Writings

Press X for Action, unless you want a partner action, then it is B.  Press A to run, unless you have the right trigger depressed, then it is reload your gun.  Left trigger quips your knife.  Right Button displays your map.  No, not Left Button, that finds your partner.  Right Trigger aims your gun.  Well, right trigger lets you aim your gun with the left stick, or fire with the X button.  Yes, the action button.  Start pauses.  The back button lets you skip through cutscenes.  Yes, forwards through cutscenes.  The left thumstick walks, unless you're holding the run button, at which point it runs, unless you're holding the fire button, at which point it aims.  Sometimes it strafes... not really sure about that.  The right stick steers, unless it strafes.  And the all of the d-pad directions let you fast-equip items.

Did I leave anything out?  Oh yes, Y brings up your inventory.  Now have fun and get lost in the experience!

I'm a professional game developer.  I have had a controller in hand for at least 20 hours a week, every week, for the past ten years.  And the control scheme above baffles even me.  I don't mean to specifically pick on Resident Evil 5, but this type of inaccessible controls leads to a lot of people simply unable to interact with video games in any substantive fashion.  How do you start enjoying a hobby where the barrier to entry is a manual dexterity that rivals octopi?  More importantly, how do you grab a player in their first 45 seconds of gameplay if all of that time is spent fumbling about desperately trying to get a sense for your control schema?

As a mental exercise, let's try some simplification.  Take a second look at the control scheme above, and let's make some changes.

First of all, even though direction is being determined by fully functional analog sticks, there is a run button.  Let's eliminate that button entirely, and load the player speed functionality onto the sticks.  The next thing that sticks out is the partner system.  There is a "partner, where are you" button," and a "partner do something" button.  It seems to me like these are parallel actions, both of which could just be simplified to a single partner action button, B.  

Now to the weapons system.  Hold one trigger to pull out your gun, a stick to aim, a button to fire, and another one to reload.  What if we changed the parameters a little bit.  Let's say that running around in the 3D world, you can simply move the right stick to both look around, and pull out your gun.  Walking with the left stick would put your gun away and run.  It's not as intimate as having to unholster your own firearm, but it's also not as tedious as taking off the safety, etc.  While we're at it, let's overload the inventory button to be the same as reload.  That way, when you're walking around on the left stick, you have two personal buttons (action and inventory), and when you're shooting on the right stick, you have two personal buttons (fire and reload).  Since strafe has been a perinneal problem so far, let's map that to the now-underused shoulder buttons, since strafing on the shoulders is both optional and a pretty clean mental map.

From a gameplay standpoint, let's eliminate the knife (whose only purpose appears to be "Action Item" and "Open Crate"), and integrate the skip cutscene functionality into the pause menu.

There, now the required control buttons would be:

L Stick - Move
R Stick - Aim Gun
A - Action / Fire
B - Inventory / Reload
Y - Partner Action
LB / RB - Map

and the optional control buttons would be

LT / RT - Strafe
D-pad - Fast Equip
Start - Pause

Now what have we done?  We've spent 30 minutes out of a long development cycle creating a control scheme with fewer used buttons, a lot cleaner of a mental map, and *still* too complicated for the average person to play without a lot of video game experience.

Ok, let's take a look at why Wii is probably selling so well.

In the Wii world, point the wii-mote at the screen to pull out your gun and aim.  The trigger fires, the button on back re-loads.  With gun down, Trigger and A could be Action and Inventory.  The left nunchuck walks you around, brings up the map, and partner actions.  Strafing could be achieved by tilting the nunchuck.  

Something that took nearly 10 minutes to explain the first time could be summarised with a more natural input device in 5 sentences.  And the Wii, "casual" as it is, is not the be-all-end-all of simplified inputs.

I guess what I've ranted on at length about here is that we really need to make simplification of control schemas a major priority for game development if we're going to lower the barrier to entry and grow past the image of the reclusive hardcore nerd.  This includes, at a fundamental level, changing our input devices to be far more friendly and simple than they currently are.  

If it takes a seasoned professional more than 10 seconds to understand your control schema, what chance does a 45 year old mother of three have when she sneaks off in the middle of the night to give her husband's "Sony" a try?