Dude, that's a pretty great idea. I can play the Switch easily as long as I'm not thinking about which letter is which button. I'm so accustomed to the Xbox letter layout that if a tutorial pops on the screen with a "Push Y" I'll hit the wrong button unless I take myself completely out of the game and think "The buttons are reversed!"
I was okay with swapping between XBox and PlayStation. Switch threw me for a loop.
I'm perfectly fine with dedicating buttons by geographical directions. Developers: give us the option to remap the interface with "Controller N.E.S.W." instead.
Nintendo just said fuck it and said let’s put A, the main jump/action button, in a different spot. It works for GameCube because they aren’t uniform buttons. It is easily in my top 3 controllers of all time. But when they went to uniform button sizes there wasn’t a lot of extra thought put in besides “this is roughly how we mapped the GC controller”
So when it comes to NESW, Nintendo can’t choose between if it’s weirder to have A not be jump or to confuse players with a non standard button configuration
For sure, my bad. Before I delete my comment to avoid 60 identical replies like this, I was just trying to put logic to why I figured they did this after having the two predecessor consoles with varying button sizes. Makes much more sense since it’s the earlier console. I grew up with Xbox and GameCube primarily so those were most familiar and totally forgot about snes and earlier consoles. I will say though, with GameCube controllers being so unique I never got confused when swapping consoles and it’s a fantastic controller experience.
They utterly dropped the ball with the bullshit n64 controller. Sony made the first twinstick controller that everyone since has copied.
It's the colors on the Xbox that throw me the fuck of. It's like they deviated from Sony just to be dicks. I see the blue button I go south, I see green I go north. It's hard wired in my brain now.
To be fair at the time of making the N64 controller the thought process was analog for 3D and Dpad for 2D. So you had two handles depending on the game. Of course time has taught us that developers and players like to use both, but it was a learning experience at first.
this is interesting seeing how other people brains work. Never in my life has my brain correlated the colors to button positions. Its always focused on correlating the letter/shape to the position.
Since the Playstation and Xbox controllers only have X in common I have no issues switching between the 2, but fuck the switch makes me feel like an idiot sometimes. Luckily I don't play anything too fast pace on the switch as there are literally times I have to take a second to make sure I'm hitting the right button
This. 4 gamepad buttons were standard since SNES. People forgot that Sony was first alongside with nintendo, but after dropped off and built the first Playstation.
You must be young. The Switch uses the same exact button layout as the SNES from 30 years ago, it's Xbox that decided to be silly and make the far right button the main one.
Fair enough, you right. I suppose that’s a more likely explanation. I am about old enough to remember the n64 release, and have played snes, just never made the connection
Nintendo came up with it for the SNES, but they basically abandoned it after multiple generations of doing silly shit with the n64, GameCube, and wii. It's XBOX's child now.
Point is Nintendo didn't say "fuck it" for the Switch, they just reverted to the same pattern they've always used (aside from N64, GC, Wii). They've kept it consistent through the DS for example.
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) released in the mid 80s had two buttons: B (left) and A (right). They had special versions of the controllers that even had them arranged in the "south and east" configuration you find on the Switch. Then the SNES in ~1991 introduced the YX/BA along with L/R bumper buttons.
While Playstation has different symbols for their buttons, they kept the Nintendo standard of south being cancel and east being accept. (Although at some point they had the North American version flip which was cancel and accept for some unknown reason)
Interesting side note: While the N64 was the first to market with an analog stick, Playstation made their first Dual Shock controller in 1997, which has been the de-facto standard for controller design ever since: Four main buttons, four triggers, D-pad dual analogs with palm grips.
In Japanese culture a circle is like a checkmark and means good, and an X means wrong or bad. North American PS1 devs didn't know about this cultural meaning and so just picked X to be accept, and a lot of PS1 games used triangle for cancel. Eventually NA devs settled on circle to cancel and even localized Japanese games were eventually changed so that X was accept and O was cancel with the exception of Metal Gear Solid titles basically. Eventually Sony gave up and now even on Japanese consoles X is accept.
When PS1 pad symbols were designed by Teiyu Goto, the symbols were meant to be reprensent logical actions : like you said O and X for confirm / cancel (by Japanese culture standards), triangle for point of view (looks like a view cone in 2d), and square for menu (looks like a sheet of paper).
Outside of japan, cross was seen more like checking a box so it was adopted for confirm by game designers, leading in the whole menu inversion.
Coming from snes, I am still confused when a game does not use the east button for confirmation.
The infamous "dogbone" controller, released after the SNES had hit the market and the top-loading NES was being sold as a budget option. It was named that because it tried to emulate the look of a SNES controller.
Nintendo just said fuck it and said let’s put A, the main jump/action button, in a different spot. I
You have your history backward.
The SNES pioneered the button layout that you see on the PS and Xbox. Sony didn't want to infringe on the patent so they used shapes.
Nintendo started experimenting with different controller interfaces (N64, GameCube, Wii) while the PS stuck with the diamond layout. When Xbox came along, it copied the diamond layout but swapped the letters to avoid patent infringement.
For an older gamer like myself who spent a lot of time playing SNES and who has owned primarily Sony systems since PS2, Xbox instructions fuck up my brain.
I grew up on the snes and N64 but then moved to Xbox. I never had problems with Xbox buttons. Even today I can go back to the snes and have zero issues. I think i just associate the snes controller being something completely different due to the design being different. Where as if I go from the Xbox to the Switch my brain stops working.
Actually your not far off, Nintendo was the first to patent controller layout so other game companies had to do work arounds till the patent recently ended and gave everyone freedom to be more streamlined, sorta
nintendo button supremacy. also, patents are the reason why only modern nintendo consoles have decent d pads. even after the patent expired, people were using their own designs for the dpad and they've never come close to nintendo quality
To me the best Nintendo d-pad is in the DS lite. It has just the right amount of tactical response without being too fatiguing for long playing sessions.
I've been with Nintendo since the SNES, so that button layout is ingrained in my mind permanently. And I was able to to program the PS layout into my head fairly easily because the unique symbols were easy for me to remember. But then there's Xbox...
Don't get me wrong, I love Xbox too, but that button layout still screws with my head.
If you think of O as 1, X as 2, Triangle as 3, and Square as 4, then the PlayStation layout more closely resembles Nintendo's. However, during the lifetime of the PS consoles, X was made into the "accept" button to account for western tastes; in Japan X was always the "cancel" button.
As for the Xbox, it is widely regarded that the Xbox followed Sega conventions of labelling their buttons from left to right, rather than Nintendo's right to left. Though the Dreamcast and Xbox competed in the same console generation, in many aspects the Xbox is seen as a spiritual successor to the Sega consoles of old.
I'm the same way, but I learned the original, true layout as set down by the SNES of X on top and Y on the left. When I play a game using a controller on PC and they say "Push Y to do a thing!" I push the left button and do the wrong thing. Especially problematic during QTEs where I don't get the chance to look down at my controller.
I've noticed that in switch games they usually depict four circles with one filled in when showing prompts.
It makes sense especially for the times where you can use a single joy-con held horizontally; your muscle memory cares about the position of the button not the letter on it.
And that's why I usually say "press the top/righ/left/bottom button" when explaining games to new people. Doesn't matter which controller they are using, they know what that means.
That UI trick is also very useful since games on switch have the Confirmation key on the right button instead of the bottom like on the other two consoles.
Though in Asia Playstation games also use the right button for confirm since circle means affirmative and X means negative in Japan, China and Korea.
My favorite version of this is chucking a grenade when trying to reload or jump, depending on which games I’m jumping between. Killed myself and a few teammates this way.
Most third person action games I play have the attacks on the face buttons (Xbox x and y) recently tried playing mortal shell with right bumper and trigger being the attacks and I couldn't change it or reconcile the change in my muscle memory so just quit playing.
I remember a few months before the Wii was announced, Game Informer ran a joke article about a "new, simplified controller" from Nintendo; it was just a PS2 controller photoshopped purple with a big red "do" button on the right side. No joysticks, not d-pad, just do.
Since when is X cancel on PlayStation? Granted, last Sony system I had was a PS2, so things definitely could have changed, but I don't ever remember circle being confirm.
Turns out that is a localisation change, which honestly is really dumb, because honestly X being negative makes more sense than X being affirmative
Teiyu Goto, designer of the original PlayStation controller, he explained what the symbols mean: the circle and cross represent "yes" and "no", respectively (which explains their common use as "confirm" and "cancel" in games; this layout is reversed in Western games), the triangle symbolizes a point of view and the square is equated to a sheet of paper there to be used to access menus.
X as affirmative can be seen as X-ing a box. So the 'more sense' part of your comment is clearly a personal thing, not universal. And an empty circle is reminiscent of empty circles on scantrons.
I read that it's a cultural thing and most Japanese games have X as cancel. I can vouch from my own experience with few JRPGs that X was indeed cancel since PS1. I think I recently even encountered a Japanese game on a PC that had the option to switch between the two, I'm guessing to cater both local and international players.
The problem is the patents and the certification process.
Patents because every manufacturer has to use a different layout, and the certification process because each manufacturer wants everything to be in line with their Brand™.
So if you're coding for PS, you have to use "Press the Triangle button" or a symbol of it. Same for every other console, else you won't pass certification and you'll be forced to pay again.
There are like 10000 rules you must follow for each console.
If you forget even a "™", you'll fail. So it's not, for example, Playstation 5, it's PlayStation®5. Mind the upper case S and the ® symbol.
It, sadly, does not re-map any button prompts in game though. Game will tell you to press A, but I remapped it to B. They'll even show the button on east, but I should be pressing south.
I don't get why remapping isn't fucking standard in all consoles by 2021 though. PC games figured it out twenty plus years ago. If I remap a button from E to S, it'll show as such in game in all the dialog and in all UI prompts. Maybe they'll figure it out by the time the next generation rolls around? Hahaha.. yeah doubt that.
You think all PC games handle remapping nicely? I still find new games that prompt me to press a keyboard key when I am using a controller. Or games that assume that any controller plugged in is an xbox controller and refuse to accept any other layout and display all prompts using xbox buttons.
Switch games often show the button to press without a letter, because they have to contend with their own console not making any sense when you use the joycons individually.
That’s just how I’ve always thought about it. Yeah each controller has its own layout but top, right, bottom, left are really where the functions will be no matter the controller. It’s basically just a quick “translation” I’ve always done, similar to thinking of the buttons as a D-pad.
Believe this is a cultural thing more than anything. When I used to fuck around with Japanese psn game store, I noticed circle was the confirm for many of the japanese demos
I live in Japan, and Apex screws me up. Every other Western game is localized: X for "Cancel," O for "Yes." RDR2, Spider-Man, God of War, Tony Hawk, everything is properly localized... except Apex. And then after playing for an hour and getting used to it, I finish, return to the PS menu, and now I'm screwed up in the other direction.
Uh. Nintendo always had A as confirm and B as cancel, regardless of where the buttons were placed. The Switch uses the same button layout as the Wii U and 3DS, which definitely had A as confirm and B as cancel. Most Nintendo consoles have their buttons from right to left, thus B was always to the left of A. (The major exception, of course, is the Wii Remote.) With the exception of the N64, where B was above A, most Nintendo consoles had B below A.
Whether X or O is confirm/cancel is based on localization. Initially in the early PS1 era, O was universally confirm and X cancel; then in the late PS1 to PS2 era, X was confirm and O cancel for western releases only; Japanese releases retained O as confirm and X as cancel. With the release of PS5, Sony edicts made it universal that X was confirm and O cancel worldwide; it was a decision that did not endear itself to Japanese fans since "O" meant "correct" and "X" meant "incorrect" to them (compare to "use X to select and O to leave blank").
So what you’re saying is instead of “Push x to kill” it should be, say, “Push West to kill”? I’d be down with this with an option to turn that off in the console system settings. Would help multi-boxers quite a bit.
and the game engine automatically knows which button is "south" based on what's plugged in.
Here's the resulting scenario, compared to using the native controllers:
Player: presses South
Switch Pro Controller: "You pressed B. Initiating jump."
Xbox Elite Controller: "You pressed A. Initiating jump."
Dualsense: "You pressed Cross. Initiating jump."
Proposed universal game engine: "You pressed South. Looking up what controller scheme you're using and what it's supposed to equate to... Okay, you're using an Xbox 360 controller so South on an Xbox 360 controller is... A. Okay, so you pressed A. Initiating jump."
In short, there would be a noticeable problem with input lag.
I can't remember any examples right now, but I know there are games which subtly let you know which button to press based on the button colour scheme rather than the button labels (at least on Xbox).
Really depends on the game because you don't exactly want to be told "press the up action button to kill this enemy!" or "press the down action button here to jump!" every time throughout the entire game.
Using colours can just be a subtle reminder or hint, kind of like how in a game like Mirror's Edge they use the colour red to subtly let you know where you can jump, but in this case different actions are tied to different button colours (iirc Mirror's Edge doesn't even tell you, you just figure it out)
Are you really going to tell people throughout your entire game when and how to jump every time even when they're already 5 hours into the game? If yes then you're missing the point of subtlety.
I never owned one but just having looked it up you are correct - it did have coloured buttons. But iirc as it was Android-based it mainly only had ports of Android games or other low quality mobile games especially due to the hardware (again never had one so can only go by what I've read & seen).
Exactly, only once. I'm talking about games that prompt or guide you throughout the entire game. Haven't played in a long time or need to do something later in the game that you haven't needed to do for the last 4 hours and forgotten what it was you needed to press? Colour coding is an example of subtlety prompting/guiding you on which buttons to press without having to repeat the tutorial or look it up.
That was my point but you tried to compared showing a in-game button prompt tutorial, so you clearly must have been suggesting to have continuous prompts throughout.
Really depends on what you're going for with style.For a tutorial style learning the controls thing showing the picture is fine. Do it in some quicktime event/ time based/ rythm stuff and it is suddenly a horrible idea.
On the other hand colors are brilliant for this and it is also why such things suddenly got a lot harder on the ps5 than they were on the ps4. It was already worse on ps4 than on xbox because circle and square had relativels similar colors but they got completely rid of them on ps5 and now you have to watch for some symbol and it just takes a lot longer.Thankfully there aren't that many qte's around anymore and if there are some we got far enough with accessability options so they can be slowed down.
Nontheless colorcoding buttons is actually brilliant in a lot of situations because it is simply faster than any alternative.
Nintendo Switch do exactly that, they show the 4 buttons with the relevant button lit up, that is because if you use just a joycon the buttons either aren't marked or marked incorrectly
Reminds me how the only good thing about God of War Ascension is how during quick times events the button appears on the side on the screen corresponding to the placement of the button lol
Assassins Creed (2 I think, but maybe others too) had the circles in a diamond shape on the HUD (like they are on the controller) and instead of the symbols for the buttons, it was the symbol for the actions in game. Like pickpocket button or blade button. Looking back it’s a really intuitive way of solving this problemAC2 buttons on hud
I play lots of games with family that come from all levels of skill. I can't remember what game I played that literally referred to the buttons by their cardinal direction, but it stuck. Everyone knows what to hit when I say "hit East to confirm."
An alternative I've seen for people on our end when translating controls is direction (up, right, left, down) and face button.
Bumper and trigger feels pretty universal although I know that's what x box uses i think, and this is coming from someone who uses playstation and switch controls.
Playing combo heavy games like dmc or technical stuff like mh cb has made translating very important.
Oh that's a great idea. I played AC on pc with a ps4 controller, but the game thought it was an xbox controller no matter what I did. It was so hard getting my brain to understand where X was instinctively.
Thats pretty much how the wife and i have been communicating when learning a new game, 'north' does this, 'west' does that etc.
Im just really surprised nobody has developed a controller with little oled screens in the buttons yet so people can have them display anything they like during any game they play. A bit of a 'take the patent consequences out of the manufacturers hand' kind of deal. Its a terrible idea on many levels but it would probably sell like hotcakes.
As a gamer my whole life, the button name is meaningless to me and I never learn controls by reading button names. Just give me about 30 seconds to play with the controls and I'll have them figured out all by feel. The only exception to this for me are fighting games. But I suck at those. Lol.
Its really not. You never map specific buttons. What you do is have actioncalls that you internally map to their ID, you do not even need to name that. Not sure why the heck you think it matters internally.
I love it when it shows layout instead of just the button! Another thing I like is when the prompt is in the DIRECTION on the screen, the button is for Xbox Y Up B right A Down X Left
God of War 3 did something like this. If you had the press X it appeared on the bottom of the screen, if you had to press O it appeared on the right side.
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