this lack of a standard layout is annoying
the xbox style layout, which a lot of pc games such as Hollow Knight expect, is not something im used to, especially with yes and no buttons (a/b) being reversed compared to nintendo switch
and a lot of games dont have good remapping
especially with yes and no buttons (a/b) being reversed compared to nintendo switch
It’s also reversed on Playstation. Games use “X” for “yes” and “O” for “cancel”. But only in the west, it’s reversed in Japan.
Valve has a chance to do something really funny.
Honestly, I don’t even really know where they are unless I’m looking at them. The games that show all four face buttons and just highlight the one I need to push are the ones that really work for me.
I don’t have any problem with the PS controller, since the X is a shape, not a letter, but the Xbox layout always fucks me up so bad since it’s become standard for PC games. The Nintendo layout was hardcoded into my brain in 1991 when I played Super Mario World. I don’t think I’ll ever really get used to the Xbox one even though I probably won’t be playing on Nintendo consoles any more.
In the 90’s me being the edgy teenager I “grew out” of Nintendo and switched to PlayStation. So the PS layout was hard coded into my brain for almost the whole decade. Then I switched to PC and it’s now the Xbox layout is in there. To this day I have to draw the PS layout on a piece of paper in front of me when I use emulation until I get used to it again. If I’m playing a N64 game you can map the buttons all you want that Z trigger is irreplaceable.
As someone who grew up with N64, then GameCube, then XBOX 360, thankfully I’ve never had this issue with XBOX controllers. (The N64 had six face buttons and the GameCube put the A button directly in the center.) So when I switched to PC after the 360, the transition was natural.
Which is why the Switch controller always fucks me up, and is one of the reasons why I prefer to play Switch games in an emulator, even though I have the actual console: because I can fix the button layout. (The other reasons being 4K, 120FPS, and mod support. Basically what the OLED Switch should have been from the get go—but isn’t—so I have to resort to emulaton.)
Yeah, Nintendo used that control scheme for the SNES and didn’t come back to it until over 10 years later with the DS. I can at least switch between the bottom button being select and the right button being cancel without too much trouble - the bottom being cancel is not only Nintendo, but Sony Japanese games.
Could be worse, it could be Japan where the purpose of X vs Circle is swapped.
As someone who learned on that, it is worse (having to switch one way or the other).
Purple ‘Q’ button, Orange ‘R’ button, Magenta ‘S’ button, and the Black ‘Horseshoe’ button.
Meanwhile, I’m annoyed by the shift from Y/triangle to B/circle for navigating back in menus. Nintendo, as far as I know (console ownership gap between SNES and Switch), kept their button assignments for those consistent.
I remember the PlayStation doing that since the PS2. I had like 30 or so games which had X for accept and O for back. But then I played a remastered Uncharted on my PS4 and was utterly confused to see triangle for back.
lol not at all. Your gap of skipping N64 and GameCube misses the inconsistencies perfectly. Have a look at images of the N64 and GameCube controllers. 😄
The Switch is the console that went back to the roots of the SNES.
I vaguely remember playing on GameCubes at the dentist’s office back then, could never figure out button mappings for the games 😂
😁 GC controller easily the best controller for a console. So comfortable, could play for hours on that thing. I especially loved the click at the bottom of the triggers. Ingenious thing that nobody did before or since.
The PlayStation one is the symbol, not the letter, so that one is a bit different.
Tell that to my brain’s pattern recognition reflexes…
Yup, functionally the cross is more like an A, and the PlayStation layout is effectively the same as the Xbox one in actual practice.
Which is incorrect in the first place. Circle was supposed to be the accept/enter button originally.
I never understood why Sony felt the need to flip confirm/cancel in markets outside Japan.
Yeah, the original system had logic to it. The square also symbolized menus, and triangle was tertiary.
This is yet another one of the many reasons Steam is amazing. Not only do they have an abstracted layer that allows devs to insert control mappings that adapt to show your controller preference… but even BETTER, they have an option for “Universal” controller button iconography where they just show the relative position of the face buttons in a diamond layout ❖ where the button indicated is a filled circle ● and the others are outlined ○ - rather than letters like ABXY.
So like this :
…instead of “× or A or B” from PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo (respectively).
Hold up, how do I do this? I literally just mentioned in another comment that my PS controller shows up with XBox buttons and I’d really like to use the neutral one anyways.
On the Deck / Big Picture - it’s under the Controller settings on Steam as seen here :
Another option, if you want to be able to describe them with words instead of pictures, it naming them after the cardinal directions.
Me already teaching my 6 year old: “press the L button” “Not left on the dpad” “That’s the left stick button” “No not left on the left stick” “Not the left on the right stick” “that’s ZL!”
And now with this suggestion: “No not the left face button either!”
No, let’s not use cardinal directions anymore.
The cardinal directions are north, east, south, and west, as on a map. They are not left, right, up, and down because the cardinal directions are not relative to the observer. The problem of differentiating D-Pad, Stick, shoulder, trigger, etc. can be frustrating too (especially when they are shown on screen as icons with confusingly minor differences instead of text), but that is another matter entirely.
The existence of cardinal directions implies the existence of ordinal directions. But, like, in the sense like numbers have those two forms, not like apparently actually exists where “ordinal directions” are just the in-betweens like northwest.
Our brains process simple symbols objectively faster than words - it’s why when you see a stop sign they all are 🛑s.
Your 🧠 maps the shape 🛑 more rapidly than the word “STOP” which is made up of several letters that you have to first understand, combine, and then remap in your mind internally.
If they made some stop signs purple triangles, there would be more accidents and traffic violations in relation to stop signs. “STOP” is secondary and takes relatively more time to process than “🛑.”
Symbols that represent objects or entire words are a more direct mapping than words composed of multiple letters.
If you’ll permit me to dust off my old game design hat… similar to the principle as to why it was easier to move Mario in any of his 3D games than it was to move your character in the original PS1 versions of Resident Evil…
…Less layers of “mapping.”
In Super Mario 64, you just angle the stick relative to YOUR view to make Mario go “that” way.
Meanwhile in the original Resident Evil games (and other earlier “3D” perspective games pre-Super Mario 64), tilting “up” on the Dual-Shock L-stick made your character go “forward” from THEIR perspective, not yours.
Part of the challenge was being able to quickly “translate” that layer of mapping in your mind.
TL;DR - 🛑 > ”STOP”
I still need to physically move my a to b and x to y on my steam deck, it triggers me
Billionaire Gabe’s corporate cult is so deep on Lemmy. You can’t talk about anything game related before someone busts in sucking Gabe’s dick and shilling steam
This is good UI design, and the fact that Steam hardware is making Linux more common and usable is also very cool.
But Idk, people were rightfully dragging Gabe Newell over his insane fucking yacht.
Appreciating some neat tech stuff, and hating capitalism aren’t mutually exclusive
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks!
It was too good for this world.
I’ve got a (non-brand) playstation controller, but for some reason, Steam thinks it’s an XBox controller and puts the XBox button prompts in games instead. I had a (non-brand) XBox controller before, so my muscle memory thankfully knows the buttons and I don’t actually have to look.
I loved that controller as a kid.
Retvrn 2 Tradition
I’m pretty sure that Nintendo created this problem.
They used a/b/x/y on the SNES. The Genesis, it’s direct competitor, had a/b/c.
Then Xbox copied them and Sony copied them… But each had to have a slight variation because Nintendo being Nintendo, they’d get sued into next week…
I definitely blame Nintendo for this one.
First, sony didnt copy them. The symbols on the PS controller had special meanings in Japanese. X = incorrect/cancel O = correct/accept. English localized games reversed them for whatever reason. Also, xbox actually derived its layout from the Dreamcast. MS was partnered with Sega, thus the xbox carries on the Sega legacy.
I remember reading somewhere that the Triangle was meant to represent “viewpoint” and the Square was meant to represent “menu”. Neat, if true!
This.
The Playstation started as an SNES add-on.
It’s been done.
The gamecube controller is how I memorized the x- and y-axis of the coordinate system.
oooooh
Man, when this shit hit the streets I thought there was no way this controller wouldn’t suck, but turned out to be a great layout.
In my experience, you almost never used the D-pad and C-stick.
That made it functionally in line with PS, and not terribly difficult to adapt into.
I do think the central A with surrounding B, X, and Y buttons was worse than the balanced design of PS/XBox. Just not enough to lose sleep over
I like this button layout. If one of the face buttons is gonna be used more than all the others, why shouldn’t it be bigger?
It also has the advantage that nearly every button is a completely different size or shape. Making it easier to use if you have trouble knowing where your fingers are without looking.
button prompts can be recognizable by silhouette
Is this not recognizible enough?
No, because Zelda has unironically one of the worst examples of button layouts due to them being different to other games for seemingly no reason.
Why is sprint the bottom face button instead of right trigger? Why is the top face button jump?
Even basic things like running and jumping are so difficult and unintuitive. So many actions are all tied to the badly placed jump button with no prompts given, like shield surfing and triggering flurry rushes.
No, look. The controls in BOTW/TOTK are really simple. The sprint/go fast button is always B. Unless you’re on a horse - then it’s A.
Or if you’re swimming or climbing, because then it’s X.
I’m not going to take a scientific approach, botw is one of the most awkward games to learn controls imo. I have so many clips of dismounting, self detonating, throwing my weapon. I’m not bad at games, this game just super confuses my gamer muscles. Bruh
Stuff like this is the only part I hated about red dead 2.
None of that has anything to do with the readability of the button prompt
Right, but the switch also has the directional buttons on the left side. They are also round and oriented the same way and are not used for moving.
So no. Even that is not perfectly readable on the switch.
yeah but it has to be given with a silhouette of the others with it, whereas the other layout allows them to be recognizable on their own.
PlayStation was originally X = B O = A Because in Japan they use a circle to mean the same thing as in English a check mark is used. That is: “yes”, or “correct”. The cross means “no”, or “wrong” in the same context in English and Japanese.
At some point the English language PlayStation games started flipping the meaning of X and O. Not sure why. Maybe to align with Xbox? So eventually Sony changed it in Japan too in order to standardise globally.
Nah. Xbox came out years after the PlayStation. The reason the usage of the ps controller got switched in NA is because they did some studies and people just tried to use ps X-button as the accept button.
Xbox is an abomination amalgamation of everything that came before it: Nintendo, PlayStation, and Sega. Look at those controllers, keeping in mind they came first, and it’s painfully obvious what Microsoft was up to. They can’t even come up with creative names. Hell, they even bought halo. And in an era of free online services, only Microsoft pushed everything into being paid and micro transactions. A LOT of the enshittification is Microsoft’s fault.
Compare to N64, which came before xbox, and know that Microsoft could have made any design they wanted, but didn’t.
American-made PlayStation games were using X for confirm and O for cancel long before the Xbox came out. It’s probably partially because X is blue and O is red; we don’t have cultural context for the symbols, but we do have cultural context for the colors.
Also fascinating is that there was this window of games that tried using various “ok” buttons. Like, I think it was originally the Start button, then some games tried even Triangle or even Square. Conventions are weird.
I just appreciate that Sony put a lot of effort into trying to make their buttons memorable and intuitive. The green Triangle points up, the cancel blue Square is down, the pink Square is left (like where you’d hold a shield), and the red ok/yes Circle is on the right. They made the convention, and haven’t fucked with it at all.
I also appreciate their buttons being labeled and numbered. Like L1 and L2, vs msft’s… Shoulder? Bumper? R1? Trigger? I alternate between shoulder and bumper, but they could have called it Frank and it would have been better. Imagine if they had weirdly given each button proper names.
I see the symbols as like checkboxes or matrices. The ‘X’ has been filled in as yes, the O has been left empty
