NO. If anything this will complicate controls. Anyone remember having to use "shift" buttons on dreamcast games?

The current shared configuration from PS and Xbox is fine. Trying to simplify the controllers will end up making games over simplified. Not a good idea in my opinion.

Using motion controls in place of buttons means lots of complicated movements, much more difficult than simply pressing a button. Also, attachment peripherals defeat the whole purpose of simplifying, do they not?

Bring back the SNES controller and everything will be fine. :D

I grew up playing video games so I never really had much trouble using any controller. reducing the amount of buttons will ultimately reduce the amount of options available to game developers.

"AC has a control system that will take me a week to get comfortable manipulating"

Waoh, I can't imagine how long will it take you to get comfortable with GTA...

I understand why you'd want this, but it would make controlling games even harder than before. This makes me think of the Wii controller, you there are different button combinations you need to memorize to do different things.

What kind of gamer would ever condone the removal of the d-pad?

I found Assassins Creed rather simple to control, with two exceptions. At times the useless d-pad selected wrong weapon for me, and more than few times I found Altair jumping in ways I didn't want him to, so they could have split some of the different jumps to separate buttons. Gears of War was horrifying experience in cramped spaces because of the one button action control, the character would glue himself to all the walls, rush around like a madman, etc. I don't think dropping buttons is good solution, you just end up simplifying the whole game unless you want to make a mess with context sensitive commands.

AC wasn't hard to pick up at all, IMO. You just had to hold buttons down.

I actually thought that considering how many things you can do, Assassin's Creed's control system was very good. In terms of controllers, I don't particularly think they're overcomplicated at the moment. It's more about how the game in question maps those controls.

I actually find it more difficult to remember 10 different obscure motions, then simply pressing a button to do the same things.

I think the current configuration of the 360/ps3 is fine. Anything more, or anything less would be a pain.

AC controls probably slightly easier than GTA IVs sooo..whatever. Losing buttons is bad though I think. Dont add any more but dont take them away.

"Add attachment peripherals" to uncomplicate controllers wtf? Thanks Kotaku were it not for you I might have ventured to GamePro in search of insightful writing now I know better.

Honestly. Anyone complaining about having too many buttons on your average everyday controller has obviously never played Steel Battalion on the X-Box. Can you say dedicated windshield wiper button? Yeah, I knew you could :)

Most games I play use a keyboard, and you probably can't get any more complex than that. But it does the job well. And, you get an attachment peripherial - a mouse. ;)

yeah, while we're at it we should change the number of keys on keyboards down to about 20 so they'll be easier to use...

more buttons != more complicated

Both

"• Use motion-sensing controls (Newton, anyone?)
• Add attachment peripheral (Newt-chuk, anyone?)"

add complexity. So uhh... yea, not exactly a well thought out list.

I never really thought Assassin's Creed had difficult controls. They didn't always WORK, but the inputs were pretty simple, I thought.

BUt I have been trying to teach a new boyfriend to at least be able to walk around a Halo map and shoot, and he can't even stop looking at the floor or sky all the time. I think we as gamers forget how much the thousands of hours of playtime have actually taught us in terms of controllers.

I started with Atari 2600, so each generation basically added a button or two - besides the jump to dual sticks, which took a slight bit longer - no big deal.

No one complains that PC gaming has too many keys or whatever - think of all the commands and stuff to track for the above average World of Warcraft player, for example.

If the gameplay experience is engaging enough, people will invest the time necessary to figure it out for the most part.

Creed seems daunting at first, but you don't need all the buttons all the time. It takes maybe a couple play sessions, but it's not as complicated as it seems. Might be a bit tricky if you're interspersing your gameplay with GTA IV, though that's true of most any games.

@Guu: I wish other games would support that controller. Mine is just gathering dust in the closet. I should probably just sell it off.

This is why nobody reads Gamepro.

I find I have that problem with PC games. Oh sure, laugh at the noob, but it's hard!

When an FPS uses arrows/mouse, I'm fine, but add anything more than jump and crouch and I'm pooped. I have very lean hands for a guy, and they're reasonably big and dexterous (I'm a Pianist), but always end up hitting the wrong key in PC games.

Game pads though? Awesome. I have come to love the nuances of every controller of the last decade or so now (Fat Xbox pad notwithstanding), and I think we've pretty much reached perfection.

Really, why aren't we looking at this from the point of view of game design?
There's nothing to stop designers making their games more simple to use with the present controllers.
I can think of games like Ico, or the much underrated Galleon which worked depending not on which button you pressed so much as the context your character was in at the time, it made for a much more fluid gaming experience.

You've heard this argument before it's dumb. People use their keyboards every day and it's 100x more complicated then any controller, well not Steel Battalion. But we can all agree that that thing was awesome! It should be up to the developer whether or not they want simple controls.

In short not everyone wants Wii controls, makes me sick.

This is like the crap that that annoying twit Cliffy B. was spewing in interviews and such. He thinks controllers are too complex. Yea, let's play flippin' Metal Gear Solid 4 or Gears 2 on a controller with 3 buttons and a D-Pad.

Stupidity.

360 and PS3 controllers have the perfect amount of buttons. Any less and you'd have to hold down buttons to press another. I've already played a few games where the Wii just doesn't have enough (comfortable) buttons to use.

Another dumb idea thanks to the "casual gaming style".

Damn it!

Today's controllers are fine.

What is not, is the games.

Like Brawl, every button of the controller should be fully configurable so people can set their own personnal setting. No forces preset.

Is it so hard to understand?

I wonder why the person who wrote this thinks that controllers need to be simplified. As it stands now I think that controllers have hit that sweet spot. While the Wii controller and nunchuk work well for the majority of Wii games and Wii gamers, there's isn't a hope in hell of them working for Xbox/PS3 games or gamers. personally, I think the dreamcast-inspired 360 controller is the best one availabe but they could do with improving the DPad (making it four seperate buttons rather than one big useless circle with a cross in the middle).

Eh. Play a game long enough, and most of the controls will come to you. Iron Man's control scheme is pretty complex, with every single button doing something unique (even half-depressing or fully depressing the triggers), but after half an hour, it came natural. And I don't mean the controls. ;D

...innuendo aside, I don't have a problem at all with controls for any game, but then again, it's not as though the DualShock has changed very much during my gamer career. :D

Even PC controls are usually homogenous, to the point where most PC games use the exact same control scheme, so you can just jump in and everything's familiar. The only problem IMO is with older games, before WASD became standardized...anyone remember having to map look/peek/strafe/rotate/dice onion buttons for the Marathon games? They were designed so that you could eschew the mouse entirely and look around with the keyboards; so if anything, controls have gotten simpler since then.

Hey, just think of System Shock, which was probably never ported to a console because it had too many buttons. To say nothing of NetHack or Steel Battalion xD

I guess who ever wrote that list has never seen a WiiMote before.

Did he seriously just say that AC has a difficult control scheme? What?

Did he also imply it is a long game with a length comparable to Grand Theft Auto?

Good god, the fallacies in this article are astounding.

Adding one to the

It's the games, not the controllers.

pile.

Ugh, of course I meant that in reverse. It's not the controllers, it's the games.

*hangs head in shame*

Less buttons?
What the fuck?
How do I get MORE control with LESS buttons? Yeah, game in the past have had lots of unique moves with only a few buttons, but why not just apply that same philosophy with more buttons instead of having less?

Oh, come on, how can you even take something from Gamepro seriously? These guys are hacks. Adding something to make it less complicated and making the start and select button the same button? This sounds like some sort of knock against the Playstation controller.

@akashhhhh: Indeed.

I think the controller layout we have today is pretty decent. It's not overtly complicated, and allows a good range of button combinations.

Regarding AC, I actually thought it was a brilliant controller scheme. The face buttons all did something similar no matter what, and you used the shoulder ones to modify the specific action. A would always do something athletic (run, leap, dodge), B would move things, and X would attack.

It was very simple once you "got" the logic behind it. And that's what I think we need - logical layouts, that once you get the idea, you don't need to actually remember what does each button do *exactly*, but you can always deduce what you need to press to achieve the intended result. Similar to the idea behind Mass Effect's dialogue system.

"Get rid of the d-pad once and for all"

no no no no no no

Many games are VERY VERY intuitively played with a d-pad (anything 2d, turn-based strategy, anything with lots of menus, etc.) i realize he's basing his analysis off the 360 controller which has a downright broken d-pad but that doesn't mean they all don't work. Besides its one of the most intuitive bits of hardware on the controller as is right now. No one ever doesn't "get" what the hell a dpad does. Up is up, down is down. end of story.

Dunno about AC having complicated controls, it all makes perfect sense once you spend about 10 minutes with it.

Owen Good : "...increasingly complex controllers will give rise to increasingly complex-to-control games. "

Have to note that since DualShock was introduced '97 the number of buttons in controllers haven't increased. Not a single button has been added for over 10 years. So I would claim that the increasingly complex controls have nothing to do with the controllers and everything to do with the game design.

Computer keyboards are too complicated. Lets simplify them by removing the less commonly used letters like "z" and "q". Beginning users must feel intimidated by having all the keys in front of them. It takes so long to learn where all the keys are when typing, so reducing the number of keys should make it much easier.

If more advanced users need the missing letters, they can hit Ctrl+Alt+s for z or Ctrl+Alt+g for q, which is simple to remember because z and q are a lot like s and g turned backwards.

Other possibilities for a simplified keyboard:

* Remove confusing and antiquated keys like CapsLock, Tab and F1-F12.
* Reduce keys with similar function. Delete and Backspace are almost identical, have Shift+Delete replace Backspace.
* Loose the Num-pad.
* PgUp, PgDn, Home and End should be completely replaced by mouse gestures.

All this will make it a lot easier to learn how to type on computer!

(Please note: This post is sarcasm. Anyone with half a brain should be able to see that more keys don't necessarily mean more complexity. If more keys made things harder to use, then "media" keys on computer keyboards wouldn't be so popular. People like being able to hit "Play/Pause" to pause their music, rather than having to mouse over to their music player and then hit Ctrl+P or some other combo. Why should we look at video games differently?)

@JonC: I agree. :D

Simplifying the controller is not exactly the best concept... simplifying the controls in-game but still leaving the opportunity for developers to have a broader control scheme as well. I'd have to have to try playing Halo with the controller shown in this news story... or even Brawl, Mario Galaxy, or anything of the like...

No, if people don't feel like spending 10 mins to familiarize themselves with controls then they go and play stupid casual games. We can't dumb down everything for the inept casual crowd.

Motion sensing controls making things easier? BWAHAHAH! That's a good one.

Jeez, that whole list sucks, except for 2.

1- Meh, it's obvious, but personally I don't think it's a good idea.

2- I'm in favor of that.

3- Many games have d-pad uses that are quite fundamental, beneficial, and irreplaceable, except by a shift key + stick (not an improvement). Squad commands are the best example. A d-pad I touch once every five minutes is much preferable to 5 different context sensitive uses for the same button.

4- HA! Yeah, allow for even more options than current controllers, without the standardization, except without all the reliability and convenience. When I click the left stick, it took me a fraction of a second I know that I clicked the left stick. When I flick the controller to boost, it takes me 5 tries at 1/2 second each, and I get no tactile indicator of success. BOO!

5- That'll simplify gaming, dozens of different peripherals! That way, it will be a bigger pain to store and transport your games and systems, you'll have to spend more money, you'll have another piece of junk to break or lose, and new players will be baffled as to why there are different controllers instead of just one! It's PERFECT!

The 360 and PS3 controllers are perfect, as far as I'm concerned. Any bad controls are the fault of the developer.

If a new gamer is confused by the controller, they're going to be confused by the game that uses it. It's still possible to write a game that uses the left stick, A and B, in which case the new player only needs to understand the left stick, A and B. Get that across to them, tell them to ignore the rest, and everything is fine, without sacrificing anything.

Get rid of the D-pad? I agree with ajay42 It's the simplest, most obvious of controls since the joystick. Even Wii Sports uses it and I haven't seen the nursing home folks being confused about how to bowl.

Being able to remap all the buttons and triggers would be good for everyone, though.

ugh give this shit a rest.

As a gamer, I agree that we do NOT need less buttons. Better configured controls are essential, however, and devs can just choose to use only some of the controller's buttons for their game. Also, it's never a bad thing to give players the options to configure their controller input schemes.

I do however understand this movement to reduce complexity of controllers, because to new gamers, they might seem a bit confusing at first. But this is just part of the larger movement to expand consumer base, and how could you blame companies for trying to get more sales?
What we need to do is find a way to please the existing gamers, including the hardcore ones, and attract new ones. A difficult thing, yes, but doable. I believe the focus should be put more on software than on hardware, though.
Also, maybe the next step in control