable in all games. Sure analogue actions will have to be tied to analogue buttons but I, as a user, should be able to swap these buttons and sticks to do my bidding. Maybe I want to play southpaw, maybe I’m disabled and I don’t have full control either hand. By denying even a basic configuration of controls, developers are limiting the accessibility of their games, the console on which they are played and the industry as a whole. Sure, control set up screens are not only a UI nightmare but potentially a very complex idea to put to the user, but if no-one tries, how is it ever going to get better?

Yeah, console developers are trying to get rid of the controller all together at the moment (I still believe this is a pipe dream for hardcore games) but this won’t make anything better. In-fact it could make things worse, muscle memory, flailing limbs, different games requiring to tie yourself in different knots. Same problem, larger scale. C’mon developers, get together and pull your fingers out of whichever orifice you have designated as your ass and sort this out, for all of us.

# April 24th, 2010 at 7:33 pm

[...] I watched a very interesting video by my even more very good friend Rockers Delight on the topic of control standards within games. I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to accessibility, so this video struck a chord with me [...]

# April 29th, 2010 at 11:35 am

I don’t like the mapping of the reload either not because I don’t think it’s located on a bad button generally, but I didn’t like it because I sometimes did click it in accidentally.

Since I’m also an educated interaction designer, working with interfaces like button-mappings etc something like an intuitive and natural control-scheme doesn’t exist what we know and think is good is based on repetition of using that control-scheme as you said.

I really understand what you’re coming from though a standardization of gaming-controls would be pretty sweet, generally I don’t have any problems learning new controls and coming back to them after a while. I played Mirror’s Edge again and when I sat down with the game my brain automatically remembered the controls and I was fine. It’s funny how that works.

I really like that you only can carry two weapons, even though I would never understand why the hell you would need to be running around with an AK in Splinter Cell. It’s nice anyways, it feels kinda gimmicky to fill out the content, I would much rather see some of the old school splinter cell stuff returning.

Like heat-vision stuff, throwing coke-cans so guards will investigate, making noises by tapping walls. I would want to see 2 or 3 way guard melee knockouts as well. I mean if Sam is so bad ass he could do it right?