Hey guys, this week I saw a video from PAX the video showed a disabled man asking developers why a lot of their games was not catering to him and other fellow disabled gamers. The reason why the gentleman could not play certain games on consoles was due to the button layouts they provided he could not press specific buttons at certain times. His aim was to get the console developers more aware of people in his situation or similar situations.
PC developers have a reputation for allowing their players the freedom to customise their setup and even the game its self through mods. Games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft allow their players to customise their own control schemes, for instance there is a mouse from razor that has 17 programmable buttons that means if you mapped all the controls on to the mouse you wouldn’t have to touch the keyboard for certain games.
Games like Call of Duty and Halo have been giving their players control pre-sets for a while this has been helpful for players, especially those that play other games with similar pre-sets. A new game from Bethesda/Splash Damage is called Brink, Brink will have custom mapping for consoles. This is great news but why is Brink the first game to do this? As it seems stupid to alienate a potential consumer.
Here are my thoughts on why game developers might not want to allow custom mapping for consoles. Consoles have game controllers with a specific amount of buttons and the amount is normally quite small, therefore the developers could be thinking that they are giving to many options to the player who then could get confused. Other developers believe the layout they have given the character is the best layout to play the game.
Overall I believe all games on consoles should allow custom mapping but I believe we should still keep the specific pre-sets, they should be packaged together.
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