Modern controls are needlessly convoluted

I have the opposite opinion. The amount of buttons we have on controller is basically standardized, but it's evidently not enough, because they are not only binding absolutely every button, including the "buttons" when you press the joystick in, but there's still combos. I wouldn't mind more buttons on controllers. Where the xbox elite controller has them would be good.

The controller you linked is essentially an SNES gamepad -- a design paradigm from the 1990s. Xbox controllers are a de facto standard, and I don't think it is reasonable to expect current games to conform to a 30-year-old gamepad layout. And it's not like every game uses every single button all the time anyway.

I gotta be honest with you, I am incredibly nitpicky when it comes to games. Excessive use of buttons has never bothered me before. I'm not sure if that's a real issue. Sorry :/

I mean, the Xbox 360/Dualshock controller style is the standard. You can't expect a modern game not to design around it. That said, you can probably get around this using 'Steam Input', Steam's advanced controller mapping system, which can do some fancy stuff like layers.

I'm mainly a PC gamer, so I've got enough buttons for the whole gang... but I agree in a sense. It's not so much that controls are too hard but that there's either 1.) Too many contextual actions or 2.) Too many actions for a controller.

Some games it's like "Hold X for 1.3 seconds to murder someone, hold X for 1.275 seconds to gently pat them on the head" and in others it's like "Hold R and LB while pressing y to solve world hunger or hold RB and LB to nuke orphans." And in the heat of the moment I never know if I'm going Paragon or Renegade. Even considering on a keyboard where I've got enough buttons for everything, some devs put crouch on control, some on C but some have 'change stance' on X or something. At least most games allow me to remap the controls but going from Wolfenstein 2s lean controls to Deathloops is a brain twister.

And don't get me started on trying to sprint and use the camera in Assassin's Creed.

I find it odd that you'd consider having different buttons for light and heavy attacks to be too much if you play fighting games.

I personally disagree with the notion in the title, and it's because of fighting games that I feel that way. Arcade controls suck. Not because of motion inputs (although I'd have words to say about those) but because there's so much awkward, unintuitive stuff in the average fighter control scheme, specifically because they rely on 6 buttons and a d-pad.

This is a valid complaint in some cases, but I've found it to cause worse problems when devs try to address it.

Usually, they "solve" the problem by doubling up context-sensitive actions to the same button. Trouble is, this always seems to result in completely batshit maps. For example, X becomes interact/use item/throw grenade/eat a sandwich. So then, if I don't press X while aiming at the twelve pixels the game considers to be "doorknob" (a separate issue!), I end up wasting a valuable single use item/exploding/having lunch instead. This disrupts the flow of the game, leaving me frustrated and possibly dead when all I wanted was to open a fucking door. Bonus points of it's a locked door and there was no way to ever open it to begin with.

It's worst with first-person games, and one of several reasons I refuse to play them with a pad.

I sort of agree, and sort of don't. Different games have different requirements. Some of them can be pretty bad - @Sodliddesu's example of overloaded buttons is a pretty good one I see fairly commonly. But other times the complexity is welcome. Sandlot's giant robot games (i.e. RAD, Tetsujin 48, etc.) are a good example; the complexity and mechanical feel of piloting the robots is pretty much the appeal of those games!

In other news, this is the first time I have heard that 8BitDo has cloned the NeoGeo CD pad, and I need it in my life immediately.

what I'm saying is that while for some game that design is essential, a lot of other games use up all the buttons without a baked-in viable alternative, or worse yet, use buttons for the sake of using buttons!

I'll offer the the extreme opposite of this trend. Yuji Naka's Balan Wonderworld mapped the jump action to 6 different buttons. Nothing special about it, you simply have a choice to use any 4 face button or the trggers to do his single action. And at the same time mapped each costume (think of a kirby powerup) to the same button. This meant that some costumes simply lacked the ability to jump. The only other (nonstandard) gameplay action is switchhing costumes, using 2 buttons to toggle forward backward. 3 actions locked to a 2 button approach, spread onto 8 buttons.

It's so baffling to make a 3 button game (which mind you, is still much less than modern games. You can use 3 face buttons on a Sega genesis) and still try to jam everything into one button as some outdated 90's approchability factor. Don't let simplicity get to a point where it disrupts your core game desgn. Which for a platformer is the ability to traverse your world.

Rant aside, the approach makes sense when you consider how

1. more actions on separate buttons offer granularity. Sorry for another Yuji Naka rant (I'll keep this brief), but Sonic had this problem in the 2000's. Context sensitive actions can be frustrating unless polished to perfection, but most of the time you have Sonic wanting to double jump but instead either air dashing to an enemy that just appeared ( or maybe wasn't even in your camera view), or fast falling into a bottomless pit. Just because you can map multiple actions on one button doesn't mean it's the best idea.

2. the fact that 3d in particular is more complex, giving more actions to do and more context sensitive situations. Again, you can solve this if desired with customizable actions (e.g. Ocarina of time). But modern game design wants to maximize flow and minimize menu-ing where possible. If games are used to have 4 face buttons, two bumpers, and two triggers, why not use the full controller to achieve this flow?

Depends on what they are trying to do. Myself, I've never, ever been able to get the hang of a console controller past the SNES.

But I have a flight-sim HOTAS that has a truly appalling number of buttons, two POV hats, more four-way+press buttons than I care to think about, triggers, rockers, sliders, switches, and somehow I can handle that just fine. I think it might be the design of the controller. I found the N-64 controller to be a nightmare. It's possible I was just using it wrong, but I remember not being able to find a way to hold it that put all the buttons under my hand, as it were.

For most of my computer games, I use a controller that basically takes the WSAD cluster, and puts a nice curved hand/palm rest below the keys. It's programmable up to, like, a billion keystrokes, but I've never found it necessary to use more than 45 or so.

I'm not sure I'd call the controls convoluted so much as complex. We have a lot more buttons but things are so standardized that most learning comes from identifying which control template is being used rather than which button does what.

When I think truly convoluted controls, I think of games like Metal Gear Solid 2 or Gothic where the controls are highly specific to the games and generally unintuitive.

The MGS games on PS2 made extensive use of the pressure sensitivity features as well, which added a whole tactile layer of convolution that really messed with some people's heads. In MGS2, the trigger buttons actually were equipment buttons, not aiming and firing. Those were actually both the Square button... but it depended on how hard you pressed it. R1 was the first person view button but L1 was the lock on button. So were you to run around a corner and have to deal with an enemy, you basically had to hit a combination of buttons in a specific sequence and mind how hard you pressed the buttons: R1, L1 or Square (lightly!). Then Square (hard) to fire, or let go of Square (lightly) to put your weapon down without firing. Now what if you wanted to aim while moving? Hold Square lightly, and also hold X.

MGS3 added a whole suite of close quarter combat controls, all mapped to different ways to hit the Circle button, and it adjusted movement so that the D-pad was "stalking" movement while the analogue stick was regular movement.

And then there's Gothic. I'll simply link this page.

The thing with these games is that, despite the convoluted controls, people ended up liking them quite a bit once they got used to it. These were the days when controls were bespoke to the game and didn't follow certain paradigms or templates, and the controls were designed to encourage players to approach the games in subtly prescribed ways. MGS2 and 3's controls disincentivized run and gun gameplay and forced you to be more tactical and strategic when encountering a "combat" arena because it wasn't really about combat. It was about "tactical espionage action", where you used stealth and getting the drop on your enemies to clear spaces out. When MGS4 and MGS5 switched over to a more traditional third person control style, they became a lot easier to pick up and play but you also ended up playing them like any other TPS game, complete with a much bigger emphasis on quick fire gunplay and combat.

With Gothic, many players felt that it was pretty natural and intuitive once you wrapped your hear around using modifier buttons, and how to deploy them with timing. It ended up being something of a precursor to games like Mount & Blade or the original Witcher game, and shades of this control scheme are still found in games like ELEX and that Skyrim full converstion mod, Enderal.

Of course, there are plenty of games in the past with convoluted controls that go to the point of bad. The original System Shock comes to mind, with its constant swapping between real-time and mouse-based menu gameplay. The first few Splinter Cell games are also riding a line between convoluted but specifically designed and an overreliance of menu-based gameplay. I think if someone fires up Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory these days, they'd be amazed how much of the gameplay happens in menus despite it being a real-time stealth game.

But as for most indie games these days... I can't say I find them convoluted really. They're more complex than many games of the past, but I've also played a lot of indie games that use less than half the buttons on the controller as well. It really depends. I don't think the split between Light and Heavy attack really qualifies, as there are some gameplay styles (especially hack 'n' slash or beat 'em ups) where having the two different buttons opens up a whole world of combinations and gameplay styles, provided the game supports it by also including different kinds of weapons and custom weapon combinations. Ultimately, two attack buttons (one fast, one slow) seems to be fairly intuitive, I think most people with some games under their belt fall quite naturally into these combat controls.

For me, it usually involves adding in other mechanics into the second-to-second gameplay like items, or other abilities, where any convolution begins. Of course, some games use this to great effect. The Batman Arkham games come to mind, where it's dead simple were you to simply punch everyone in sight, but it gets very complicated and convoluted when you go for big combos and use all of Batman's various abilities. You can do up to something like 11 different actions, and that's strewn across six buttons and an analogue stick, most of which are unintuitive and designed more to delineate between actions than to naturally feel like their respective actions. Being able to pull off that Achievement-earning combination of using all of Batman's abilities in one string is more of a battle of learning the controls than it is getting the combat rhythm and flow state dialled in.

The most recent game I've made can be played with only a d-pad.

Funny I thought that way when 3-d games were really taking off in the early 2000s but now it seems to me that they are standardized enough that I can always pick up the controller and get around and manage the view at the same time.

I am used to dealing with lots of buttons, but it takes plenty of practice. :-)

I can't go along with your main point, as I love tons of buttons, but you alluded to one of my biggest pet peeves. If I can't navigate all the menus with the d-pad instead of an analog stick, that game goes right in the trash where it belongs.