Skip to main content

Cease and Desist: Context Sensitive Buttons

I have noticed an increasing trend in modern video games (particularly third person action games) for context sensitive buttons. The same button can have multiple effects depending on the context. In general I hate this. It leads to all sorts of control confusion. I played a shooter last week where the same button would either make you duck for cover or sprint forwards depending on your position and what you were looking at when you pressed it. Recipe for disaster. Of course you get used to it and for the most part learn when to press it to achieve the desired effect but I can assure you that many times in the heat of battle I panicked and pressed that button when I wasn't quite lined up with cover and instead dashed wildly out into a hail of gunfire.

For me it is not just a control problem it is also an immersion problem.  In order to maximise immersion I want to feel in control of my character at all times. I need to know that when I press button X the same thing will happen every darn time.

I imagine the main justification for context sensitive buttons is the limited number of buttons on a game controller but I don't buy this excuse. There are plenty of ways to squeeze more functions into those buttons. Use menus for functions that don't need to be done in real time and free up buttons for those functions that need to be done quickly. Use multiple key combinations if you need more functions than you have buttons. Heck why not use one of the triggers as a kind of shift key to give you a complete new set of  button actions.
 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...
52 comments
Read more

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...
1 comment
Read more

If there is a God I think they are a God of fractals

Life is infinitely complex. In the language of mathematics it is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable. This is the definition of a fractal.  The thing about fractals is that you can zoom in as far as you like and it never gets any less complex. I think life is like that. At one level you see kings and emperors and their epoch defining movements. Zoom in and you see common people arguing over the price of corn. Zoom in further and it is just one person trying to decide what clothes to wear. I think that God, if there is a God inhabits all of these levels and all of the complexity that each entails. 
1 comment
Read more