Rampant Games - Game Controllers and Computer RPGs
The Rampans Coyote has updated his blog with his opion on game controllers and computer RPGs. After a talk about the old days, he goes on to explain how he sees this today:
Nowadays, from a technology standpoint - there's not such a difference between consoles and computers. As far as what's going on under the hood, it doesn't really matter. As Microsoft's Surface and will-conceived Windows 8 attest, mobile devices are closing the gap as well. We have HD TVs now that display text almost as well as computer monitors. And the controllers? Well, console controllers from the last couple of generations of systems have been pretty dang interesting. I'll bet you could eliminate some redundancies, put a few rare controls on a menu, and map the old Ultima controls onto an XBox controller pretty well.
An then, a quote, about how this will affect his new game:
But reality intrudes. I have to show my next game, Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath, at Salt Lake Comic Con in about a month, and ... well, people really respond better to controllers, especially when faced with a new game. The left stick and right buttons are the first to be experimented with. And - as the adventure games of the 90s illustrated, context-sensitive verbs are a pretty good thing. I really want to hand them a controller, not point them to a keyboard and mouse. So now I'm frantically re-thinking my UI in terms of game control input.