This is one of my biggest issues with playing games on my PS4, Switch or XBOX ONE. I want to talk about this, highlight what I feel are the key issues, and talk about what I'd like to see moving forward. I hope this promotes some discussion on the topic, as I'd love to hear other perspectives.
In my opinion, the controls on console, particularly those offered in third and first person shooters or games where it's important that the player can aim the camera accurately, are consistently terrible. This issue is caused by various factors which I'd like to discuss in detail, alongside breaking down the impact these issues are likely to have on the player experience for both players broadly, and specifically players with disabilities.
Many games have a terrible default configuration
In many games, the default configuration is what I would consider, terrible. Most commonly, you have games with an excessive amount of aim acceleration, or games with features like large deadzones. These all affect how responsive the game is likely to feel, and how in-control the player is likely to be when playing the game.
For example, by default Doom Eternal features a crazy amount of aim acceleration, and this acceleration ramps up suddenly and dramatically. You can adjust this in the settings menu, but the default configuration is quite poor.
Pay Day 2 is outright unresponsive by default, and relies on a 'snap to target' aiming system that overly helps the player to aim in order to compensate for the how the game is so poor to control.
Recently, The Hunt Showdown released and this game has again, a large amount of aim acceleration coupled with a good deal of input delay. Like many other games it's both difficult to control as a result, and the game suffers for it.
Historically, Uncharted 3 even shipped with god-awful controls in its singleplayer mode, and the developers required community feedback (from GAF) to help them understand what the issue was (again, it seemed to be a combination of input latency and a aim acceleration making the controls feel unresponsive).
Obviously having unresponsive controls impacts everyone that plays the game. But for gamers with disabilities and in particular, (e.g. cognitive or motor disabilities) having a feature like aim acceleration which very suddenly pushes their aim dramatically into a certain direction, can be very difficult to adjust to. It can make these games harder to play than intended, and outright uncomfortable for the player.
Your controls aren't 'weighty', they're garbage
One of the common arguments against the way that these games control is that it's a 'design choice' and that the controls were supposed to feel 'weighty'. But if this were the case, why do games like The Hunt Showdown and Pay Day 2 control just fine with a keyboard and mouse, but not a controller? Why do games like Uncharted 3 and Killzone 2 feature post-hoc 'precision modes' that fix their controls?
In the case of PC ports like Pay Day, the controls feel as though they were an after thought. Something copied from a Unity tutorial as a means of pacifying the player base that the developer have little understanding of. Pay Day 2's console community feel like second class citizens to their PC counterparts, missing many updates and general attention from the developers, and as such it makes sense that they get a shitty control configuration to match.
Unless the developers explicitly explain, or at least hint at a deliberate design intention behind the unresponsive control system you can assume it just wasn't intentional. In my time as a user researcher I have never met a developer trying to make the controls feel unresponsive. Awkward and comically counter intuitive? Yes (see Octodad, Terover, and similar games), but not unresponsive.
Many games offer only minimal options to adjust the controls
This one is both an an issue that affects everyone, but also severely impacts the experience for player with disabilities. In spite of the less than ideal control configuration that many games offer, these games also tend not to feature a good set of options to customise the controls. Just to provide some examples...
For players with disabilities, being able to remap the controls can be vital to ensuring that they can play the game comfortably.
The OS level accessibility settings are mostly useless
A common counterargument (at least for remapping) is that if you want to remap the controls you can just do it at the system level. This is often used by both developers to de-prioritise the provision of custom settings, and players to defend the current lack of options. Despite this, these OS level accessibility options are typically vastly insufficient in allowing players to play the game comfortably.
Crucially, the OS level options a) change the controls in every 'mode' the game has. For instance a player might want to jump with L1, but if they do that, they also make L1 the confirm button in the menus, which may be both counter intuitive, or for whatever reason difficult for them to press) and b) the OS level controls do nothing for many in-game options like stick sensitivity, or acceleration.
The settings that are present are often, borderline incomprehensible
Many games do feature more in-depth customisation options, but these settings are often offered to the player alongside vague terminologies that would be difficult to decipher to anyone but the game developers themselves. Apex Legends does a good job in providing relatively understandable explanations alongside it's 'advanced look controls', but many other games throw these in without a clear indication of what they are going to do.
For instance, Doom Eternal has an option called 'aim smoothing'. My best guess is that this is their version of 'aim acceleration' but probably adjusts other variables too. The game doesn't explain what it's doing, so you have to slide it up and down, go back in and out, and see if it helps you achieve what you were hoping for with the controls.
Overwatch provides options for the aiming style, these are as follows
Do you know what these options do? I could take a guess, but there's little clarity provided in-game. Meanwhile games like Paladins offer similarly non-interpretable settings like 'dynamic', 'classic' and 'precision'. Seriously, what the fuck are these? Ironically, precision is by far the most unconventional, and likely the most difficult for anyone to... well, be precise with.
Meanwhile in Battlefield we have a slider labelled 'coefficient'.
...
The game does provide a description of what each setting does along the side, yet players still need to hover over, and read this paragraph to understand it. It'd be far better if the sliders label more accurately, and intuitively conveyed it's function.
Limited and obtuse settings like these those in the aforementioned games, lead to player experiences like this:
www.reddit.com
Where players simply, can't settle on a configuration where they feel comfortable, and that's if they even bother to try and adjust the controls before bouncing off the game.
Comfort through familiarity
People take comfort in familiarity, familiar places, familiar smells, familiar feels, and controls are no different. When an Apex Legends player hops onto something like The Hunt Showdown, it's very likely that one of the first things they'll do is seek to adjust the settings in-game so as to try to get the camera to move in a way that feels familiar to them. Why? Because this is something that they're comfortable with. They then hit your menu and find the settings difficult to understand (due to the vague and obtuse terminology), despite numerous attempts, nothing they do can get the game to feel comfortable to them.
At this stage, before the player has even got to the meat of the game, the game has already failed to meet their expectations at two stages (the initial feel, and then the lack of settings to adjust). Do you think this increases, or decreases the chances that this player will stick around to try out your game?
At present, every game you play on console will work against your muscle memory for the last game you've played. Outside of games from the same developer, it's incredibly difficult to find two games that have the same feel to their controls.
In summary
Many games have poorly configured control layouts and stick configurations by default. Most games have very poor options to customise these controls. These often, awkward and difficult to use controls, combined with limited options both harm the overall player experience, and make these games less accessible to players with disabilities. Despite these issues, there is a way forward, developers can design better controls, control options, and ultimately, better player experiences with some more consideration to these areas of the game.
Specifically I would suggest...
In my opinion, the controls on console, particularly those offered in third and first person shooters or games where it's important that the player can aim the camera accurately, are consistently terrible. This issue is caused by various factors which I'd like to discuss in detail, alongside breaking down the impact these issues are likely to have on the player experience for both players broadly, and specifically players with disabilities.
Many games have a terrible default configuration
In many games, the default configuration is what I would consider, terrible. Most commonly, you have games with an excessive amount of aim acceleration, or games with features like large deadzones. These all affect how responsive the game is likely to feel, and how in-control the player is likely to be when playing the game.
For example, by default Doom Eternal features a crazy amount of aim acceleration, and this acceleration ramps up suddenly and dramatically. You can adjust this in the settings menu, but the default configuration is quite poor.
Pay Day 2 is outright unresponsive by default, and relies on a 'snap to target' aiming system that overly helps the player to aim in order to compensate for the how the game is so poor to control.
Recently, The Hunt Showdown released and this game has again, a large amount of aim acceleration coupled with a good deal of input delay. Like many other games it's both difficult to control as a result, and the game suffers for it.
Historically, Uncharted 3 even shipped with god-awful controls in its singleplayer mode, and the developers required community feedback (from GAF) to help them understand what the issue was (again, it seemed to be a combination of input latency and a aim acceleration making the controls feel unresponsive).
Obviously having unresponsive controls impacts everyone that plays the game. But for gamers with disabilities and in particular, (e.g. cognitive or motor disabilities) having a feature like aim acceleration which very suddenly pushes their aim dramatically into a certain direction, can be very difficult to adjust to. It can make these games harder to play than intended, and outright uncomfortable for the player.
Your controls aren't 'weighty', they're garbage
One of the common arguments against the way that these games control is that it's a 'design choice' and that the controls were supposed to feel 'weighty'. But if this were the case, why do games like The Hunt Showdown and Pay Day 2 control just fine with a keyboard and mouse, but not a controller? Why do games like Uncharted 3 and Killzone 2 feature post-hoc 'precision modes' that fix their controls?
In the case of PC ports like Pay Day, the controls feel as though they were an after thought. Something copied from a Unity tutorial as a means of pacifying the player base that the developer have little understanding of. Pay Day 2's console community feel like second class citizens to their PC counterparts, missing many updates and general attention from the developers, and as such it makes sense that they get a shitty control configuration to match.
Unless the developers explicitly explain, or at least hint at a deliberate design intention behind the unresponsive control system you can assume it just wasn't intentional. In my time as a user researcher I have never met a developer trying to make the controls feel unresponsive. Awkward and comically counter intuitive? Yes (see Octodad, Terover, and similar games), but not unresponsive.
Many games offer only minimal options to adjust the controls
This one is both an an issue that affects everyone, but also severely impacts the experience for player with disabilities. In spite of the less than ideal control configuration that many games offer, these games also tend not to feature a good set of options to customise the controls. Just to provide some examples...
- Many games don't offer full customised button remapping
- Many games only allow you to adjust the 'sensitivity' but do not allow you to change the 'acceleration' of the sticks
- Many games don't allow you to adjust the controller deadzones
For players with disabilities, being able to remap the controls can be vital to ensuring that they can play the game comfortably.
The OS level accessibility settings are mostly useless
A common counterargument (at least for remapping) is that if you want to remap the controls you can just do it at the system level. This is often used by both developers to de-prioritise the provision of custom settings, and players to defend the current lack of options. Despite this, these OS level accessibility options are typically vastly insufficient in allowing players to play the game comfortably.
Crucially, the OS level options a) change the controls in every 'mode' the game has. For instance a player might want to jump with L1, but if they do that, they also make L1 the confirm button in the menus, which may be both counter intuitive, or for whatever reason difficult for them to press) and b) the OS level controls do nothing for many in-game options like stick sensitivity, or acceleration.
The settings that are present are often, borderline incomprehensible
Many games do feature more in-depth customisation options, but these settings are often offered to the player alongside vague terminologies that would be difficult to decipher to anyone but the game developers themselves. Apex Legends does a good job in providing relatively understandable explanations alongside it's 'advanced look controls', but many other games throw these in without a clear indication of what they are going to do.
For instance, Doom Eternal has an option called 'aim smoothing'. My best guess is that this is their version of 'aim acceleration' but probably adjusts other variables too. The game doesn't explain what it's doing, so you have to slide it up and down, go back in and out, and see if it helps you achieve what you were hoping for with the controls.
Overwatch provides options for the aiming style, these are as follows
- Exponential ramp
- Linear ramp
- Dual zone
Do you know what these options do? I could take a guess, but there's little clarity provided in-game. Meanwhile games like Paladins offer similarly non-interpretable settings like 'dynamic', 'classic' and 'precision'. Seriously, what the fuck are these? Ironically, precision is by far the most unconventional, and likely the most difficult for anyone to... well, be precise with.
Meanwhile in Battlefield we have a slider labelled 'coefficient'.
...
The game does provide a description of what each setting does along the side, yet players still need to hover over, and read this paragraph to understand it. It'd be far better if the sliders label more accurately, and intuitively conveyed it's function.
Limited and obtuse settings like these those in the aforementioned games, lead to player experiences like this:
Reddit - Dive into anything
www.reddit.com
Where players simply, can't settle on a configuration where they feel comfortable, and that's if they even bother to try and adjust the controls before bouncing off the game.
Comfort through familiarity
People take comfort in familiarity, familiar places, familiar smells, familiar feels, and controls are no different. When an Apex Legends player hops onto something like The Hunt Showdown, it's very likely that one of the first things they'll do is seek to adjust the settings in-game so as to try to get the camera to move in a way that feels familiar to them. Why? Because this is something that they're comfortable with. They then hit your menu and find the settings difficult to understand (due to the vague and obtuse terminology), despite numerous attempts, nothing they do can get the game to feel comfortable to them.
At this stage, before the player has even got to the meat of the game, the game has already failed to meet their expectations at two stages (the initial feel, and then the lack of settings to adjust). Do you think this increases, or decreases the chances that this player will stick around to try out your game?
At present, every game you play on console will work against your muscle memory for the last game you've played. Outside of games from the same developer, it's incredibly difficult to find two games that have the same feel to their controls.
In summary
Many games have poorly configured control layouts and stick configurations by default. Most games have very poor options to customise these controls. These often, awkward and difficult to use controls, combined with limited options both harm the overall player experience, and make these games less accessible to players with disabilities. Despite these issues, there is a way forward, developers can design better controls, control options, and ultimately, better player experiences with some more consideration to these areas of the game.
Specifically I would suggest...
- Include 'control feel' as part of the focus of your user testing. Ask players about how the game controls. Ask players if ever felt difficult to be precise, or to press the buttons they wanted to. Leverage this feedback to help the developers tune the 'default' settings so that the game feels more comfortable out of the box.
- Include a robust set of options that allow players to tweak and tune the game so that it feels comfortable to them. Full custom remapping is essential, particularly for players with disabilities. The OS level remapping options are not good enough.
- Use familiar and intuitive language so that players can understand what your options do. Offer clear descriptions of each setting so that players understand what they are doing when making adjustments to the control configuration
- Remember that game feel should not be an afterthought, when players hit your gameplay experience, how it feels to move move around the world you've created is the first thing that players will take away from the experience. Everything that's built is framed inside of how it controls to play and it can be make or break for the player experience.
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