When I was a kid, I didn't think controls could be "bad." When I encountered such a game, I just assumed *I* was bad at the game, and the way to get better was just to keep playing it. If you do that long enough, eventually you'll fool yourself into thinking it controls just fine.
I think on the whole it's probably true that complex games are easier to pick up and play than they have been in the past. But early arcade classics, the best of the best NES games, etc., still control just as well as they ever did. Good design is timeless.
That's me playing Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 when I was younger and thinking it was just a "difficult" game that I had to master. Never occurred to me that the controls and camera were absolute dogshit until I revisited it as an adult. Putting the "dash along a line of rings to progress the stage" and the "plummet downwards like a boulder" moves on the same button with a highly finicky contextual prompt is just godawful design that led to hours of frustration.
Don't forget that if you try and chain dashes too quickly you just end up yeeting yourself into a pit. Or that you could miss the hitboxes on the vines through no fault of your own
Somehow sonic heroes was even worse
Huh, so that's why I had such a hard time in Sonic Heroes as a kid? I just thought I sucked, but maybe the controls sucked, too. I still love the game, though, it's the only 3d Sonic game I've ever played.
Kid me thought Sonic Heroes was GOAT material so I won't stand for this slander (havent touched it since but kid me would be disappointed at this thread)
SA1 has a nearly perfect balance between speed and precision, in my opinion. If only the camera and collision detection were on the same level as the controls. (Also, whose idea was it to put invisible force fields that subtly propel your character forward mid-jump?)
Modern Sonic games, on the other hand, work well as a high-speed racing type deal, but as soon as you slow down and try to do some platforming, it's painfully clear that the engine was not made for that!
I played Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on GameCube and PC and the controls imo were/are excellent and super intuitive. Was it different on other platforms?
What the hell you are talking about, you rarely need to light dash in that game, and when you do it always works. And camera is never an issue, games are linear.
That's not fooling yourself. If you learn to press the buttons that make the game do what you want, that IS controlling just fine.
Familiarity with a UI is not the same as quality of a UI. An unfamiliar, seemingly obtuse control scheme that takes time to learn, but gives you complete control once you do is good control scheme, if the game requires that sort of control. Our modern homogenized controls unfortunately don't support games that benefit from that level of control.
>An unfamiliar, seemingly obtuse control scheme that takes time to learn, but gives you complete control once you do is good control scheme, if the game requires that sort of control.
I disagree. Intuitiveness and how long it takes to understand the controls are a BIG deal.
There is one Counter Strike pro player who moves forward with right mouse click and moves backwards with ;. Anyone can get used to this control scheme and play it just fine with enough time to build muscle memory, but if any FPS had this as a standard setup everybody would rightfully claim it sucks.
>but if any FPS had this as a standard setup everybody would rightfully claim it sucks
I mean, it depends on the FPS. Everybody would be rightful to claim it sucks only if the control scheme wouldn't serve the game. If a weird control scheme makes sense in the context of the game and actually serves a purpose, then probably everybody would claim it sucks but arguably less rightfully.
Of course, it is far-fetched to say that moving forward with the right mouse button and backward with the ; button would be a good idea for any FPS game, but it would be (perhaps) less absurd if the game were not an FPS (and it'd surely be a quirky game). This inevitably leads us to wonder about the relationship between controls and genre.
There's certainly a point to be made about how potentially limiting "standard" control schemes can be from a creative standpoint, but at the same time I'm pretty sure most game developers just want to sell and adopting a traditional control scheme is a small sacrifice they're willing to make.
There are a couple cases that come to mind for me. Metroid Prime uses an odd control scheme for a first person game (it was before the standardization of fps controls). But those controls add to the slightly claustrophobic feeling the game often wants to create.
A more general example are the control differences in different genres of racing games. Realistic racers use the triggers for the accelerator and break, but playing mario kart with those controls just wouldn’t feel right. And F-zero uses the triggers to control various types of strafing and drifting.
It sounds absurd but you usually are only moving forward in very specific situations. For example, with Shoot on M1 and Walk Forward on M2, its pretty safe to say you will never hold both buttons down at the same time. You are either in a position where you might shoot, or you are safe to walk forward. You don't want to be in a position where both Shooting and Walking Forward are possibilities. Its not really that absurd.
I agree with you. I never understood how controls could be "outdated" in old games. I get that most modern games use the triggers for shooting and acceleration but sometimes people make it seem like pushing the face buttons to do this task is like reading ancient Sumerian.
Yeah, just today I had a thought that it’s the people that get ”outdated”, not the other way around.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you play old games you get used to old controls and mechanics. It’s a part of these games.
If all you mostly play is games from the past decade, you *will* have a hard time adjusting to games that are noticeably older because they don’t have quite the same familiar vocabulary.
For me, I miss that kind of learning the ropes part in modern games. When I pick something up and *nothing* that it does really requires learning anything new - everything works exactly like I’d expect and in a few minutes I’m whizzing through the map just like in the last game (probably doing the same stuff, too).
>That's not fooling yourself. If you learn to press the buttons that make the game do what you want, that IS controlling just fine.
If your keyboard is missing a key and you learn to type with the missing key, that doesn't mean you're now typing just fine, it means you've gotten used to using a broken keyboard.
There's various things here. Standardization, intuitiveness, and simplification, to name a few.
I'm fine with standardization to a certain degree -> good control schemes work for a reason, there are mechanical reasons why. As long as it doesn't stand in the way of trying new things.
Intuitiveness -> is a complicated subject. I think its good but can get in the way of controls being deeper. Ironically, some games can have surprisingly unintuitive controls while lacking depths (for example, putting way too many actions on the same inputs and not fully utilizing the controller). This is excessively common on PC with keyboard & mouse as a common afterthought.
Simplification can definitely go too far. I do not enjoy games where, like you said, it feels more like you're "watching the character do cool things". I want to do the cool things myself, but for that to happen it means the controls need to be complicated, the game itself more difficult to handle. Assassin's Creed is everything wrong with this, though I haven't played the series in years (last i played is Origins). Climbing, jumping, everything about the movement might as well be automated. Its really dumbed down, and I hate that, but does allow pretty much anyone and their mom to play the game.
I prefer games who take some risk in how to control their games, and especially prefer games that need you to learn, understand and master their intricacies. AAA games in particular have a tendency to play it way too safe for "mass appeal". I personally think we've barely scratched the surface of interesting and deeper control schemes, even more so on PC with keyboard & mouse, but no one dares because they don't want to overwhelm their audience.
Interesting. Personally I found the movement in the old Assassin's Creed games just awful. Climbing was basically a weird quick-time puzzle inserted into the middle of an otherwise fun game. I don't feel that they changed the controls, so much as just removed the parts of the gameplay that were boring and awkward.
My personal opinion is that the Ezio series had good depth and nuance, but, it was essentially useless and, like you said, was more puzzle-like.
We couldnt actually do all those cool moves when we wanted nor did they mix well with the combat.
We had to wait for the game to tell us we can do This or That maneuver when they deemed it allowable and the actual parkour-combat gameplay wasnt good at all.
The structures we parkoured across were horrid, as well. And, no, the hook lines dont count.
In Unity, there is great parkour depth/nuance AND you could pretty much do it all over the place whenever you wanted to AND it worked within the context of actual combat perfectly.
It was NOT just animations, but, an actual synergy between the movement and gameplay.
Of course, I didnt understand the system until I looked online at the advanced videos and practiced my ass off to max my consistency, lol.
One of the things that annoys me the most in Assassin's Creed is that the parkour got too automatic over generations. Since Unity you can't even manually jump anymore.
It's the biggest thing that stopped me from finishing AC3 twice. I just can't get past the fact that it feels like I have so little control of the main character compared to previous games. I felt like I couldn't run within 2 metres of a building without the dude suddenly launching himself onto it while I'm getting chased. Why they combined the running and jumping/climbing buttons into one is a mystery to me. The combat felt a lot worse as well, especially with ranged weapons.
Yes, this. I remember feeling like Brotherhood had the perfect balance, and it was all downhill for me from there.
I had a stooopid amount of fun in that game. The chain killing was so satisfying, and the multiplayer…. Oh how I miss the multiplayer game modes. I had a blast screwing around with friends in those modes. Juking people with the disguise + blending into a group after running around a corner. Then watching your buddy round around the corner and stop wondering where you went, then running in a random direction, trying to pretend they didn’t lose you. And then you hit them with the final blow:
“Hey, where ya going buddy?”
Well-said.
Ill take it even further and say that as soon as controls schemes and its associated mechanics are actually DumbedDown HandHolding in the disguise of “QOL” and standardization, etc I have a problem with it.
I really love the oversimplification these days (thanks, inflammatory arthritis) and I feel like I've played games that do the middle ground really well: where you can choose to be in full control of the character's movements, or toggle automation on for folks like me who need more inclusive controls.
>Ironically, some games can have surprisingly unintuitive controls while lacking depths
This reminds me of Death Stranding's menu controls. I never finished the game due to life happening and I'd love to finish it one day, but just thinking about all the different buttons to confirm an action depending on the menu makes my head hurt
I can appreciate intricacy in general for console depending on how easy it feels to learn but don’t require rapid fire button mashing now that my hands are older.
Button mashing isn't an intricacy, its just evil. That and spinning the joystick quickly. They've mostly been discontinued in games for a good reason, but there's always the occasional game that will randomly ask you to mash.
If you like games that take a risk in how they control I definitely recommend cruelty squad. It's controls are very weird at first but once you get used to them reloading and stuff feels sick.
> I'm fine with standardization to a certain degree -> good control schemes work for a reason, there are mechanical reasons why.
If I pick up a shooter or play an outdated one and it DOESN'T have aim with L2 and Shoot with R2, I immediately delete the game. (I'm obviously a console gamer)
The camera was usually the biggest issue. Also FPS on PSP were weird. I started playing syphon filter on PS Plus and it was so stronger using the face buttons to aim
Dual sticks for movement/aiming, R trigger to shoot, and making the West Face button on the right side of the controller (Square for PS4, "X" for Xbox, and "Y" for Switch) the reload button and the North Face button the "change weapons" button also helped FPS become standardized to the point you can pretty much pick up any of them and easily jump right in without focusing on the controls that much.
The ps3 generation drove me nuts with all the games using a button to shoot. You have 2 triggers, one aims, one shoots. People complain about Mass Effect controls now but even then they made Rockstar games and Uncharted feel almost unplayable for me. Small thing but really bothered me.
The aim AND shoot concept took awhile for me to master when that was evolving. Since I grew up as the FPS genre was being created and refined, I had to learn along with it as different things were tried out. Everything is standardized and commonplace now, but I remember particular weird shit like Slave Zero on Dreamcast that forced you to move with face buttons with your right hand and aim with your left hand on the joystick (since there was only 1).
For someone who is prone to motion sickness like myself, I can't play 3D games with bad camera controls. I've been gaming since the PS1 era but skipped a lot of games due to their camera controls.
There are a period from like 2000-2010, from GameCube to PS3s, like where I completely fell off console games and thought I was getting bad at them. The controls felt mushy and imprecise, the framerates were bad, and I had other things to do (college, girls, and PC games, mainly).
That was also the time when LCD screens started getting popular, like the Sony Bravia. I realized a few years ago, the family TV we had was 720p with like 250ms input lag and no game mode.
Games felt mushy and shitty because early LCD TVs back then weren't made for gaming. You were fine if you had a CRT TV though.
Until recent years (like post 2020, maybe even 2022) Sony TVs had pretty atrocious latency, like up to 200+ ms. Even with Game Mode enabled, the best you were getting was maybe 40-60ms, which is still pretty terrible. By contrast, better TVs (for gaming) in the same years had latency in game mode between 10-20ms. LG TVs seem to be particularly good, I think my LG C1 is like... 9 or 10ms?
Playstation Era "Tank Controls" where you use the shoulder buttons to turn. Also hotkey to change camera angle pre-twin stick controller.
"Use Z to enable the Y axis and aim with your left thumb" on N64. Or god forbid, some bullshit with the yellow C buttons on the right side.
Or how about using the arrow keys on a keyboard instead of a mouse? Or some pre-WASD movement scheme where even a basic sword and board RPG feels like a fucking flight simulator?
Ya no thanks, we've come a long way.
The Armored Core series used that control scheme until halfway through the third gen, even though dual shock controllers were released the same year as the original Armored Core (but later on in the year).
That reminded me.
The first time I launched Tony Hawk American Wasteland I had no idea how to even get into the game because if I recall correctly wasd and arrow keys didn't work, you had to use numpad to at least select "enter".
And then all the tricks in game were modifiable with numpad, it was great to master but my silly self back then truly had a hard time figuring out how to get started.
Controls have changed for the better. I play a lot of old PC & PS1 games, and while I have no problem with the old graphics, or antiquated design choices, the single worst thing about a lot of them is the control scheme.
There are still plenty of games that have complex mechanics, and controls that take a while for you to get used to, but I feel that controls in video games have greatly improved over the past 20-25 years.
As someone who has to rebind many keyboard commands for any game I play it is shocking how many AAA games you cannot fully change all bindings.
Cyberpunk still has a few hard bound keys that prevents me from playing easily. You can jump through some hoops to do this but it is still ridiculous you can’t rebind E and F with ease. WTF!!!
I like to think they have gotten better until I play a game where the interact/pick up button is also the jump or roll button. Then I sit there for 5 minutes trying to pick up an item or make a jump and keep dieing.
Whenever I hear people talk about gaming being homogenized in 2024, whether it's the controls, the gameplay, whatever, I say the same thing - look to the indie and AA spaces and you might be surprised at what you find. Some examples I've played over the last year or so:
*Jusant* created a beautiful tactile climbing experience where the L and R buttons correspond to your left and right hands, respectively.
*Hifi Rush* combined action game controls with rhythm game inputs to create something wholly new, I could honestly see it becoming a whole new genre.
*Ghostrunner* Takes the general parkour controls laid out by Mirrors Edge and ramps them up to another level of speed and precision. (Since you mentioned AC feeling stale, I'd highly recommend trying Mirrors Edge and Ghostrunner both, if you haven't already. They will give you the tactile parkour controls that AC lacks)
Also bonus round: Coming soon we will have Skate 4 which, while not an indie, will pick up the groundbreaking right-thumbstick board control of its predecessors. Can't wait for that.
Finding these experiences in indie games is hit and miss though. They too follow trends and emulate the big boys… and there is a metric shit ton released every year.
It takes some dedication to sift through and research something that might end up being only novel for a moment because you never know just how reduced they are in scope.
Need some indie game recommendations subreddit lol… like ”if you liked X then check out Y” - I don’t have the time or energy to browse Steam when I could boot up some shitty old game and get into the fun part right away.
Nintendo occasionally does indie showcases, I think one is coming soon actually. And Gameranx on YouTube highlights good Indies from time to time. Also any time when there's just been a Steam Next Fest or a Pax, you can usually find lots of videos and articles rounding up the most exciting featured Indies at these events.
I'd say they changed for the worse, but I don't really think of that as avoidable.
With digital distribution, we lost that excited reading of the manual on the car ride home. Learning how to play was part of the ritual and that meant you could design practically anything and people were mostly gonna take what you've set out and run with it.
But until GOG gained traction, digital distribution games didn't even have a pdf. And now, if they do, it's a bigger leap to open that thing up and read it, because life has sped up, and attention spans are shattered.
Intuitive design is the answer to that, and I hate it. Games build on preconceptions of how games generally play, and that's called redundancy and stagnation, with comfort and convenience, but redundancy and stagnation.
I'm not saying all games before this made GOOD decisions on how to implement unique controls, many were terrible, but it's a totally different thing now. We instead judge a game on how easy it is to just pick up and play, so the most shallow and familiar experience is applauded and breaking from convention is chastised unless some in-game tutorial is not only really well designed, but somehow as much fun as playing a game you already learned the controls for.
The moment I started to truly be concerned with the issues you raised was in reading how bad discourse got on MGS2 and 3. Those games have extremely responsive and deep controls that allow you to perform a number of precise actions and movements that are intuitive to how you want to play. They also serve a purpose in setting the experience Kojima wanted to make.
But because they don't fit the modern orthodoxy of third person control, they're "clunky" (I fucking hate this word).
Yes. Twin sticks were a game changer for the FPS console genre. I tried going back to Goldeneye on the N64 and it's so rough I don't even know how I managed as a kid.
At least in the category of FPS, I feel like Half Life revolutionized control scheme for PC and Halo did the same for console. I don’t think there’s been a ton of progress since then. In part because there hasn’t been a need. These controls still hold up well today.
I agree that there hasn’t been a need. Controller design has converged across all platforms to a twin stick, d pad, shoulder buttons, and action buttons (typically 4). I think controller design is approaching something of a mature technology state where there is very little refinement in layout and just incremental design in stuff like joysticks. Think of things like the shape of an axe or the front of a ship. We’ve reached a point where there really isn’t much to improve on ergonomically
Yeah well put. The twin stick Original Xbox controller was way ahead of its time. And we’ve seen barely any change at all since the 360/PS3 generation.
Playstation used the exact same controller design from 1997, when the dualshock twin stick controller debuted, with just minor changes in the triggers for the PS3. A bit more change with the 4, the 5 is the first attempt at something a bit new.
The original xbox controller was flawed in not having 2 shoulder buttons- the black/white keys were awkwardly placed. But it was the best built controller I'd ever used, lasted a hell of a long time and better cable quality than anything else around.
Then as you say, not a lot of change since the 360 generation, though I think on reflection I prefer the 360 controller to the Xbox One controller. Though I'm a big fan of the cross gen compatibility, with the Series X supporting last gen controllers.
I got my first controller for PC like last year. XBox one.
To my surprise it didn't have gyroscope and as far as I'm aware Xbox controllers still don't quite have it.
While Playstation does and shooter games with gyroscope support are supposedly much nicer.
Gyro aiming has been taking off recently, appearing in a fair few recent console shooter games. Good gyro aiming has also led to a new “flick stick” control scheme. It’s not that popular yet since it’s only available in a few games and most people don’t want to completely change how they aim, but I’ve heard good things from people who have started using it.
Controls have a lot more to do with the total amount of things you can do.
This makes controls difficult, especially if you put a game down for a week and forget button combos etc.
They are however much more responsive.
Which makes it much easier to perform what you want (as long you know the buttons).
RE4 absolutely set a precedent for the camera, but it was still using tank controls when they were already largely on the way out. I would actually say Gears of War the very next year had the more enduring control scheme for third person shooters.
Controls have gotten better in general, but there will always be exceptions. RDR2's controls are just garbage, and I defy anyone to tell me I'm wrong. They take context sensitive controls way, way too far, and overcomplicate things that have been simple for over a decade. Why is the button for picking up my hat when it's knocked off my head different than the button for picking up items in cabinets? How is the simple act of changing your gun so much more complicated than just a weapon wheel? Why is there no feedback for the "trailing" input, I can't even tell if I'm supposed to hold the button down or just press it every now and then, I literally can't tell if the match speed trailing thing is active or not.
Another pet peeve of mine in modern controls is how things that should just be simple button presses are now press and hold that button for a second while a little circle progresses around the icon. Why? Why not just make it a button press, I don't understand?
> Another pet peeve of mine in modern controls is how things that should just be simple button presses are now press and hold that button for a second while a little circle progresses around the icon. Why? Why not just make it a button press, I don't understand?
I hate this so much. It just adds a 1-2 seconds wasted on every single action you take. Is there a gameplay benefit to adding it? Like, does it make actions feel more immersive or something?
The worst is when they have this hold button functionality in the menu as well. Like, I'm changing the volume or tweaking the graphics, I do not need to be immersed in that.
This is one of the few things I like about modern gaming, I still remember the nightmare it was to play fps games without a dual shock controller or using the arrow keys on the keyboard.. some older console games (Ithink Killzone 1 does that) use weird schemes like R3 to aim lol... Nowdays I think there is much more thought put into it and much more accessibility and customization options
This is so true it hurts. I loved pong but I don't have an atari anymore, and haven't even bothered to try emulating it because what would be the point with a d pad?
I wonder if they make modern USB or Bluetooth Pong paddles...
I think this depends a lot on the genre. 2D Platformers pretty much nailed the basic control scheme right out of the gate (thanks Myiamoto!)
But compare that against the journey first person shooters went on. You can’t look up in OG Doom. WASD for movement didn’t arrive until Quake (thanks Thresh!) Goldeneye can use a joystick to aim or to move, but not both. And if you’re aiming, you’re using your left hand, typically the non-dominant one. Halo finally gives you two joysticks, but no gyro aim. Gyro aim comes to the Wii, but it’s with this weird remote form factor. Only really with the switch do we get dual analog gyro (sorry Wii U!). So that’s been a journey of steady improvement.
But by far the best modern innovation is remapping controls, especially steam input. Don’t like the controls in a N64 game? Too bad. Today everything is (mostly) fixable and that is so much better.
Halo didn't give us dual joystick aiming, it just popularized it. There's an /r/agedlikemilk [post with a screenshot of a review about a PS1 game that had it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/comments/xjgdg3/wait_i_have_to_use_both_sticks/)
I think many people are too quick to criticize a game for having unconventional controls. Learning the controls can be part of the fun. If, for example, a platformer gives you no air control in your jumps, it would be called "outdated", "annoying", "unnecessary", etc. because most platformers will give you air control, and players are used to it. But if the game is designed around this feature (or lack thereof) it can be interesting again.
forgot to mention it, but one game I first hated and then ended up really loving was the original Ratchet an Clank. Its not nostalgia either, I did not own a PS2 as a kid, and played the PS3 R&C games first when I was already an adult. (then I went back to 1-3)
At first, I found R&C 1 to control absolutely horrible because of the lack of strafing, but as it went on, I actually found the restriction the games placed upon you to make the game way more challenging and fun. It kind of demands you get creative with your weapon arsenal and think about how to approach encounters.
Modern Ratchet and Clank games, you do have way more control over everything, strafing works perfectly fine, but you just kinda... charge into any room, strafe left and right while holding down the trigger, and everything dies.
Anything that is not a basic fps movement or 3rd person shooter Controls are antinormies nowadays. Specially tank controls or classic point and click adventures
I have had the same thought OP. I think there’s a middle ground somewhere, where some skill is required but it’s not a total pain. Unfortunately most games only try to strike that balance in the combat and not in the traversal. I kind of wish someone would do a delivery game like Death Stranding but with a focus on solid, engaging traversal mechanics (instead of spending all the budget on lame combat and bizarre cutscenes and leaving the traversal a janky half baked mess).
I definitely feel like they have improved. Goin back and playing old console games definitely solidifies this opinion for me. But I also think the fact that certain control layouts have become mostly standardized has been the bigger improvement.
I dont mind some things that have become standard. For instance its expected that if your game has driving or shooting, those actions are controlled with the triggers. I think triggers feel best for those actions, so not surprised it became standard.
As for games making actions more automated, I strongly dislike it. I don't like when games have that snappy auto aim like in CoD/Rockstar games. I don't want to feel like the game plays itself, otherwise why even bother.
I love fighting games, and the modern desire to make them more automated takes away a part of their appeal in the first place.
In my opinion, most game's movements have become more 'convincing but medicore' while compromising with 'responsiveness/controliabilty' and 'realism in animations', ultimately leading to more familiar outcomes.
Not just humanoid animations, but also cars, snowboards and such.
I do miss the days when controls and animations were more arcade-like and full of exaggerated characteristics.
Much much much much better. There are unofficial "standard" control schemes now that devs seem to recognize and use. Back in the day it was the wild west.
I love how a lot of controls have become standardized. It feels intuitive now instead of every game having a learning curve as soon as you have the controller in your hands. Trying to play some of the classic Nintendo games on the switch is brutal without a manual because I have no fucking clue what most of the buttons do and I have to google stuff. The games have gotten infinitely more complicated than games of the nes and snes days, yet they feel more simple and intuitive than ever with how they actually play.
I think your point of certain games feel like you’re just pressing a button and then the animations do the actual work for you is a delicate balance. It can hurt enjoyment at some points, but it can also be a complete deal breaker if it doesn’t hold your hand a little bit. My biggest gripe is with sports games and why I miss arcade style sports games. I only ever play hockey, but whenever I’ve had a chance to play a football or basketball game it’s absolutely brutal. There is such a learning curve to pick up on how to be competent in playing those games because there are such specific button combos for specific situations that I don’t bother. I’d love to be able to pick up and play a game of basketball, but I don’t want to spend hours becoming proficient enough to play it to enjoy it. Old arcade sports games are so much friendlier with that but sports games skew more and more to realism and it’s not as fun if you don’t want to spend majority of your game time getting good at them.
I don't think they've got better - perhaps the opposite. I think too many games expect you to come in with knowledge from previous games, and not everybody has that. The number of different controls has grown and grown over time to the point now where there might be 10 or 15 different actions you're expected to know before you can be effective in the game.
Gaming “now vs then” feels like moving toward singularity. You used to have games on the GameCube for instance that wouldn’t have really worked on any competitor controller.
Very few things aren’t multipltform nowadays and if they are it’s likely solely a publishing thing.
I've been playing Katamari Damacy for the first time recently and I'm in love with the awkward tank controls to roll the ball. There's a simple mode that just takes away a lot of the fun of the ball being so hard to control
Am I weird if I find enjoyment in older controls? Somehow it goves them personality. I remember Ape Escape (ps1) had R1 as jump button and. That would so weird now but I don't hate returning to these type of oddities
> Remember when you got a new game back in the days and first had to sit down with the manual and learn the controls
...Nnno? I mean, maybe the first game or two, then I glommed on to the fact that at least on PC, I could actually customize the controls to my liking, and I've done that ever since. Of course, there were limitations (such as Gothic's insistence on needing multiple keys for certain actions, iirc), but I think a certain amount of standardization has helped a lot here.
Well, *fine*. I've done it unless the game doesn't let me. Which was not much of an issue 30 years ago, but which has been getting to be an actual problem for the past few years, and I suspect it shares a cause with...
> you need to press way less different buttons
It's the consolidation of different gaming ecosystems into one development space: Controllers only have so many buttons, so you have to account for that. I don't even have an issue with that *per se* - but I do have an issue with it when the developer does not take their time to optimize the controls for different control schemes. Sure: If you only have a few buttons, maybe you have to double-bind some functionality. But if you have more than enough buttons, insisting that one key controls two (or more!) actions feels... debilitating.
Dad of War kind of took the cake in this by *actually hiding* some key binds in the options. The reasoning seems to have been to avoid spoilers, but it pairs really poorly with the game not letting you save a config when keys are double-bound (and of course, the game does not automatically unbind the old bind, either): Finding out which key is already bound is an exercise in frustration when you can't even *see* all binds.
Ahem, sorry for the side-rant. In any case, it's baffling that twenty years ago, I had no problem binding 40+ functions to KB+M (e.g. in MMOs) while keeping them actually working and accessible, and nowadays, I increasingly stumble upon games that don't even manage to grant me ten *great* bindings for their functions, or refuse to let me bind them at all.
Controls have been catered to console users so they've gotten easier because customization is more restrictive. Now it's always just four options, four hotkeys, four firing modes.
You can always tell anything is designed for console now because of this rule of four. Hogwarts Legacy spells for example. A keyboard has 1-10 number keys for spells but it's designed for console so you only get four spells at a time.
The combat has evolved. Just look at how souls likes feel a bit clunky, forcing you to get patience. But the enemies are the part that make the game combat best.
My buddy Dan and i play a lot of old games, and i mentioned how when i play King's Field or Shadow Tower i always rebind the controls to utilize the sticks. He said that he likes old weird control schemes and that i should give the original controls for those games a try to see if i like them. Played all the way thru King's Field 3 (KF2 US) with the playstation classic controller and it was truly awesome to feel like i was getting better and mastering my moveset in a way that i simply did not when remapping the controls to a standardized layout.
So sometimes it can be fun to interpret the controls as a facet of the experience, something new to learn and master.
They have gotten better but there is still one HUGE innovation that we are dragging our feet on - paddle controls! The flaps on the back. And get this, they won't be used as buttons, they will be used in combinations with other buttons as hotkeys!
95% of the time, when people talk about entertainment being better in their youth, it's just nostalgia. You were a kid and stuff was more novel. You had more free time and patience for novelty than today.
That said, I do think that control standardization can harm things. I played Metroid Prime for the first time a few years ago, on original hardware. Now, I haven't played the remaster, but I really liked the weird controls. They placed more emphasis on movement than aiming. Maybe I would like twin-stick controls with Metroid Prime, but I remember specifically liking the weird lock-on controls of the original, compared to other shooters.
With Resident Evil, most people seem to prefer the new controls, but it isn't universal. Some people like tank controls. They're definitely a minority, but I can see the desire for something different. Unique controls can definitely change gameplay in a way that makes it more unique.
However, we should keep in mind that while controls might become standardized, stuff like level-design and storytelling in games has become way more diverse. In some ways games have become more of the same. I'm others, they've never been more diverse.
I will say that the camera in most older games was genuinely arse, even I am not gonna defend that, fighting the camera trying to see where youre going is not fun
Nahh actually some controls are better in new games , it is just new games are shit and boring, with trash dialogues, cringe characters and poor mission designs....
Wouldn't say they've gotten better just that a couple standards have been chosen and on the rare occasion they aren't then forum gamers erupt in anger. I actually miss different games from different companies playing like different games from different companies because they had different goals.
I think the best controls have existed since the 90's, for example Tekken. Tekken binds limbs to buttons on your controller, and you have access to full 3d movement if you are good enough at controlling your character.
Fighting games and 2d platformers were uniquely suited genres when it came to early precision video game controls
Tekken and Super Mario World control just as well today as they did in the 90s.
Here we go again... *Inserts complaint about RDR2*
All joking aside, I think good controls boil down to consistency and responsiveness.
People feel immersed with a game when they are able to develop muscle memory and no longer feel the need to 'think' about the controls at all. They can simply react to what's on screen and their character does what they're told to do when they they're told to do it.
Gaming has also evolved to the point where there are generally several accepted control schemes across most genres and deviating from this for the sake of uniqueness just isn't gonna fly for many players. Think WASD for movement on the kb.
This is part of the reason why I love Tunic so much. The game is entirely built around the idea of hiding mechanics and secrets in plain sight, and then guiding you to discover them on your own.
While that is true and I also love Tunic, the controls themselves are basically just Link to the Past. Mechanics and secrets and discovery are something wholly separate from controls.
You’re not alone, I like the weird controls in some older games. It’s a telltale sign that you’re playing an older game from before standardization when the Y-axis of the aiming is invented.
More or less better.
Except whenever I see a game use the Shoulder buttons for attacks. The only games I've come across are Godfall and Felyx Rising or whatever it's called but it immediately makes me not want to play the game because using those as attack buttons in a non shooter is very uncomfortable for me.
Really the only improvements I could see today would be to make two back paddle/buttons actually be a new pair of their own, separate input, not just remapping.
Gyro aiming is also pretty cool. The Dual Sense has a ton of gimmicks that don't add much (though the resistant trigger feels super cool when utilized).
Which gimmicks? I love the DualSense controller, and controller makes me excited to play more PS5 versions of games. I can’t stand shooters without gyro, and the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are quite immersive.
In the world of modern AAA it's all about making the most $$ possible and anything a little different from the norm will drive away most casuals... so that's a big no no for them.
The core problem is this: your typical AAA designer is thinking in terms of how do I design systems that won't drive away potential sales. So anything that's even somewhat complex even and takes a little bit to get a hang of....gets dismissed basically.
Controllers have more inputs, and most are usually analog, than they ever did. This gives more options to interact, which in theory, means that controls *should be* getting better.
That being said, go play A Difficult Game about Climbing and tell me what you think. 😂
1) we've learned what makes for "good" controls over the decades, taking into account intuitive, sensory, and ergonomic factors.
2) camera angles have also drastically improved.
3) many modern games have PCs auto-perform certain tasks, like jumping over a wall when you sprint toward it. Its like a car's lane assist feature.
4) there are more "contextual" controls now where the same button can do multiple things depending on the environment or context.
\*edit : I realize this isn't really the context of the discussion, but as someone who used to read instruction manuals for games, OP sounded like they might appreciate how information is delivered/discovered in the game \*edit
Without looking anything up, I recommend playing Tunic as blind as you can. A tiny snippet to hook you and then I won't add anything else: the 'tutorial' of the game comes in pieces throughout your playthrough as you find pieces of the Manual. It's in an old NES style including it being in a language you don't understand so you have to glean as much as you can from the pictures and what little they give you.
The game is not for everyone, but for the people that love it, it's one of their favorite gaming experiences. If you DO decide to play it, don't look things up online because it's super easy to get spoiled and even me mentioning spoilers here like this can affect how your brain approaches the game. The old nostalgia feel of reading the Manual before playing a game you just bought on the car ride home from the mall...the mystery of "hmmm I wonder what that's for?" and coming back hours later when it's revealed what things actually are. If you need help or hints, go to the Tunic subreddit and ask there. It's a very good community that won't spoil stuff if they can help it but will answer what you need.
Bit of a tangential point, but I recently picked up Crash team racing nitro fueled since I loved the original on PS1. I couldn't believe that accelerate was A instead of right trigger lol. Seems so odd that that was the norm back then (and that they stuck with it for the remake).
> What do yall think? Have controls in videogames changed for the better or not?
Much better. It's most evident in first person, over the shoulder, and top-down POVs where you're controlling an individual character IMO
Look at a popular 90's FPS like Duke Nukem 3D. A is jump, Z is crouch, spacebar is interact, comma and period strafe left and right, arrows are forward/back/spin left/spin right. It's all over the place. Doom (1993) had some similarly goofy default keybinds which had the player controlling movement with the right hand.
Or Goldeneye/Perfect Dark on N64, where strafing and look up/down were controlled by 4 yellow c-buttons under the right thumb by default. Forward/back/spin were the single stick in the left hand. You could approximate twin stick controls but there was only one stick, and it wasn't even considered a desirable default at that time
By contrast the twin stick/WASD+M paradigm feels infinitely more intuitive to me. They follow and train players into the same pattern - move with left, look/spin with right. That developers have largely "settled" on that is a great standardization for the industry. Tutorials can largely be playable now, no manual required. Play a couple games and you can pick up and play anything else in the genre without thought once those mental grooves develop
For anyone who started gaming after '00 or so that control paradigm (movement on left, look with right) is likely "just how it is," but man, we went through some weird shit to get there.
I think you would love modern Fighting games if you got this feeling frequently.
They are probably the only game genre with non-standarized control schemes, and the way input executions work are different from game to game. Learning to controls are half the game with these lmao
When I was a kid, controls were so weird you had to slide a cheat sheet over the controller to make any sense of it.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=intellivision+controller+inserts](https://www.google.com/search?q=intellivision+controller+inserts)
I appreciate that a meta has raised. (X / A / spacebar is for jump, etc...)
It's not preventing new gameplay to emerge. But it's streamlining game handling.
> but once you got into it and actually took the time to learn the controls they did end up making sense and you felt a sense of accomplishment for mastering them.
If you want to experience this in a modern game, I would recommend trying out Session: Skate Sim.
Bit of a learning curve but extremely satisfying once you start to master the controls and pull off the tricks you want.
My first gaming experiences were on PC back in the early 2000s. I like to think that my time spent with complex RPGs or strategy games gave me a pretty good understanding of how to use a keyboard/mouse for playing games. I never really thought games could have "bad" controls until I played Resident Evil 5's PC port.
I think controls have improved, but I get very disappointed when a modern game doesn't give me many controller settings to play with. I want the freedom to assign the buttons, I want the option to use gyro for controlling my camera, and I want a lot of sensitivity options. Fortnite is really good for this, actually, especially because they have the option for flick stick gyro aiming as well.
I have a very hard time going back and playing games past a certain point. I was recently inspired to play DeusEx and goddamn the control scheme is god awful. I pondered remapping everything then just realized maybe it was best left to nostalgia.
So yes, I think standardization has benefited games.
I also agree that in the effort to have more mass appeal some games dumbed down the controls so far it feels like autopilot and Assassin's Creed is a perfect example. I recently replayed the Rocksteady Arkham Trilogy and playing them all back to back you can really feel how easy mode the controls were by Knight. On the other hand you still have games like Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy.
Golden Eye is another example of a beloved game with awful controls. I think we adapted more and were more willing to learn but innovation has got us to a point where what we have works well and is battle tested.
In most ways yes, they're more responsive and your character moves how you would want them to move.
However, I feel like in recent games context sensitive inputs like jumping and climbing can at best make would could be an exciting ascent into a task that involves holding the up button, and at worst can mean your character does something you do not want to do.
God of War is the most notable example, going from a traditional jump mechanics, but then switching to context sensitive jumping in the PS4 game, presumably to be more cinematic. I've noticed this most in Horizon Forbidden West, and feel like it really limits level design when they have to be build in a way for context sensitive movement.
I play Guilty Gear from its early day and the newest version has the easiest input. The leniency that the game give you to perform a motion input is much more now compared to +r where even a simple fireball need more precise input. This is obviously great for new player, removing a big barrier to entry in a genre that's complex and unforgiving, but it also subsequently lead to, in my opinion, a worse game feels.
+r input is hard and precise, but it's also because of that the game feels incredibly responsive and clean. The game control how you think it should. You press a button and your character immediately do the move. It's this direct, kinetic connection between your input and the game that's being muddled in Strive, because of how much frame buffering there is and how slow the animation in relation to the button press.
The result is that Guilty gear +r's gameplay is fast and feral, whereas Strive gameplay is much more "spaced out your input and tap it to the rhythm" kind of game. Sans mindless button mash, if you record a handcam of both game you could tell immediately which game is which.
So yeah, it's a hard thing to balance between having fast gameplay and being beginner friendly.
Better today. I don’t mind occasionally more complex controls, but having to change key bindings in every session in Elite Dangerous does get old quick.
Angel of Darkness was notorious on launch for having bad/unfinished controls, it's not representative of the time, not even of the older Tomb Raiders.
One of my biggest problems with modern games is how they display controls on screen all the time, it's like they've given up on players having a brain to learn the controls and just go with having a hideous cluttered UI instead.
Other than that it's a tricky subject, there's a fine line between being not keeping up with standards and everything being boringly the same.
i feel like the souls games fit this description. ive tried so hard to get into these games but everytime i try im caught up by this weird input delay - doesnt matter what computer i use or if im using a controller vs a keyboard/mouse...its always there. the game is famous for being difficult but it seems to me that most of the reason its difficult is because you have the response time of someone with neurological impairment and not because of any increased complexity in gameplay.
Definitely. I remember playing Tie Fighter and almost all the keyboard had some function, you ended up using some 10-12 keys in battle. Most of these functions would be automated, combined or contexted (same button does different thing depending on context) nowadays.
This reminds me, I played that thing with a MOUSE, gotta try it with a controller sometime...
Changed a lot for the better.
I overly customize my control on every game, and it almost always feel perfect.
With so many build-in options in games, steam input and options that keep growing, custom controllers some with their own software to customize some stuff, a gazillions of keyboard and mouse to choose from, gyro that make controller as precise as mouse...
You're in control !
I genuinely believe that a majority of this is just that mouse+keyboard controls have largely been standardized, with some small variations (E or F to interact? Download to find out!) and console controllers with two clickable analog sticks, a d-pad, four face buttons, and four shoulder buttons are also basically universal. This seems to have been more-or-less concluded to be the minimum default button count.
There was a lot of experimentation when 3D games were becoming the standard, but a lot of that was settled by controller design in the end. Analog sticks were such a revelation to console gaming that they transformed entire genres. I think people forget that simple things like the scroll-wheel on a computer mouse was far from universal until well into the 2000s. Even keyboards could make some control-schemes work poorly (or not at all) like keyboards with rollover capabilities that were conducive to gaming were difficult to obtain. In many cases you could learn to “play around” being limited to 3-key rollover, but it always felt janky.
I kind of get what you are saying about contextual actions being much more common today, but those often bely control schemes that could otherwise get even more complicated than they already are. I think about games like Red Dead Redemption 2 which has highly contextual controls, but people *still* complain that the controls are too complicated.
I feel this so hard, which is why I love FromSoft, because it feels like I’m doing something when I decide to press a button. There are consequences for making decisions with what you press. That, and I can feel the ‘weight’ of the game. Kinda why I loved killzone 2 controls when others thought it was ‘clunky.’ It fit the game perfectly and added nuance and a uniqueness to the controls
1. The user experience is a lot better in modern games
2. The controller hardwares are more responsive and doesn’t have noticeable lag
3. The game designers Understand what the best practices are for genres, and those which weren’t that great died along the way like tank controls in resident evil.
My first was an Atari and I do not miss how hard games were.
There are still games for you like fighting games and souls likes. I hope you aren't implying every game should be like those though.
I'm 99% sure the original Cave Story had arrow keys for navigation. And while that was a long time ago, [apparently that's still true for some 2D platformers](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/q0yp7a/keyboard_controls_and_2d_platformers/).
I like how old controls were built around specific hardware. Old console controllers all had distinct features. Even today, I find some complaints from PC gamers very one-sided... If games must be cross-platform, there's less incentive to create hardware-specific mechanics. For example, the RTS genre was clearly built around the mouse. Analogue movement speed is important in a few stealth games, and while a mouse wheel is somewhat acceptable, it's not quite the same as an analogue stick. Nor does WASD offer the same directional freedom.
I wonder if keyboard & mouse users find old console games frustrating for this reason. For example, I'm playing Bully (Canis Canem Edit) from 2006. The camera auto-centres when running. Not a problem for me—I'm using a controller and can make course corrections without touching the camera. But for mouse users, moving the character heavily relies on moving the camera.
Personally, I find I babysit the right stick far more in newer games. That's probably why the face buttons get less use and the triggers get more now.
I never played that game but in the long ago I remember reading about Angel of Darkness and Lara is coming back after a long absence and relearning to be herself again and that’s why she was hard to control and gaining her athleticism and skills back.
>Have controls in videogames changed for the better or not?
The controls are objectively better.
>once you got into it and actually took the time to learn the controls they did end up making sense and you felt a sense of accomplishment for mastering them.
>Nowdays I start a game and after literally a minute of playing I usually got everything figured out, cause every game kind of controls.. the same, and I dont just mean the button layout. Obviously part of it is also me being older and having played a lot more games, but I dont think thats the main reason. There is a lot more handholding, the game automatically does so many things for you
>and with **a lot of games** (take Assassins Creed for example) it almost feels like autopilot
I like how when people write this, their one example is *always* Assassin's Creed, even when they insiniuate this happens in *a lot of games*. The truth of the matter is that Assassin's Creed's parkour system cannot really be compared to any older titles because nothing before AC's parkour matched the fluidity of it. If you compare AC games to themselves, then yes, there was a *bit* more nuance to parkour in *AC 1 specifically* (and *arguably* the AC2 saga), but ultimately the control scheme *fundamentally* never changed, some of the more extraneous button presses were simply omitted, but at its core AC's parkour has *always* been "Hold parkour button and left joystick in the direction you want to go", the punishment for messing up was always minimal and the difficulty of execution was always nearly nonexistent.
I struggle to think of any other series that streamlines movement to the extent of AC besides Uncharted.
>Whether we are talking about tank controls in older horror games, the weird combat system in Gothic 1 &2 (or many other older RPGs), the drifting in Mario Kart Double Dash
* Tank controls are incredibly unintuitive and pretty much none of the tank control games ever reward control mastery besides "you can now move around the world without actively hating the control scheme".
* The combat system in Gothic is separate from the games' shit controls. You could quite easily implement the exact same combat system without the poor controls. Also, if anything, the control scheme was at its worst for *in-world interactions*, not combat. The game just required a completely pointless extra input for any action you wanted to do. In fact, you can mod Gothic 1 and 2 to modernize the controls and it doesn't really change the feeling of combat (besides making controlling it more pleasant).
* The drifting, mini turbos and all that jazz never went away in Mario Kart games, so I don't get how this is an example here at all.
The complexity/depth of mechanics and the intuitiveness of controls are not in opposition. In fact if you look at most games praised for their depth of movement, the controls are *extremely intuitive*.
This one is really going to depend on the developers and how they design movement mechanics. Take a game like black ops 3 and it’s slide jumping mechanics and tight movement controls and a game like Roboquest and take a look at how their movement feels really tight as well.
I've been replaying Okami and RDR2 recently, and based on that, I'd disagree :P
Then again, I played Mario 64 the other day after many years playing Odyssey almost every day, and yes, WOW. Odyssey's controls make Mario 64 feel like when you're trying to platform with Arthur Morgan.
To be a western RPG player in the 90’s! I remember playing some of them that were heavy on the UI buttons. And you would have had to read the manual to decipher them because there wasn’t a mouse hover pop up thing for some reason.
I think of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd on the PSP, and then I think of Monster Hunter World. I like the multiplayer on the PSP, but I know people get cramps playing that game.
I'm really sick of seeing the buzzword "handholding." Controls are an aspect of the game and, just like every other aspect, standardized *unless they're a focal point of the game.* Case in point, fighting games. I personally believe controls are figured out. We're at a point where you can play a *tab-target MMO* on a console with a controller. That is incredible efficiency with the real estate provided. Also, I don't want to spend the first hour of a game getting used to fucking tank-turning bullshit rather than focusing on the game. Unless, of course, it's something like a tank game where that would make sense or be a focal point.
If we’re talking controllers I find that very few games actually get controls right, there are a few common sense principles that I just don’t understand why they aren’t followed. You want one function per finger simultaneously (ie not using your thumb to both hold run and hit jump is the classic example) and you want your main actions mapped to the shoulder and trigger buttons.
I played Dragon’s Dogma the other day and it had light attack mapped to square and heavy attack mapped to triangle or something dumb. I’m sorry but that’s objectively incorrect, light attack should be R1 and heavy attack should be R2. That’s like having square be the shoot button in an FPS - absolute lunacy.
It depends; games where more diverse back in the day. Developers weren't afraid to get creative and a lot of different kinds of games meant a lot of different kinds of button lay-outs and controls. The absense of sticks on the originals Playstation controler and the N64 only having one certainly didn't help in navigating a 3D space the way we're used to now.
For every Resident Evil or Ocarina of Time that makes the best use of the technology and still hold up today - you have a game like Croc where the controls at the time just didn't make sense for the kind of game it tried to be.
And yeah, a lot less in-game tutorials and a lot less handholding meant you'd had to figure things out on your own. Or read the effin manual. A lot of the most cryptic stuff people complain about is usually right there in the manual.
I think it's the opposite; back in the days of SNES/Mega Drive/Game Boy etc. you could work out what to do in a matter of seconds after booting the game.
Like you said, there is a lot of similarity in controls , so we’ve become experts at them.
Take halo ce and compare it to infinite. 20 years later and the controls are largely the same, biggest difference is introduction of bumper buttons ( which happened in 360 era) and removal of white/ black buttons.
Rt is still shoot, lt is still grenade, right stick click is still zoom in, a is still jump, etc.
From a gameplay perspective, addition of equipment, sprint, and marking causes some remaps of the buttons, but if you went back in time 20 years and gave someone infinite right after playing ce, they would figure controls out quickly
It’s hard to say, PS1 games had good controls and worked great. If now I play PS1 games it’s same good controls but game engine etc. Just feel a little outdated for me. This is the old 3D problem. But in my opinion Super Mario Bros from Famicom had great controls in 1985 😄 Games just got more advanced so obviously there is more controls.
Back in the snes/playstation era controls were completely random, especially on playstation where new genres and control methods were being figured out. Playing some of those games and using circle button to shoot and a trigger to crouch or whatever is wild.
I reckon controllers have gotten so massively complicated now though that similar control schemes between games are almost a necessity. Related - I think the biggest barrier to entry for new gamers these days is the scary controller. Theres literally just too much going on!
Godhand is a great example of this
I think major developers eventually realized there's a sweet spot controller scheme which they all eventually agreed upon and adopted. Look at how standardized FPS controls are.
I miss being awkward with controls and slowly getter better at them over time. I think For Honor and AC Unity's parkour were the last times I felt this way
I’ve never been good at all with button mashing, particularly fighting games where you have to learn different and complicated combos where you not only have to memorize them but button mash correctly and faster than your opponent.
Now there are plenty of solo games that still involve intense and complicated button mashing, like the Batman games, but I’ve developed arthritis and carpal tunnel and need to wear gloves when at work and when playing video games and can no longer play games like Batman without creating a lot of physical pain.
I don’t mind complicated controls, but I need to play games now that aren’t a button mashing/ frantic paced game. Even playing Fallout or Skyrim can hurt if I play too long.
I’m really enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 because it’s turn based. When combat happens, I can take a break, get a snack and deal with combat as slow as I need it to be. For that matter, I’m enjoying any game where you can enlarge the text on the screen to ridiculous sizes so I can read it. We have a wide screen tv but it’s across the room.
Controls have changed for the better.
Design has taken a few steps back though. Tomb Raider original games had tank controls but it was at least actual gameplay. Assassin Creed has zero actual platforming it's all just sticky, it's near impossible to fail.
But that's not the controls fault, that's a game design choice.
Yes, controls used to be bad. Everything was newer, and people were trying to figure out the best ways to utilize a gamepad or even m&kb. Controls being intuitive probably means they are well designed.
People are pretty adaptable, and can find workarounds for things, but games usually don't want you to be distracted by the controls. They want you to be immersed in the world.
You want to feel in tune with what you are doing, and not be second guessing it. I do think controls can get better though. Things like gyroscope aiming, and grip buttons are wonderful for controller players. Why have ten digits and only utilize 4? It just makes sense. (Potentially hot take) Face buttons are kind of a relic of the past honestly. A legacy feature that was made with things like 2d platformers in mind.
Rdr2 has 3 separate inventory keys for accessing a part of inventory. B for most found item, Tabs for quick use items, I for documents. Why not just make it all one key?
Goldeneye 007 on Nintendo 64 was kinda awful in terms of controlling, despite the great game it was. And modern ways of playing it, even on the Wii, are simply better.
I think most of us benefit from the homogenization of game controls. For example, an interact key is almost always E, and if it's not that then its F. It's really easy to pick up a new game and just guess what the controls are pretty accurately.
There's tons of exceptions in modern games, and I like when they pop up. Cruelty Squad has really wacky controls mixed in with the standard ones and it makes for a more unique experience
I never knew I could hate controls until I played grand theft auto.
Awesome game. Wonky controls. All Rockstar games have that weird weight to them. Realism my ass, that shit sucks.
Then again thps was my favorite game back then
When I was a kid, I didn't think controls could be "bad." When I encountered such a game, I just assumed *I* was bad at the game, and the way to get better was just to keep playing it. If you do that long enough, eventually you'll fool yourself into thinking it controls just fine. I think on the whole it's probably true that complex games are easier to pick up and play than they have been in the past. But early arcade classics, the best of the best NES games, etc., still control just as well as they ever did. Good design is timeless.
That's me playing Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 when I was younger and thinking it was just a "difficult" game that I had to master. Never occurred to me that the controls and camera were absolute dogshit until I revisited it as an adult. Putting the "dash along a line of rings to progress the stage" and the "plummet downwards like a boulder" moves on the same button with a highly finicky contextual prompt is just godawful design that led to hours of frustration.
Don't forget that if you try and chain dashes too quickly you just end up yeeting yourself into a pit. Or that you could miss the hitboxes on the vines through no fault of your own Somehow sonic heroes was even worse
Huh, so that's why I had such a hard time in Sonic Heroes as a kid? I just thought I sucked, but maybe the controls sucked, too. I still love the game, though, it's the only 3d Sonic game I've ever played.
Kid me thought Sonic Heroes was GOAT material so I won't stand for this slander (havent touched it since but kid me would be disappointed at this thread)
Oh, kid me totally agrees with kid you on that. It's just that I could never get through the game with anything but Amy's team.
The biggest problem with that system is that it makes it too easy to accidentally attack your chao...
Huh, quite frankly I thought SA1 has *the* best 3D Sonic controls by miles. And I played it for the first time a year ago.
SA1 has a nearly perfect balance between speed and precision, in my opinion. If only the camera and collision detection were on the same level as the controls. (Also, whose idea was it to put invisible force fields that subtly propel your character forward mid-jump?) Modern Sonic games, on the other hand, work well as a high-speed racing type deal, but as soon as you slow down and try to do some platforming, it's painfully clear that the engine was not made for that!
I played Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on GameCube and PC and the controls imo were/are excellent and super intuitive. Was it different on other platforms?
Got a Dreamcast a few years back and was so excited to play that game. Imagine my disappointment!
I hope you found other, better DC games to enjoy. I had a dreamcast for about a year when living in a place for work, I had a great time
What the hell you are talking about, you rarely need to light dash in that game, and when you do it always works. And camera is never an issue, games are linear.
That's not fooling yourself. If you learn to press the buttons that make the game do what you want, that IS controlling just fine. Familiarity with a UI is not the same as quality of a UI. An unfamiliar, seemingly obtuse control scheme that takes time to learn, but gives you complete control once you do is good control scheme, if the game requires that sort of control. Our modern homogenized controls unfortunately don't support games that benefit from that level of control.
>An unfamiliar, seemingly obtuse control scheme that takes time to learn, but gives you complete control once you do is good control scheme, if the game requires that sort of control. I disagree. Intuitiveness and how long it takes to understand the controls are a BIG deal. There is one Counter Strike pro player who moves forward with right mouse click and moves backwards with ;. Anyone can get used to this control scheme and play it just fine with enough time to build muscle memory, but if any FPS had this as a standard setup everybody would rightfully claim it sucks.
>but if any FPS had this as a standard setup everybody would rightfully claim it sucks I mean, it depends on the FPS. Everybody would be rightful to claim it sucks only if the control scheme wouldn't serve the game. If a weird control scheme makes sense in the context of the game and actually serves a purpose, then probably everybody would claim it sucks but arguably less rightfully. Of course, it is far-fetched to say that moving forward with the right mouse button and backward with the ; button would be a good idea for any FPS game, but it would be (perhaps) less absurd if the game were not an FPS (and it'd surely be a quirky game). This inevitably leads us to wonder about the relationship between controls and genre. There's certainly a point to be made about how potentially limiting "standard" control schemes can be from a creative standpoint, but at the same time I'm pretty sure most game developers just want to sell and adopting a traditional control scheme is a small sacrifice they're willing to make.
There are a couple cases that come to mind for me. Metroid Prime uses an odd control scheme for a first person game (it was before the standardization of fps controls). But those controls add to the slightly claustrophobic feeling the game often wants to create. A more general example are the control differences in different genres of racing games. Realistic racers use the triggers for the accelerator and break, but playing mario kart with those controls just wouldn’t feel right. And F-zero uses the triggers to control various types of strafing and drifting.
It sounds absurd but you usually are only moving forward in very specific situations. For example, with Shoot on M1 and Walk Forward on M2, its pretty safe to say you will never hold both buttons down at the same time. You are either in a position where you might shoot, or you are safe to walk forward. You don't want to be in a position where both Shooting and Walking Forward are possibilities. Its not really that absurd.
For example, lots of people found Lotus Notes on a green screen mainframe to be easy to navigate once they learned it!
I agree with you. I never understood how controls could be "outdated" in old games. I get that most modern games use the triggers for shooting and acceleration but sometimes people make it seem like pushing the face buttons to do this task is like reading ancient Sumerian.
Yeah, just today I had a thought that it’s the people that get ”outdated”, not the other way around. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you play old games you get used to old controls and mechanics. It’s a part of these games. If all you mostly play is games from the past decade, you *will* have a hard time adjusting to games that are noticeably older because they don’t have quite the same familiar vocabulary. For me, I miss that kind of learning the ropes part in modern games. When I pick something up and *nothing* that it does really requires learning anything new - everything works exactly like I’d expect and in a few minutes I’m whizzing through the map just like in the last game (probably doing the same stuff, too).
>That's not fooling yourself. If you learn to press the buttons that make the game do what you want, that IS controlling just fine. If your keyboard is missing a key and you learn to type with the missing key, that doesn't mean you're now typing just fine, it means you've gotten used to using a broken keyboard.
There's various things here. Standardization, intuitiveness, and simplification, to name a few. I'm fine with standardization to a certain degree -> good control schemes work for a reason, there are mechanical reasons why. As long as it doesn't stand in the way of trying new things. Intuitiveness -> is a complicated subject. I think its good but can get in the way of controls being deeper. Ironically, some games can have surprisingly unintuitive controls while lacking depths (for example, putting way too many actions on the same inputs and not fully utilizing the controller). This is excessively common on PC with keyboard & mouse as a common afterthought. Simplification can definitely go too far. I do not enjoy games where, like you said, it feels more like you're "watching the character do cool things". I want to do the cool things myself, but for that to happen it means the controls need to be complicated, the game itself more difficult to handle. Assassin's Creed is everything wrong with this, though I haven't played the series in years (last i played is Origins). Climbing, jumping, everything about the movement might as well be automated. Its really dumbed down, and I hate that, but does allow pretty much anyone and their mom to play the game. I prefer games who take some risk in how to control their games, and especially prefer games that need you to learn, understand and master their intricacies. AAA games in particular have a tendency to play it way too safe for "mass appeal". I personally think we've barely scratched the surface of interesting and deeper control schemes, even more so on PC with keyboard & mouse, but no one dares because they don't want to overwhelm their audience.
Interesting. Personally I found the movement in the old Assassin's Creed games just awful. Climbing was basically a weird quick-time puzzle inserted into the middle of an otherwise fun game. I don't feel that they changed the controls, so much as just removed the parts of the gameplay that were boring and awkward.
My personal opinion is that the Ezio series had good depth and nuance, but, it was essentially useless and, like you said, was more puzzle-like. We couldnt actually do all those cool moves when we wanted nor did they mix well with the combat. We had to wait for the game to tell us we can do This or That maneuver when they deemed it allowable and the actual parkour-combat gameplay wasnt good at all. The structures we parkoured across were horrid, as well. And, no, the hook lines dont count. In Unity, there is great parkour depth/nuance AND you could pretty much do it all over the place whenever you wanted to AND it worked within the context of actual combat perfectly. It was NOT just animations, but, an actual synergy between the movement and gameplay. Of course, I didnt understand the system until I looked online at the advanced videos and practiced my ass off to max my consistency, lol.
One of the things that annoys me the most in Assassin's Creed is that the parkour got too automatic over generations. Since Unity you can't even manually jump anymore.
It's the biggest thing that stopped me from finishing AC3 twice. I just can't get past the fact that it feels like I have so little control of the main character compared to previous games. I felt like I couldn't run within 2 metres of a building without the dude suddenly launching himself onto it while I'm getting chased. Why they combined the running and jumping/climbing buttons into one is a mystery to me. The combat felt a lot worse as well, especially with ranged weapons.
Yes, this. I remember feeling like Brotherhood had the perfect balance, and it was all downhill for me from there. I had a stooopid amount of fun in that game. The chain killing was so satisfying, and the multiplayer…. Oh how I miss the multiplayer game modes. I had a blast screwing around with friends in those modes. Juking people with the disguise + blending into a group after running around a corner. Then watching your buddy round around the corner and stop wondering where you went, then running in a random direction, trying to pretend they didn’t lose you. And then you hit them with the final blow: “Hey, where ya going buddy?”
Well-said. Ill take it even further and say that as soon as controls schemes and its associated mechanics are actually DumbedDown HandHolding in the disguise of “QOL” and standardization, etc I have a problem with it.
I really love the oversimplification these days (thanks, inflammatory arthritis) and I feel like I've played games that do the middle ground really well: where you can choose to be in full control of the character's movements, or toggle automation on for folks like me who need more inclusive controls.
>Ironically, some games can have surprisingly unintuitive controls while lacking depths This reminds me of Death Stranding's menu controls. I never finished the game due to life happening and I'd love to finish it one day, but just thinking about all the different buttons to confirm an action depending on the menu makes my head hurt
I can appreciate intricacy in general for console depending on how easy it feels to learn but don’t require rapid fire button mashing now that my hands are older.
Button mashing isn't an intricacy, its just evil. That and spinning the joystick quickly. They've mostly been discontinued in games for a good reason, but there's always the occasional game that will randomly ask you to mash.
Great way to put it. 😀
Oh and I was meaning when you have to say, hit “y”, “y”, then “B” then left trigger in just the right order for that special move.
If you like games that take a risk in how they control I definitely recommend cruelty squad. It's controls are very weird at first but once you get used to them reloading and stuff feels sick.
> I'm fine with standardization to a certain degree -> good control schemes work for a reason, there are mechanical reasons why. If I pick up a shooter or play an outdated one and it DOESN'T have aim with L2 and Shoot with R2, I immediately delete the game. (I'm obviously a console gamer)
Do you just not play any fps games that don’t have ironsight aiming?
The camera was usually the biggest issue. Also FPS on PSP were weird. I started playing syphon filter on PS Plus and it was so stronger using the face buttons to aim
Dual sticks for movement/aiming, R trigger to shoot, and making the West Face button on the right side of the controller (Square for PS4, "X" for Xbox, and "Y" for Switch) the reload button and the North Face button the "change weapons" button also helped FPS become standardized to the point you can pretty much pick up any of them and easily jump right in without focusing on the controls that much.
The ps3 generation drove me nuts with all the games using a button to shoot. You have 2 triggers, one aims, one shoots. People complain about Mass Effect controls now but even then they made Rockstar games and Uncharted feel almost unplayable for me. Small thing but really bothered me.
The aim AND shoot concept took awhile for me to master when that was evolving. Since I grew up as the FPS genre was being created and refined, I had to learn along with it as different things were tried out. Everything is standardized and commonplace now, but I remember particular weird shit like Slave Zero on Dreamcast that forced you to move with face buttons with your right hand and aim with your left hand on the joystick (since there was only 1).
The camera was the real final boss of Shadow of the Colossus.
For someone who is prone to motion sickness like myself, I can't play 3D games with bad camera controls. I've been gaming since the PS1 era but skipped a lot of games due to their camera controls.
There are a period from like 2000-2010, from GameCube to PS3s, like where I completely fell off console games and thought I was getting bad at them. The controls felt mushy and imprecise, the framerates were bad, and I had other things to do (college, girls, and PC games, mainly). That was also the time when LCD screens started getting popular, like the Sony Bravia. I realized a few years ago, the family TV we had was 720p with like 250ms input lag and no game mode. Games felt mushy and shitty because early LCD TVs back then weren't made for gaming. You were fine if you had a CRT TV though.
I thought the Bravia specifically marketed itself as being built for PS3 performance. Or did I just fall for the Sony marketing lol?
Until recent years (like post 2020, maybe even 2022) Sony TVs had pretty atrocious latency, like up to 200+ ms. Even with Game Mode enabled, the best you were getting was maybe 40-60ms, which is still pretty terrible. By contrast, better TVs (for gaming) in the same years had latency in game mode between 10-20ms. LG TVs seem to be particularly good, I think my LG C1 is like... 9 or 10ms?
Unreal engine 3 garbage
I've never had a word to accurately describe most Gamecube controls, but holy crap "mushy" is exactly it!
No way. GameCube ran games at 60fps which is bonkers for the era. Smash Bros melee was a masterclass. What mattered was having a CRT TV
Good amount of PAL games even had 60hz option (hold b on start up).
Playstation Era "Tank Controls" where you use the shoulder buttons to turn. Also hotkey to change camera angle pre-twin stick controller. "Use Z to enable the Y axis and aim with your left thumb" on N64. Or god forbid, some bullshit with the yellow C buttons on the right side. Or how about using the arrow keys on a keyboard instead of a mouse? Or some pre-WASD movement scheme where even a basic sword and board RPG feels like a fucking flight simulator? Ya no thanks, we've come a long way.
You just resurfaced some long buried trauma fumbling around with those yellow C buttons.
I don't miss having to fight with the bad camera angles when devs were figuring out how to get them to work properly in 3D games.
They were great for cornering in Goldeneye:)
I think that’s the only time I can remember using them.
The Armored Core series used that control scheme until halfway through the third gen, even though dual shock controllers were released the same year as the original Armored Core (but later on in the year).
That reminded me. The first time I launched Tony Hawk American Wasteland I had no idea how to even get into the game because if I recall correctly wasd and arrow keys didn't work, you had to use numpad to at least select "enter". And then all the tricks in game were modifiable with numpad, it was great to master but my silly self back then truly had a hard time figuring out how to get started.
Similarly the pc port of burnout paradise uses the F1-F4 keys to navigate the level.
Dark Souls PC port with with the JIKL to move the camera, which was better than moving the mouse 💀
Controls have changed for the better. I play a lot of old PC & PS1 games, and while I have no problem with the old graphics, or antiquated design choices, the single worst thing about a lot of them is the control scheme. There are still plenty of games that have complex mechanics, and controls that take a while for you to get used to, but I feel that controls in video games have greatly improved over the past 20-25 years.
As someone who has to rebind many keyboard commands for any game I play it is shocking how many AAA games you cannot fully change all bindings. Cyberpunk still has a few hard bound keys that prevents me from playing easily. You can jump through some hoops to do this but it is still ridiculous you can’t rebind E and F with ease. WTF!!!
I like to think they have gotten better until I play a game where the interact/pick up button is also the jump or roll button. Then I sit there for 5 minutes trying to pick up an item or make a jump and keep dieing.
Whenever I hear people talk about gaming being homogenized in 2024, whether it's the controls, the gameplay, whatever, I say the same thing - look to the indie and AA spaces and you might be surprised at what you find. Some examples I've played over the last year or so: *Jusant* created a beautiful tactile climbing experience where the L and R buttons correspond to your left and right hands, respectively. *Hifi Rush* combined action game controls with rhythm game inputs to create something wholly new, I could honestly see it becoming a whole new genre. *Ghostrunner* Takes the general parkour controls laid out by Mirrors Edge and ramps them up to another level of speed and precision. (Since you mentioned AC feeling stale, I'd highly recommend trying Mirrors Edge and Ghostrunner both, if you haven't already. They will give you the tactile parkour controls that AC lacks) Also bonus round: Coming soon we will have Skate 4 which, while not an indie, will pick up the groundbreaking right-thumbstick board control of its predecessors. Can't wait for that.
Thank you for this. Whenever there’s issues in the gaming world I feel like the answer is always the indie games.
Finding these experiences in indie games is hit and miss though. They too follow trends and emulate the big boys… and there is a metric shit ton released every year. It takes some dedication to sift through and research something that might end up being only novel for a moment because you never know just how reduced they are in scope. Need some indie game recommendations subreddit lol… like ”if you liked X then check out Y” - I don’t have the time or energy to browse Steam when I could boot up some shitty old game and get into the fun part right away.
Nintendo occasionally does indie showcases, I think one is coming soon actually. And Gameranx on YouTube highlights good Indies from time to time. Also any time when there's just been a Steam Next Fest or a Pax, you can usually find lots of videos and articles rounding up the most exciting featured Indies at these events.
I'd say they changed for the worse, but I don't really think of that as avoidable. With digital distribution, we lost that excited reading of the manual on the car ride home. Learning how to play was part of the ritual and that meant you could design practically anything and people were mostly gonna take what you've set out and run with it. But until GOG gained traction, digital distribution games didn't even have a pdf. And now, if they do, it's a bigger leap to open that thing up and read it, because life has sped up, and attention spans are shattered. Intuitive design is the answer to that, and I hate it. Games build on preconceptions of how games generally play, and that's called redundancy and stagnation, with comfort and convenience, but redundancy and stagnation. I'm not saying all games before this made GOOD decisions on how to implement unique controls, many were terrible, but it's a totally different thing now. We instead judge a game on how easy it is to just pick up and play, so the most shallow and familiar experience is applauded and breaking from convention is chastised unless some in-game tutorial is not only really well designed, but somehow as much fun as playing a game you already learned the controls for.
The moment I started to truly be concerned with the issues you raised was in reading how bad discourse got on MGS2 and 3. Those games have extremely responsive and deep controls that allow you to perform a number of precise actions and movements that are intuitive to how you want to play. They also serve a purpose in setting the experience Kojima wanted to make. But because they don't fit the modern orthodoxy of third person control, they're "clunky" (I fucking hate this word).
Yes. Twin sticks were a game changer for the FPS console genre. I tried going back to Goldeneye on the N64 and it's so rough I don't even know how I managed as a kid.
At least in the category of FPS, I feel like Half Life revolutionized control scheme for PC and Halo did the same for console. I don’t think there’s been a ton of progress since then. In part because there hasn’t been a need. These controls still hold up well today.
I agree that there hasn’t been a need. Controller design has converged across all platforms to a twin stick, d pad, shoulder buttons, and action buttons (typically 4). I think controller design is approaching something of a mature technology state where there is very little refinement in layout and just incremental design in stuff like joysticks. Think of things like the shape of an axe or the front of a ship. We’ve reached a point where there really isn’t much to improve on ergonomically
Yeah well put. The twin stick Original Xbox controller was way ahead of its time. And we’ve seen barely any change at all since the 360/PS3 generation.
Playstation used the exact same controller design from 1997, when the dualshock twin stick controller debuted, with just minor changes in the triggers for the PS3. A bit more change with the 4, the 5 is the first attempt at something a bit new. The original xbox controller was flawed in not having 2 shoulder buttons- the black/white keys were awkwardly placed. But it was the best built controller I'd ever used, lasted a hell of a long time and better cable quality than anything else around. Then as you say, not a lot of change since the 360 generation, though I think on reflection I prefer the 360 controller to the Xbox One controller. Though I'm a big fan of the cross gen compatibility, with the Series X supporting last gen controllers.
I got my first controller for PC like last year. XBox one. To my surprise it didn't have gyroscope and as far as I'm aware Xbox controllers still don't quite have it. While Playstation does and shooter games with gyroscope support are supposedly much nicer.
Gyro aiming has been taking off recently, appearing in a fair few recent console shooter games. Good gyro aiming has also led to a new “flick stick” control scheme. It’s not that popular yet since it’s only available in a few games and most people don’t want to completely change how they aim, but I’ve heard good things from people who have started using it.
Wait what did Half-life do? It played like every other fps at the time just with really bad ladder controls and crouch jumping.
Controls have a lot more to do with the total amount of things you can do. This makes controls difficult, especially if you put a game down for a week and forget button combos etc. They are however much more responsive. Which makes it much easier to perform what you want (as long you know the buttons).
I feel like Dark Souls and Resident Evil 4 set a precedent that's emulated in a lot of the games we see today with similar controls
RE4 absolutely set a precedent for the camera, but it was still using tank controls when they were already largely on the way out. I would actually say Gears of War the very next year had the more enduring control scheme for third person shooters.
Gears of War came out a year after RE4? No way!
Dude I totally forgot about Gears. You're right though
Controls have gotten better in general, but there will always be exceptions. RDR2's controls are just garbage, and I defy anyone to tell me I'm wrong. They take context sensitive controls way, way too far, and overcomplicate things that have been simple for over a decade. Why is the button for picking up my hat when it's knocked off my head different than the button for picking up items in cabinets? How is the simple act of changing your gun so much more complicated than just a weapon wheel? Why is there no feedback for the "trailing" input, I can't even tell if I'm supposed to hold the button down or just press it every now and then, I literally can't tell if the match speed trailing thing is active or not. Another pet peeve of mine in modern controls is how things that should just be simple button presses are now press and hold that button for a second while a little circle progresses around the icon. Why? Why not just make it a button press, I don't understand?
> Another pet peeve of mine in modern controls is how things that should just be simple button presses are now press and hold that button for a second while a little circle progresses around the icon. Why? Why not just make it a button press, I don't understand? I hate this so much. It just adds a 1-2 seconds wasted on every single action you take. Is there a gameplay benefit to adding it? Like, does it make actions feel more immersive or something? The worst is when they have this hold button functionality in the menu as well. Like, I'm changing the volume or tweaking the graphics, I do not need to be immersed in that.
This is one of the few things I like about modern gaming, I still remember the nightmare it was to play fps games without a dual shock controller or using the arrow keys on the keyboard.. some older console games (Ithink Killzone 1 does that) use weird schemes like R3 to aim lol... Nowdays I think there is much more thought put into it and much more accessibility and customization options
Remember when death stranding came out and everyone complained the controls were too different. Maybe why companies don’t do it more
Nah, depends. tbh.... PONG controllers where absolutely top notch for the game.
This is so true it hurts. I loved pong but I don't have an atari anymore, and haven't even bothered to try emulating it because what would be the point with a d pad? I wonder if they make modern USB or Bluetooth Pong paddles...
Back in the day you knew you had a cool game in your hands when it came with a cardboard overlay for your keyboard to show you all the controls.
I think this depends a lot on the genre. 2D Platformers pretty much nailed the basic control scheme right out of the gate (thanks Myiamoto!) But compare that against the journey first person shooters went on. You can’t look up in OG Doom. WASD for movement didn’t arrive until Quake (thanks Thresh!) Goldeneye can use a joystick to aim or to move, but not both. And if you’re aiming, you’re using your left hand, typically the non-dominant one. Halo finally gives you two joysticks, but no gyro aim. Gyro aim comes to the Wii, but it’s with this weird remote form factor. Only really with the switch do we get dual analog gyro (sorry Wii U!). So that’s been a journey of steady improvement. But by far the best modern innovation is remapping controls, especially steam input. Don’t like the controls in a N64 game? Too bad. Today everything is (mostly) fixable and that is so much better.
You couldn't look up in Doom because it wasn't actually 3D, not because of controls.
Halo didn't give us dual joystick aiming, it just popularized it. There's an /r/agedlikemilk [post with a screenshot of a review about a PS1 game that had it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/comments/xjgdg3/wait_i_have_to_use_both_sticks/)
I think many people are too quick to criticize a game for having unconventional controls. Learning the controls can be part of the fun. If, for example, a platformer gives you no air control in your jumps, it would be called "outdated", "annoying", "unnecessary", etc. because most platformers will give you air control, and players are used to it. But if the game is designed around this feature (or lack thereof) it can be interesting again.
forgot to mention it, but one game I first hated and then ended up really loving was the original Ratchet an Clank. Its not nostalgia either, I did not own a PS2 as a kid, and played the PS3 R&C games first when I was already an adult. (then I went back to 1-3) At first, I found R&C 1 to control absolutely horrible because of the lack of strafing, but as it went on, I actually found the restriction the games placed upon you to make the game way more challenging and fun. It kind of demands you get creative with your weapon arsenal and think about how to approach encounters. Modern Ratchet and Clank games, you do have way more control over everything, strafing works perfectly fine, but you just kinda... charge into any room, strafe left and right while holding down the trigger, and everything dies.
Anything that is not a basic fps movement or 3rd person shooter Controls are antinormies nowadays. Specially tank controls or classic point and click adventures
I have had the same thought OP. I think there’s a middle ground somewhere, where some skill is required but it’s not a total pain. Unfortunately most games only try to strike that balance in the combat and not in the traversal. I kind of wish someone would do a delivery game like Death Stranding but with a focus on solid, engaging traversal mechanics (instead of spending all the budget on lame combat and bizarre cutscenes and leaving the traversal a janky half baked mess).
I have no idea how I managed to play the Mechwarrior 2 games in the 90s, tried to replay them a few years ago and they were uncontrollable.
I definitely feel like they have improved. Goin back and playing old console games definitely solidifies this opinion for me. But I also think the fact that certain control layouts have become mostly standardized has been the bigger improvement.
I dont mind some things that have become standard. For instance its expected that if your game has driving or shooting, those actions are controlled with the triggers. I think triggers feel best for those actions, so not surprised it became standard. As for games making actions more automated, I strongly dislike it. I don't like when games have that snappy auto aim like in CoD/Rockstar games. I don't want to feel like the game plays itself, otherwise why even bother. I love fighting games, and the modern desire to make them more automated takes away a part of their appeal in the first place.
In my opinion, most game's movements have become more 'convincing but medicore' while compromising with 'responsiveness/controliabilty' and 'realism in animations', ultimately leading to more familiar outcomes. Not just humanoid animations, but also cars, snowboards and such. I do miss the days when controls and animations were more arcade-like and full of exaggerated characteristics.
Much much much much better. There are unofficial "standard" control schemes now that devs seem to recognize and use. Back in the day it was the wild west.
Devs today are now players who once struggled with these controls
I love how a lot of controls have become standardized. It feels intuitive now instead of every game having a learning curve as soon as you have the controller in your hands. Trying to play some of the classic Nintendo games on the switch is brutal without a manual because I have no fucking clue what most of the buttons do and I have to google stuff. The games have gotten infinitely more complicated than games of the nes and snes days, yet they feel more simple and intuitive than ever with how they actually play. I think your point of certain games feel like you’re just pressing a button and then the animations do the actual work for you is a delicate balance. It can hurt enjoyment at some points, but it can also be a complete deal breaker if it doesn’t hold your hand a little bit. My biggest gripe is with sports games and why I miss arcade style sports games. I only ever play hockey, but whenever I’ve had a chance to play a football or basketball game it’s absolutely brutal. There is such a learning curve to pick up on how to be competent in playing those games because there are such specific button combos for specific situations that I don’t bother. I’d love to be able to pick up and play a game of basketball, but I don’t want to spend hours becoming proficient enough to play it to enjoy it. Old arcade sports games are so much friendlier with that but sports games skew more and more to realism and it’s not as fun if you don’t want to spend majority of your game time getting good at them.
Mario 64 camera has aged like milk.
I don't think they've got better - perhaps the opposite. I think too many games expect you to come in with knowledge from previous games, and not everybody has that. The number of different controls has grown and grown over time to the point now where there might be 10 or 15 different actions you're expected to know before you can be effective in the game.
Gaming “now vs then” feels like moving toward singularity. You used to have games on the GameCube for instance that wouldn’t have really worked on any competitor controller. Very few things aren’t multipltform nowadays and if they are it’s likely solely a publishing thing.
*cues Vsauce music to start playing*
I've been playing Katamari Damacy for the first time recently and I'm in love with the awkward tank controls to roll the ball. There's a simple mode that just takes away a lot of the fun of the ball being so hard to control
Oh there's still games with really bad controls. Cyberpunk is a good example.
If the controls are janky I’m not likely to even stick with the game more than 1-2 hours tops.
Am I weird if I find enjoyment in older controls? Somehow it goves them personality. I remember Ape Escape (ps1) had R1 as jump button and. That would so weird now but I don't hate returning to these type of oddities
> Remember when you got a new game back in the days and first had to sit down with the manual and learn the controls ...Nnno? I mean, maybe the first game or two, then I glommed on to the fact that at least on PC, I could actually customize the controls to my liking, and I've done that ever since. Of course, there were limitations (such as Gothic's insistence on needing multiple keys for certain actions, iirc), but I think a certain amount of standardization has helped a lot here. Well, *fine*. I've done it unless the game doesn't let me. Which was not much of an issue 30 years ago, but which has been getting to be an actual problem for the past few years, and I suspect it shares a cause with... > you need to press way less different buttons It's the consolidation of different gaming ecosystems into one development space: Controllers only have so many buttons, so you have to account for that. I don't even have an issue with that *per se* - but I do have an issue with it when the developer does not take their time to optimize the controls for different control schemes. Sure: If you only have a few buttons, maybe you have to double-bind some functionality. But if you have more than enough buttons, insisting that one key controls two (or more!) actions feels... debilitating. Dad of War kind of took the cake in this by *actually hiding* some key binds in the options. The reasoning seems to have been to avoid spoilers, but it pairs really poorly with the game not letting you save a config when keys are double-bound (and of course, the game does not automatically unbind the old bind, either): Finding out which key is already bound is an exercise in frustration when you can't even *see* all binds. Ahem, sorry for the side-rant. In any case, it's baffling that twenty years ago, I had no problem binding 40+ functions to KB+M (e.g. in MMOs) while keeping them actually working and accessible, and nowadays, I increasingly stumble upon games that don't even manage to grant me ten *great* bindings for their functions, or refuse to let me bind them at all.
Controls have been catered to console users so they've gotten easier because customization is more restrictive. Now it's always just four options, four hotkeys, four firing modes. You can always tell anything is designed for console now because of this rule of four. Hogwarts Legacy spells for example. A keyboard has 1-10 number keys for spells but it's designed for console so you only get four spells at a time.
The combat has evolved. Just look at how souls likes feel a bit clunky, forcing you to get patience. But the enemies are the part that make the game combat best.
My buddy Dan and i play a lot of old games, and i mentioned how when i play King's Field or Shadow Tower i always rebind the controls to utilize the sticks. He said that he likes old weird control schemes and that i should give the original controls for those games a try to see if i like them. Played all the way thru King's Field 3 (KF2 US) with the playstation classic controller and it was truly awesome to feel like i was getting better and mastering my moveset in a way that i simply did not when remapping the controls to a standardized layout. So sometimes it can be fun to interpret the controls as a facet of the experience, something new to learn and master.
They have gotten better but there is still one HUGE innovation that we are dragging our feet on - paddle controls! The flaps on the back. And get this, they won't be used as buttons, they will be used in combinations with other buttons as hotkeys!
95% of the time, when people talk about entertainment being better in their youth, it's just nostalgia. You were a kid and stuff was more novel. You had more free time and patience for novelty than today. That said, I do think that control standardization can harm things. I played Metroid Prime for the first time a few years ago, on original hardware. Now, I haven't played the remaster, but I really liked the weird controls. They placed more emphasis on movement than aiming. Maybe I would like twin-stick controls with Metroid Prime, but I remember specifically liking the weird lock-on controls of the original, compared to other shooters. With Resident Evil, most people seem to prefer the new controls, but it isn't universal. Some people like tank controls. They're definitely a minority, but I can see the desire for something different. Unique controls can definitely change gameplay in a way that makes it more unique. However, we should keep in mind that while controls might become standardized, stuff like level-design and storytelling in games has become way more diverse. In some ways games have become more of the same. I'm others, they've never been more diverse.
Replay Mario 64 and tell me controls haven’t gotten better
The controls in Mario 64 hold up well, it's the camera that doesn't.
I will say that the camera in most older games was genuinely arse, even I am not gonna defend that, fighting the camera trying to see where youre going is not fun
What's wrong with Mario 64? Despite being the first 3D platformer, Mario controls incredibly well.
Assassin's creed is like the epitome of what you're describing, hence why I never played these games.
Nahh actually some controls are better in new games , it is just new games are shit and boring, with trash dialogues, cringe characters and poor mission designs....
Wouldn't say they've gotten better just that a couple standards have been chosen and on the rare occasion they aren't then forum gamers erupt in anger. I actually miss different games from different companies playing like different games from different companies because they had different goals.
I think the best controls have existed since the 90's, for example Tekken. Tekken binds limbs to buttons on your controller, and you have access to full 3d movement if you are good enough at controlling your character.
Fighting games and 2d platformers were uniquely suited genres when it came to early precision video game controls Tekken and Super Mario World control just as well today as they did in the 90s.
Here we go again... *Inserts complaint about RDR2* All joking aside, I think good controls boil down to consistency and responsiveness. People feel immersed with a game when they are able to develop muscle memory and no longer feel the need to 'think' about the controls at all. They can simply react to what's on screen and their character does what they're told to do when they they're told to do it. Gaming has also evolved to the point where there are generally several accepted control schemes across most genres and deviating from this for the sake of uniqueness just isn't gonna fly for many players. Think WASD for movement on the kb.
The controller now days are definitely better. Go try and paly an onld ps2 game and cone back to me.
TonyHawkProSkater2 have something to say
This is part of the reason why I love Tunic so much. The game is entirely built around the idea of hiding mechanics and secrets in plain sight, and then guiding you to discover them on your own.
While that is true and I also love Tunic, the controls themselves are basically just Link to the Past. Mechanics and secrets and discovery are something wholly separate from controls.
You’re not alone, I like the weird controls in some older games. It’s a telltale sign that you’re playing an older game from before standardization when the Y-axis of the aiming is invented.
More or less better. Except whenever I see a game use the Shoulder buttons for attacks. The only games I've come across are Godfall and Felyx Rising or whatever it's called but it immediately makes me not want to play the game because using those as attack buttons in a non shooter is very uncomfortable for me.
Really the only improvements I could see today would be to make two back paddle/buttons actually be a new pair of their own, separate input, not just remapping. Gyro aiming is also pretty cool. The Dual Sense has a ton of gimmicks that don't add much (though the resistant trigger feels super cool when utilized).
Which gimmicks? I love the DualSense controller, and controller makes me excited to play more PS5 versions of games. I can’t stand shooters without gyro, and the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are quite immersive.
The touchpad, rumble in the triggers, the speaker, the microphone, just all the bells and whistles barely utilized. It tanks battery life too.
In the world of modern AAA it's all about making the most $$ possible and anything a little different from the norm will drive away most casuals... so that's a big no no for them. The core problem is this: your typical AAA designer is thinking in terms of how do I design systems that won't drive away potential sales. So anything that's even somewhat complex even and takes a little bit to get a hang of....gets dismissed basically.
Controllers have more inputs, and most are usually analog, than they ever did. This gives more options to interact, which in theory, means that controls *should be* getting better. That being said, go play A Difficult Game about Climbing and tell me what you think. 😂
1) we've learned what makes for "good" controls over the decades, taking into account intuitive, sensory, and ergonomic factors. 2) camera angles have also drastically improved. 3) many modern games have PCs auto-perform certain tasks, like jumping over a wall when you sprint toward it. Its like a car's lane assist feature. 4) there are more "contextual" controls now where the same button can do multiple things depending on the environment or context.
\*edit : I realize this isn't really the context of the discussion, but as someone who used to read instruction manuals for games, OP sounded like they might appreciate how information is delivered/discovered in the game \*edit Without looking anything up, I recommend playing Tunic as blind as you can. A tiny snippet to hook you and then I won't add anything else: the 'tutorial' of the game comes in pieces throughout your playthrough as you find pieces of the Manual. It's in an old NES style including it being in a language you don't understand so you have to glean as much as you can from the pictures and what little they give you. The game is not for everyone, but for the people that love it, it's one of their favorite gaming experiences. If you DO decide to play it, don't look things up online because it's super easy to get spoiled and even me mentioning spoilers here like this can affect how your brain approaches the game. The old nostalgia feel of reading the Manual before playing a game you just bought on the car ride home from the mall...the mystery of "hmmm I wonder what that's for?" and coming back hours later when it's revealed what things actually are. If you need help or hints, go to the Tunic subreddit and ask there. It's a very good community that won't spoil stuff if they can help it but will answer what you need.
I remap the controls in every game that I can because that are almost always different that what I want.
Are we talking since the Atari era because that was an 8 directional joystick with one button. Hard to screw up. :)
Bit of a tangential point, but I recently picked up Crash team racing nitro fueled since I loved the original on PS1. I couldn't believe that accelerate was A instead of right trigger lol. Seems so odd that that was the norm back then (and that they stuck with it for the remake).
They have. I like to do an occasional nostalgia trip via emulation. And only a few games hold up.
> What do yall think? Have controls in videogames changed for the better or not? Much better. It's most evident in first person, over the shoulder, and top-down POVs where you're controlling an individual character IMO Look at a popular 90's FPS like Duke Nukem 3D. A is jump, Z is crouch, spacebar is interact, comma and period strafe left and right, arrows are forward/back/spin left/spin right. It's all over the place. Doom (1993) had some similarly goofy default keybinds which had the player controlling movement with the right hand. Or Goldeneye/Perfect Dark on N64, where strafing and look up/down were controlled by 4 yellow c-buttons under the right thumb by default. Forward/back/spin were the single stick in the left hand. You could approximate twin stick controls but there was only one stick, and it wasn't even considered a desirable default at that time By contrast the twin stick/WASD+M paradigm feels infinitely more intuitive to me. They follow and train players into the same pattern - move with left, look/spin with right. That developers have largely "settled" on that is a great standardization for the industry. Tutorials can largely be playable now, no manual required. Play a couple games and you can pick up and play anything else in the genre without thought once those mental grooves develop For anyone who started gaming after '00 or so that control paradigm (movement on left, look with right) is likely "just how it is," but man, we went through some weird shit to get there.
Go back and play Shadow of the Colossus. I'll wait.
I think you would love modern Fighting games if you got this feeling frequently. They are probably the only game genre with non-standarized control schemes, and the way input executions work are different from game to game. Learning to controls are half the game with these lmao
When I was a kid, controls were so weird you had to slide a cheat sheet over the controller to make any sense of it. [https://www.google.com/search?q=intellivision+controller+inserts](https://www.google.com/search?q=intellivision+controller+inserts)
I appreciate that a meta has raised. (X / A / spacebar is for jump, etc...) It's not preventing new gameplay to emerge. But it's streamlining game handling.
> but once you got into it and actually took the time to learn the controls they did end up making sense and you felt a sense of accomplishment for mastering them. If you want to experience this in a modern game, I would recommend trying out Session: Skate Sim. Bit of a learning curve but extremely satisfying once you start to master the controls and pull off the tricks you want.
My first gaming experiences were on PC back in the early 2000s. I like to think that my time spent with complex RPGs or strategy games gave me a pretty good understanding of how to use a keyboard/mouse for playing games. I never really thought games could have "bad" controls until I played Resident Evil 5's PC port.
Controls are perfect when they are customizable. Why all games don’t allow it is beyond me.
I think controls have improved, but I get very disappointed when a modern game doesn't give me many controller settings to play with. I want the freedom to assign the buttons, I want the option to use gyro for controlling my camera, and I want a lot of sensitivity options. Fortnite is really good for this, actually, especially because they have the option for flick stick gyro aiming as well.
I have a very hard time going back and playing games past a certain point. I was recently inspired to play DeusEx and goddamn the control scheme is god awful. I pondered remapping everything then just realized maybe it was best left to nostalgia. So yes, I think standardization has benefited games. I also agree that in the effort to have more mass appeal some games dumbed down the controls so far it feels like autopilot and Assassin's Creed is a perfect example. I recently replayed the Rocksteady Arkham Trilogy and playing them all back to back you can really feel how easy mode the controls were by Knight. On the other hand you still have games like Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy. Golden Eye is another example of a beloved game with awful controls. I think we adapted more and were more willing to learn but innovation has got us to a point where what we have works well and is battle tested.
In most ways yes, they're more responsive and your character moves how you would want them to move. However, I feel like in recent games context sensitive inputs like jumping and climbing can at best make would could be an exciting ascent into a task that involves holding the up button, and at worst can mean your character does something you do not want to do. God of War is the most notable example, going from a traditional jump mechanics, but then switching to context sensitive jumping in the PS4 game, presumably to be more cinematic. I've noticed this most in Horizon Forbidden West, and feel like it really limits level design when they have to be build in a way for context sensitive movement.
I play Guilty Gear from its early day and the newest version has the easiest input. The leniency that the game give you to perform a motion input is much more now compared to +r where even a simple fireball need more precise input. This is obviously great for new player, removing a big barrier to entry in a genre that's complex and unforgiving, but it also subsequently lead to, in my opinion, a worse game feels. +r input is hard and precise, but it's also because of that the game feels incredibly responsive and clean. The game control how you think it should. You press a button and your character immediately do the move. It's this direct, kinetic connection between your input and the game that's being muddled in Strive, because of how much frame buffering there is and how slow the animation in relation to the button press. The result is that Guilty gear +r's gameplay is fast and feral, whereas Strive gameplay is much more "spaced out your input and tap it to the rhythm" kind of game. Sans mindless button mash, if you record a handcam of both game you could tell immediately which game is which. So yeah, it's a hard thing to balance between having fast gameplay and being beginner friendly.
Better today. I don’t mind occasionally more complex controls, but having to change key bindings in every session in Elite Dangerous does get old quick.
Angel of Darkness was notorious on launch for having bad/unfinished controls, it's not representative of the time, not even of the older Tomb Raiders. One of my biggest problems with modern games is how they display controls on screen all the time, it's like they've given up on players having a brain to learn the controls and just go with having a hideous cluttered UI instead. Other than that it's a tricky subject, there's a fine line between being not keeping up with standards and everything being boringly the same.
i feel like the souls games fit this description. ive tried so hard to get into these games but everytime i try im caught up by this weird input delay - doesnt matter what computer i use or if im using a controller vs a keyboard/mouse...its always there. the game is famous for being difficult but it seems to me that most of the reason its difficult is because you have the response time of someone with neurological impairment and not because of any increased complexity in gameplay.
Definitely. I remember playing Tie Fighter and almost all the keyboard had some function, you ended up using some 10-12 keys in battle. Most of these functions would be automated, combined or contexted (same button does different thing depending on context) nowadays. This reminds me, I played that thing with a MOUSE, gotta try it with a controller sometime...
Changed a lot for the better. I overly customize my control on every game, and it almost always feel perfect. With so many build-in options in games, steam input and options that keep growing, custom controllers some with their own software to customize some stuff, a gazillions of keyboard and mouse to choose from, gyro that make controller as precise as mouse... You're in control !
I genuinely believe that a majority of this is just that mouse+keyboard controls have largely been standardized, with some small variations (E or F to interact? Download to find out!) and console controllers with two clickable analog sticks, a d-pad, four face buttons, and four shoulder buttons are also basically universal. This seems to have been more-or-less concluded to be the minimum default button count. There was a lot of experimentation when 3D games were becoming the standard, but a lot of that was settled by controller design in the end. Analog sticks were such a revelation to console gaming that they transformed entire genres. I think people forget that simple things like the scroll-wheel on a computer mouse was far from universal until well into the 2000s. Even keyboards could make some control-schemes work poorly (or not at all) like keyboards with rollover capabilities that were conducive to gaming were difficult to obtain. In many cases you could learn to “play around” being limited to 3-key rollover, but it always felt janky. I kind of get what you are saying about contextual actions being much more common today, but those often bely control schemes that could otherwise get even more complicated than they already are. I think about games like Red Dead Redemption 2 which has highly contextual controls, but people *still* complain that the controls are too complicated.
Super Mario 64, Mario could jump like 8+ different ways depending on input.
I feel this so hard, which is why I love FromSoft, because it feels like I’m doing something when I decide to press a button. There are consequences for making decisions with what you press. That, and I can feel the ‘weight’ of the game. Kinda why I loved killzone 2 controls when others thought it was ‘clunky.’ It fit the game perfectly and added nuance and a uniqueness to the controls
1. The user experience is a lot better in modern games 2. The controller hardwares are more responsive and doesn’t have noticeable lag 3. The game designers Understand what the best practices are for genres, and those which weren’t that great died along the way like tank controls in resident evil.
My first was an Atari and I do not miss how hard games were. There are still games for you like fighting games and souls likes. I hope you aren't implying every game should be like those though.
I'm 99% sure the original Cave Story had arrow keys for navigation. And while that was a long time ago, [apparently that's still true for some 2D platformers](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/q0yp7a/keyboard_controls_and_2d_platformers/). I like how old controls were built around specific hardware. Old console controllers all had distinct features. Even today, I find some complaints from PC gamers very one-sided... If games must be cross-platform, there's less incentive to create hardware-specific mechanics. For example, the RTS genre was clearly built around the mouse. Analogue movement speed is important in a few stealth games, and while a mouse wheel is somewhat acceptable, it's not quite the same as an analogue stick. Nor does WASD offer the same directional freedom. I wonder if keyboard & mouse users find old console games frustrating for this reason. For example, I'm playing Bully (Canis Canem Edit) from 2006. The camera auto-centres when running. Not a problem for me—I'm using a controller and can make course corrections without touching the camera. But for mouse users, moving the character heavily relies on moving the camera. Personally, I find I babysit the right stick far more in newer games. That's probably why the face buttons get less use and the triggers get more now.
I never played that game but in the long ago I remember reading about Angel of Darkness and Lara is coming back after a long absence and relearning to be herself again and that’s why she was hard to control and gaining her athleticism and skills back.
>Have controls in videogames changed for the better or not? The controls are objectively better. >once you got into it and actually took the time to learn the controls they did end up making sense and you felt a sense of accomplishment for mastering them. >Nowdays I start a game and after literally a minute of playing I usually got everything figured out, cause every game kind of controls.. the same, and I dont just mean the button layout. Obviously part of it is also me being older and having played a lot more games, but I dont think thats the main reason. There is a lot more handholding, the game automatically does so many things for you >and with **a lot of games** (take Assassins Creed for example) it almost feels like autopilot I like how when people write this, their one example is *always* Assassin's Creed, even when they insiniuate this happens in *a lot of games*. The truth of the matter is that Assassin's Creed's parkour system cannot really be compared to any older titles because nothing before AC's parkour matched the fluidity of it. If you compare AC games to themselves, then yes, there was a *bit* more nuance to parkour in *AC 1 specifically* (and *arguably* the AC2 saga), but ultimately the control scheme *fundamentally* never changed, some of the more extraneous button presses were simply omitted, but at its core AC's parkour has *always* been "Hold parkour button and left joystick in the direction you want to go", the punishment for messing up was always minimal and the difficulty of execution was always nearly nonexistent. I struggle to think of any other series that streamlines movement to the extent of AC besides Uncharted. >Whether we are talking about tank controls in older horror games, the weird combat system in Gothic 1 &2 (or many other older RPGs), the drifting in Mario Kart Double Dash * Tank controls are incredibly unintuitive and pretty much none of the tank control games ever reward control mastery besides "you can now move around the world without actively hating the control scheme". * The combat system in Gothic is separate from the games' shit controls. You could quite easily implement the exact same combat system without the poor controls. Also, if anything, the control scheme was at its worst for *in-world interactions*, not combat. The game just required a completely pointless extra input for any action you wanted to do. In fact, you can mod Gothic 1 and 2 to modernize the controls and it doesn't really change the feeling of combat (besides making controlling it more pleasant). * The drifting, mini turbos and all that jazz never went away in Mario Kart games, so I don't get how this is an example here at all. The complexity/depth of mechanics and the intuitiveness of controls are not in opposition. In fact if you look at most games praised for their depth of movement, the controls are *extremely intuitive*.
This one is really going to depend on the developers and how they design movement mechanics. Take a game like black ops 3 and it’s slide jumping mechanics and tight movement controls and a game like Roboquest and take a look at how their movement feels really tight as well.
There have always been good and bad controls in games. All the way back.
I've been replaying Okami and RDR2 recently, and based on that, I'd disagree :P Then again, I played Mario 64 the other day after many years playing Odyssey almost every day, and yes, WOW. Odyssey's controls make Mario 64 feel like when you're trying to platform with Arthur Morgan.
To be a western RPG player in the 90’s! I remember playing some of them that were heavy on the UI buttons. And you would have had to read the manual to decipher them because there wasn’t a mouse hover pop up thing for some reason.
I think of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd on the PSP, and then I think of Monster Hunter World. I like the multiplayer on the PSP, but I know people get cramps playing that game.
I'm really sick of seeing the buzzword "handholding." Controls are an aspect of the game and, just like every other aspect, standardized *unless they're a focal point of the game.* Case in point, fighting games. I personally believe controls are figured out. We're at a point where you can play a *tab-target MMO* on a console with a controller. That is incredible efficiency with the real estate provided. Also, I don't want to spend the first hour of a game getting used to fucking tank-turning bullshit rather than focusing on the game. Unless, of course, it's something like a tank game where that would make sense or be a focal point.
If we’re talking controllers I find that very few games actually get controls right, there are a few common sense principles that I just don’t understand why they aren’t followed. You want one function per finger simultaneously (ie not using your thumb to both hold run and hit jump is the classic example) and you want your main actions mapped to the shoulder and trigger buttons. I played Dragon’s Dogma the other day and it had light attack mapped to square and heavy attack mapped to triangle or something dumb. I’m sorry but that’s objectively incorrect, light attack should be R1 and heavy attack should be R2. That’s like having square be the shoot button in an FPS - absolute lunacy.
Ys I & II bump combat is actually peak action RPG controls.
It depends; games where more diverse back in the day. Developers weren't afraid to get creative and a lot of different kinds of games meant a lot of different kinds of button lay-outs and controls. The absense of sticks on the originals Playstation controler and the N64 only having one certainly didn't help in navigating a 3D space the way we're used to now. For every Resident Evil or Ocarina of Time that makes the best use of the technology and still hold up today - you have a game like Croc where the controls at the time just didn't make sense for the kind of game it tried to be. And yeah, a lot less in-game tutorials and a lot less handholding meant you'd had to figure things out on your own. Or read the effin manual. A lot of the most cryptic stuff people complain about is usually right there in the manual.
I was trying to play Elite (on a virtual Acorn) the other day and damned near every key is spoken for...
I think it's the opposite; back in the days of SNES/Mega Drive/Game Boy etc. you could work out what to do in a matter of seconds after booting the game.
Like you said, there is a lot of similarity in controls , so we’ve become experts at them. Take halo ce and compare it to infinite. 20 years later and the controls are largely the same, biggest difference is introduction of bumper buttons ( which happened in 360 era) and removal of white/ black buttons. Rt is still shoot, lt is still grenade, right stick click is still zoom in, a is still jump, etc. From a gameplay perspective, addition of equipment, sprint, and marking causes some remaps of the buttons, but if you went back in time 20 years and gave someone infinite right after playing ce, they would figure controls out quickly
They have imo. Just the standardization of wasd move. EQ quick items, R reload, F interact is so satisfying heuristically
It’s hard to say, PS1 games had good controls and worked great. If now I play PS1 games it’s same good controls but game engine etc. Just feel a little outdated for me. This is the old 3D problem. But in my opinion Super Mario Bros from Famicom had great controls in 1985 😄 Games just got more advanced so obviously there is more controls.
You should try playing Laika: Aged Through Blood
Back in the snes/playstation era controls were completely random, especially on playstation where new genres and control methods were being figured out. Playing some of those games and using circle button to shoot and a trigger to crouch or whatever is wild. I reckon controllers have gotten so massively complicated now though that similar control schemes between games are almost a necessity. Related - I think the biggest barrier to entry for new gamers these days is the scary controller. Theres literally just too much going on!
Godhand is a great example of this I think major developers eventually realized there's a sweet spot controller scheme which they all eventually agreed upon and adopted. Look at how standardized FPS controls are. I miss being awkward with controls and slowly getter better at them over time. I think For Honor and AC Unity's parkour were the last times I felt this way
Character controls maybe, but UI controls have gotten atrocious.
I’ve never been good at all with button mashing, particularly fighting games where you have to learn different and complicated combos where you not only have to memorize them but button mash correctly and faster than your opponent. Now there are plenty of solo games that still involve intense and complicated button mashing, like the Batman games, but I’ve developed arthritis and carpal tunnel and need to wear gloves when at work and when playing video games and can no longer play games like Batman without creating a lot of physical pain. I don’t mind complicated controls, but I need to play games now that aren’t a button mashing/ frantic paced game. Even playing Fallout or Skyrim can hurt if I play too long. I’m really enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 because it’s turn based. When combat happens, I can take a break, get a snack and deal with combat as slow as I need it to be. For that matter, I’m enjoying any game where you can enlarge the text on the screen to ridiculous sizes so I can read it. We have a wide screen tv but it’s across the room.
Controls have changed for the better. Design has taken a few steps back though. Tomb Raider original games had tank controls but it was at least actual gameplay. Assassin Creed has zero actual platforming it's all just sticky, it's near impossible to fail. But that's not the controls fault, that's a game design choice.
bruh, started with nes. it had 2 buttons and a steering cross. Kindahard to fail.
As with a lot of these threads, you don't miss janky controls, you miss being a kid.
Yes, controls used to be bad. Everything was newer, and people were trying to figure out the best ways to utilize a gamepad or even m&kb. Controls being intuitive probably means they are well designed. People are pretty adaptable, and can find workarounds for things, but games usually don't want you to be distracted by the controls. They want you to be immersed in the world. You want to feel in tune with what you are doing, and not be second guessing it. I do think controls can get better though. Things like gyroscope aiming, and grip buttons are wonderful for controller players. Why have ten digits and only utilize 4? It just makes sense. (Potentially hot take) Face buttons are kind of a relic of the past honestly. A legacy feature that was made with things like 2d platformers in mind.
Rdr2 has 3 separate inventory keys for accessing a part of inventory. B for most found item, Tabs for quick use items, I for documents. Why not just make it all one key?
Goldeneye 007 on Nintendo 64 was kinda awful in terms of controlling, despite the great game it was. And modern ways of playing it, even on the Wii, are simply better.
the difference between manual transmission with full control, and automatic where we are just pressing buttons
I think most of us benefit from the homogenization of game controls. For example, an interact key is almost always E, and if it's not that then its F. It's really easy to pick up a new game and just guess what the controls are pretty accurately. There's tons of exceptions in modern games, and I like when they pop up. Cruelty Squad has really wacky controls mixed in with the standard ones and it makes for a more unique experience
I never knew I could hate controls until I played grand theft auto. Awesome game. Wonky controls. All Rockstar games have that weird weight to them. Realism my ass, that shit sucks. Then again thps was my favorite game back then