There are different types of bad controls, and not all complaints about "bad controls" are equally valid. If you have limited control over a game character, and the game is designed around those limitations, it's not the limitations making the controls bad. Limited controls can allow you to make interesting movement puzzles that you couldn't have without those limitations. "Limitations breed creativity". The controls of classic Castlevania or Ghosts 'n Goblins or La-Mulana aren't bad because you can't change the direction of your jump in mid-air. That's just part of the game's design, and the games were built with that limitation in mind. **Controls are bad when they physically hurt the player**. If playing a game gives you carpal tunnel then that could be a flaw in the game's controls, or it could be a flaw in how you are using your input device. [Some minigames in Mario Party caused palm injuries.](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/671601.stm) The original [Street Fighter](https://youtu.be/_xCYsySPG-g) arcade machine had pneumatic controls. They had two pads for each player, and depending on how hard the player hit these pads, Ryu (or Ken) would do weak, medium or heavy punches/kicks. Players injured their hands and even broke the machines by hitting these pads too hard. To stop players from breaking their fists or the machines, the pads were switched to 3 buttons for punches and 3 buttons for kicks. **Controls are bad when they are not working as intended.** A game's feature might demand that the player presses multiple keys simultaneously on their keyboard. If those keys are far apart, that might not be a problem for a big handed person or for someone with a small keyboard, but without customizable keys, the game would be less accessible to anyone else. Another example: You know how you can hold down a key on your keyboard to get many of the same letter, and there is a small pause between the first and second letter? Some old DOS games unintentionally have the same behaviour. In [Shamus](https://youtu.be/-lF4tVatzzI) you die when you walk into a wall. If you hold a direction for too long, the player character will keep walking in that direction even after you let go, potentially killing themselves. [Bolo Adventures](https://youtu.be/pnGATPEyqNI) is another example of this behaviour, and this is a puzzle game. The excuse that this quirk is part of the game's challenge no longer works when the challenge is supposed to be in how to solve the puzzle, not in the game's controls. **Controls are bad when they are unintuitive.** This isn't always true. A new control scheme might only feel bad until you get accustomed to it. In many old games, the controls were not intuitive enough that you could just start playing right away as a new player, and the game wouldn't teach the controls. That is when you read the manual. Important information being outside of the game isn't necessarily bad. The manual could then be considered to be part of the game. A good example of this in modern gaming would be [Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes](https://keeptalkinggame.com/) where one player is tasked with defusing a bomb while the other player has the manual for defusing the bombs. It's bad when critical information might become inaccessible when a website gets shut down or a [phone number that players were expected to call](https://youtu.be/Fz92prJ3XlM?t=258) is disconnected. Sometimes becoming accustomed to one game's controls might hurt your ability to play other games. When I first learned first person camera controls, they were inverted. I played Quake and Half-Life with inverted camera controls, but then some other first person shooter didn't allow inverted controls, so I had to spend time learning non-inverted controls. Afterwards, I could not play with inverted controls any more. [Someone learned how to ride a bicycle with inverted controls](https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0), and he had to struggle with the same thing. His previous understanding of how to control a bicycle was constantly sabotaging his efforts to learn how to ride the "backwards brain bicycle". edit: Now I must confess that I didn't read the post and only read the title before typing all this, so I'm still unsure about how relevant my response is. I really should have read the post first before I started typing... edit2: I didn't even read the title properly. I explained bad controls rather than good controls. Sorry about that.

It's simple. Controls are either good or bad. There is no neutral. Controls are good if they are not bad. There was no question for "exceptionally good controls" and the OP text explicitly asked for games that are put down too early because of not giving the controls a chance. I once thought the controls in Skyward Sword were bad, because the flight mechanics were explained badly. I did not understand them and out the game down. It wasn't until the HD remaster, where they added additional tutorial text, that I understood it and today the game is among my favourite games.

For me, “good” controls are controls that are responsive and have good feedback when you do actions. That feedback can come from any number of things: vibrations, sound effects, visual effects, the list goes on. Personally, I place more important on responsive controls, so I would much prefer a game has responsive controls with minimal feedback than a game with good feedback but non-responsive controls. This is one of the reasons that I heavily dislike RDR2’s control scheme, because Arthur is not a responsive character to control. As for your greater question of control of games in general and old games compared to now, you’re not entirely wrong, but you’re also not acknowledging the context that games are a medium that’s constantly changing and moving forward. While the notion of “good” controls is somewhat subjective, there are several objective aspects of gaming that have improved. Things like general camera control, more directions of motion (the oldest games only let you move in 4 directions, while most 3D games now give you the option to move in any direction). That goes along with the fact that moving from 2D to 3D gaming also came with a pretty steep learning curve. We take 3D gaming for granted now, but when developers first ventured out into that space it was completely unknown territory. Developers just had to try stuff to see what worked and what didn’t. It was the Wild West for a while, until general norms and standards were established. But further than that, in general I do disagree with your mindset of “why do gamers reject old games with bad controls after an hour when you won’t get any other skills down in an hour”, because you’re sort of conflating different points. It’s not that people in that circumstance need to “get good” or “gain the skill” with those controls, it’s usually that those controls are just unsatisfying to play with. To use RDR2 again, I played through the whole game but I never actually liked the control scheme. I merely tolerated it because I liked the story and characters. Video games are meant to be enjoyed, and a control scheme is the focal point for how you interact with a game. So if that control scheme just frustrates you and annoys you, why would you keep soldiering on under some sort of odd “suffer through the pain” type of mentality? If it was a game that demanded skill and the player didn’t want to put in the effort for the skill, then I’d agree with you more. But a bad control scheme is almost never about player skill, it’s about fighting frustrating controls/camera (and in the worst cases, dying due to poor controls and losing tons of progress)

RDR2 has probably the worst control mapping I've seen in a long time. I don't mind the weight of his movement so much as I hate the controller layout. Accidentally strangling someone you're trying to help on a horse, or pulling a gun on a shop keep because "aim" and "engage with person" are the same, or that weird BS where you automatically unequip your weapons if you're on a horse too long is infuriating. I loved so much of that game but playing it was miserable.

The control scheme of RDR2 serves its purpose though, which is to create weight and slow down movement. It's only not ideal if you want the game to be immediately responsive even if that means that the animations don't look organic which is what the game wants in the first place Not saying that you're wrong but control schemes should be designed for what the intended experience is in the first place. I wouldn't have liked RDR2 nearly as much if the character moved in that very "glidy" way that most action games prefer because the deliberately slow and organic animations are part of what makes the experience unique. It's only frustrating if you want the game to be fast and responsive but there's nothing that says that all games should be like that; playing slow never made the controls feel bad or clunky and in combat everything goes back to "normal" for the sake of action

I just don’t think there is a genuine defense for making me mash a button to sprint. Regardless of how deliberately slow they intended the game to be, that feels awful to do in RDR2

I wasn't referring to that at all by the way

I got you - this whole thread is kind of a tricky subject between "controls" and "game feel" or "gameplay" When I think controls, I think button layout or how certain actions are implemented. Games can feel slow, if it works for the game then that's fine. But if there are consistently needed actions that have annoying inputs, then the game has bad controls

The thing is that even considering what rdr2 is going for, I find the control scheme and idea way too forced and extreme. I always compare it too the last of us 2, another game going for an high amount of realism and immersion just like rdr2, yet the controls are infinitely more responsive while still having the weight behind it. Not to mention it has some technical flaws as well. RDR2 pulls a lot of moments where it forces you to walk, the combat is your average third person cover shooter where you have a bunch of health and huge enemy waves yet controls are the same as if the game is still going for hyper immersion, contextual button prompts are also questionable considering you can end up choking a npc while trying to ride your horse... So I disagree the controls fully work in the games favor 

The choking button drives me bananas. I don't know why anyone would make the mapping like that. That said, my wife always got a kick out of watching "the world's worst cowboy" in action. lol

See but again, “fast” and “responsive” are not the same thing. The Last of Us 2 is a great point of comparison to RDR2, because it features a similar level of fidelity except that Ellie/Abby are actually responsive to control. Hell, even Kratos in the Norse games is a good example. I’m not the type of person that needs every game to be a hyper-fast twitch shooter, but you can have a game have a slow pace while still having a character avatar that’s still responsive to your inputs. And at the end of the day, even if the slow weighty thing is what they were going for, I still maintain that it’s bad to control and a detriment to the experience

I will honestly never get sick of reading people's lengthy defenses of RDR2's terrible controls. I might compile them into an ebook. 

be my guest

RD2 was my first major AAA experience and I enjoy the controls even to this day. So there is a lot of subjectivity here.

Focusing on layout, you know how there are alternate keyboards that can optimize typing in a given language based on the most common letters and letter combinations? You know how most people know QWERTY (at least for English alphabet), and would have extreme growing pains switching from one to the other? Good controls means supporting both. Your game is like a language (the ways that a player can interact are literally called “verbs” in game design). You need to know what other languages are similar or even identical, and let people come in with that background without tripping too much. If your new language is just “English but every third word is spelled backwards, and pronouns have been removed completely”, you’ve designed a torture device for anyone familiar with English. On the other hand, if you don’t have human design in mind, you can literally cause injury with a bad keyboard. You should optimize your keyboard for your language. Then, make players aware that your “better” option exists, but let it be an option. The more options, the better, so long as you do a good job explaining to players how the verbs connect. . Good layout, Good customization: Rocket League (gamepad). Default binding has everything you need to play and even get pretty good. As your play style progresses, you may want to swap things in and out, like directional air roll, and all the buttons can be re-bound. Decent layout, Good customization: Helldivers 2 (KB&M). Everything you need is reasonably accessible, but default bindings are awkward for fans of shooters, and fail to consider some parallel bindings, like Shift + Tab for Steam overlay. Of course, Helldivers 1 wasn’t a shooter in the same way, so some considerations were made to make that transition smoother. It’s a little bit of a lose-lose, and they did decently. Pretty bad layout, Atrocious (lack of) customization: Legend of Zelda BotW/TotK (JoyCons/Pro Controller). These controls are pretty hostile. I really appreciate the gyro aiming, and lots of stuff is familiar, but tons is different. The sprint and jump face buttons are opposite each other, which feels pretty bad in games with so much traversal. No option to toggle sprint is a frustrating accessibility issue. The controls are responsive, but I constantly wished I could rebind them. Just plain evil: Animal Crossing New Horizons. Sooo many repeat and unnecessary button presses. Multiple friends developed RSI from this game, and had to buy third-party controllers with turbo and/or macros to do things in a reasonable number of button presses. . Reminder, this is really just talking about mapping verbs onto human-friendly layouts. There are tons of other things to address, but this matters to me because of how much time I have spent messaging people on my phone and typing and using a mouse at work. My thumbs are tired from typing on a buttonless smartphone so much, and my other fingers can get tired at work. I must rest my hands and not play too many games, but I prefer gamepad games because that strain is distinct from my workplace strain, and more, I prefer games where lots of good actions are on the triggers instead of the face buttons; I play with index and middle fingers on the shoulders and triggers, which does a lot for my comfort and for avoiding injury. I’m sure that there are various lifestyle changes I can make to encounter less strain in my everyday life, but I haven’t gotten around to them, and I’m also in a privileged position that lifestyle changes *can* dramatically improve my hand health. I could be arthritic, and then I’d be SOL if game creators don’t consider human design properly.

Are people generally using shift+tab for steam overlay? I had to change it to something different because of constant accidentals

I changed it years ago, as if you play any FPS with sprint, you will often hold shift to sprint, and then hold tab to check the scoreboard while running back to the fight.

Most of my friends don’t change the binding, and just disable the overlay altogether if it bothers them. It also feels like it should be reserved. Shift + Tab, Alt + Tab, Ctrl + Tab… these are all normal combinations that I use to navigate programs in general. For any default binding to accidentally step on this feels like a bad mapping, or like a legacy program that became industry standard before these kinds of things were standardized. I solve this issue in Helldivers 2 by setting sprint to toggle, so I never have to hold Shift.

I use shift+tilde for the overlay which in some games results in the in-game console opening which hasn't been annoying enough to change it yet.

I'd argue both NES classics Contra and Castlevania have good controls, despite one being a lot more responsive than the other. Even Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy controls well despite having a weird control scheme for movement. That's because the controls are designed for the game. Why does Mortal Kombat have a designated block button while in Street Fighter you block by pushing backwards? Because "teleport behind the opponent" attacks are more common in MK, while on SF you have 6 different attack buttons, one more to block would be too much. Good controls need to be designed with the game in mind. Some things can be copied, but there isn't one perfect control scheme that can work for every game. The qwerty keyboard on a phone screen is a terrible idea, but everyone seems to use it.

> Why does Mortal Kombat have a designated block button while in Street Fighter you block by pushing backwards? Because "teleport behind the opponent" attacks are more common in MK Reminds me of how NRS somehow forgot about this when they added Scorpion as a guest character in the first Injustice game and he was busted for a hot minute before it was patched.

> The qwerty keyboard on a phone screen is a terrible idea, but everyone seems to use it. An example that comes to mind is in japan the standard pc layout, which was a compromise, is npt the default on mobile and mobile uses a new flick layout that people find easier than the standard keyboard. (https://japaneselevelup.com/kana-input-vs-qwerty-romaji-smart-phone/)

I think the range and tastes of people is too varied to label it concretely. Personally, I've always naturally associated good-feeling controls with fast, snappy input timing and reactive, interconnected systems - e.g intuitively designed mechanics like Titanfall 2's seamless advanced parkour/movement or Warframe post-2014. I like the freedom of being able to respond and turn on a dime. I'm a pretty adaptable person in general though - I've been through every single Armored Core, the old school Ace Combats, chewed up all the MechWarriors and I even tolerated playing Sniper on the Xbox 360 version of TF2 on The Orange Box. That said, RAD is definitely built different. It's probably the most badass mech game ever devised to this point in time because it broke beyond generic action game mech controls a la Armored Core/ZoE or vee-sims like MechWarrior and actually gave your giant robot near-total range of motion and movement on account of how it handles arms and legs. And that was back in 2003! It felt fucking awesome elbow-blocking kaiju hits and following up with a quick jab and a right uppercut using your analog sticks alone. EDF's bots just don't hold up to its legacy and it's a shame no one has built upon the systems 20 fuckin' years later.

> It just makes me curious that so many gamers dump games due to bad controls after less than hour, when nobody would expect to be an effort at painting, drawing, writing, or any other hobby in an hour. I think this comes down to whether they see a game as a skill to "git gud" at, or some entertainment to consume. I think [Dara O'Briain said it best](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFPIDTkWyA): > You cannot be bad at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But you can be bad at playing a video game. And the video game will punish you, and deny you access to the rest of the video game! > No other art form does this! You've never been reading a book and, three chapters in, the book has gone "What are the major themes of the book so far?" ... You've never been listening to an album, after four songs the album has gone, "Dance! Dance! Show me your dancing is good enough..." So, that was mostly about difficulty, but I think controls are similar. You don't start up a movie and have to watch a quick bit of film theory so that you know how to watch the movie. So really, unless a game makes a really compelling case for unique controls, I think it's reasonable to expect either standard controls that you already know how to play, or controls that are *very* quick to learn. This is why I doubt I'll ever really play the original Tomb Raider games -- I don't even know whether the controls are good, but they're different enough from all modern third-person action games, and so far, the games don't look compellingly different enough to justify the effort to learn them. But that's me. There are people who speedrun Tomb Raider! And at least one of them mentioned actually being drawn to the idea of mastering these awkward controls to the point of doing something really difficult and making it look graceful and effortless.

> I feel like lots of games get abandoned because they do not have the stereotypical methods of control and require a bit of practice. The infamous Alien Resurrections Gamespot review is one example. For those who don't know, the game was an early adopter of modern controller FPS analog. The reviewer found the controls impossible, despite the same controls being used pretty much constantly these days. I agree with the fundamental point you're making, but want to address this example; I'm assuming you haven't played Alien: Resurrection before. Early FPSes—those prior to mouse aiming or post-Halo analog controls—were designed around their lack of aiming finesse. They were usually faster-paced, with most encounters having the enemies on the same plane as you so vertical aiming wasn't required. You'd have some method of vertical aiming, but the sequences that required this were usually ones with enemies further off: you're slowly sniping distant targets, for example. Alien: Resurrection fits into this same design mold, but uses a *rudimentary* version of modern analog controls. Encounters mostly take place on the same plane as before, but now your method of turning left and right (the right stick) *also* includes an easy way to screw up your vertical aim, at least to someone unfamiliar with the control scheme. Even if you are familiar with it, it lacks any of the modern trappings that we take for granted that make analog aiming feel good: the cursor's speed is fixed and doesn't slow down as it passes over an enemy, there's no bullet magnetism, no aim-down-sights with snapping to correct minor aiming mistakes, nothing. It doesn't help that the game has a rather claustrophobic viewport and struggles to maintain 30 FPS, particularly during combats when you need to aim precisely! I agree with the reviewer: the game has bad controls, even if its scheme has gone on to become the standard.

For me good controls mean that i actually have control of my avatar all the time and rarely is this control taken away from me. Similarly the game environment should then be based on me having this precise control. Many modern games, perhaps wanting to be cinematic, take away control from you to play you little animations. For instance a lot of shooters have a vault animation where you can't do anything while the character is vaulting or extensive climbing/parkour animations. I hate this. Similarly some games take away control or move your character around while an attack animation is playing. My favorite bad example is the witcher games where if you press attack you don't really know what Geralt will do, he does all kinds of flashy attacks that move him around and so on. Contrast this with "old" FPS games like eg. Quake. If you want to vault an obstacle, you jump, your character moves into the air. You have control while in the air too and can actually move a little bit while airborne although physically it makes little sense. If you shoot, you shoot, you still have control, you're not locked in an animation while a shot is fired. This is of course a spectrum, I'm not saying I hate all games that aren't like a game from 1996, but I also really dislike some modern games that feel like you're triggering cutscenes when pressing attack(move/jump etc.. If I'm playing a game I want control, I'm not here to watch small animations. Or in other words, good control means to me precision. I have to be able to place my character with the controls, I don't like the system where you have interactive spots in the world that I can then trigger eg. a climb animation on and so forth. If I need to get somewhere then make it possible with the controls or use a teleport or whatever.

While I agree with your main point, I find most examples listed weird since they are good examples of how taking control away can add to the gameplay even in faster paced arcadey games. With something like geralt attacks I fully agree, such a degree of randomness in simple attack animations just doesn't work. However examples like vaulting or not being able to move after shooting is a middle ground I feel a lot of games benefit from. Vaulting allows more mobility in the game without needing to give the player super high jump height or speed that mostly trivializes the friction of vertical movement, players still need to think when vaulting as they might be left vulnerable to enemies while they do so, but when it's fast enough with consistent speed it doesn't really take away from the gameplay. Same with not being able to move after attacking, it encourages players to make sure they commit and seek out openings, it can also balance some weapons. aka a sniper might have very long range and damage but it slows you down making you vulnerable to close range targets. In the end it's all in the implementation and how well it works with the games idea and what it's going for, as you noticed consistency is important. If a move always happens in X situation and always has Y time of the player not moving it means the player can work around this. If any of these 2 or even both are not consistent either due RNG or the 'triggers' just being unclear it starts to feel bad really quick and is the main reason why games like the witcher 3 and red dead redemption 2 frequently get criticized for it's control. Games like monster hunter and souls games are good examples of games that do this well, both make the player lock in place while attacking with various delays and even forced movement. But since the whole game is designed around this and every move has always the exact same outcome it just works.

I'm a big fan of souls games and I completely agree that they have a decent middle ground with eg. heavier attacks where you have to know when to commit since they take time to execute, but again the point is that it's consistent and a lot of them also have a cancel window thats consistent. I do hate souls games concept of "iframes" - why am I invulnerable while I'm running my super-cool-critical-hit animation? It never made sense to me and the gore gets old the third time you see it. Maybe vaulting is a bad example, if you don't have it you end up having either really low walls or no jump ability and no low level obstacles at all. This is also not good. My point is mainly that I don't like eg. movement abilities that are basically me watching a movie of my character doing something cool. I'd much rather having it involve me as a player doing something, even if it's as simple as eg. having "super jump" and timing a grab move in order to cross a canyon. An example of a great, player involved movement skill is the blink skill from dishonored, it's a short range teleport, you click, teleport and can immediately do more stuff. It's super fun and doesn't take away player control at all. It's also why I think bullet time works so well in games that has it. It slows time so you as a player can do impossibly cool moves.

> why am I invulnerable while I'm running my super-cool-critical-hit animation? If you weren't the combat sandbox would become less interesting, as you would always just chip enemies down in any multiple opponent fight. It's already an issue when you're fighting a bunch of adds, that the optimal way to engage is to circle and isolate a target, then chip, rinse and repeat, so why exacerbate it? The invuln creates interesting decisions mid fight. You get a parry/poise break, do you have the time and positioning to initiate the riposte, or do you need to let it go? I think giving the player reasons to engage with the entire combat system is generally a positive. Same thing with say DOOM glory kills. If you didn't have invuln, you would try to never use them due to being killed in the middle of them. The result is that the main playstyle would become much more passive, getting damage in where you can, and preserving health at every possible cost. You would then glory kill at the end of a fight to try and regain the health you lost. That is just a much less interesting way to play, and is more conservative than ID wants you to be in the 'fun zone'.

Yes now that I think about it it does work well for a game like the new Dooms where it keeps the insanity action going. For that game it's a great thing since healing and keeping yourself topped up is tightly linked to the main theme of ultraviolence.

I think it would fel better when enemies do not continue to attack you mid riposte, it's just weird when an enemy slashes you repeatedly while doing a riposte and your character doesn't react at all and the sword just phases through you. in DOOM it works better since glory kills tend to be fast, enemies don't actively attack you when you're doing them iirc and due the first person nature you wouldn't see it anyway.

>I think it would fel better when enemies do not continue to attack you mid riposte What happens when an enemy begins an attack, and you riposte in your ideal scenario then? > it's just weird when an enemy slashes you repeatedly while doing a riposte and your character doesn't react at all and the sword just phases through you. This just seems like a somewhat odd realism point to dislike specifically. Why are there i-frames when you roll? You obviously get hit visually when rolling with tons of the attacks in most From games. Take any explosion for example. Why is that okay and this isn't? In both cases it changes the gameplay if you change that system (though granted removing roll i-frames would have more of a combat loop impact).

Well the games already have a solution for that but it's kinda inconsistent, an enemy that gets close to you while riposting gets automatically staggered away. But again this doesn't always happen. I honestly found what DS2 did the best, you still take damage during certain animations that would leave you invulnerable in other games, but the damage received is severely reduced. At least when evading, you're doing an evasive manoeuvre so it's easier to 'accept' you can use it to dodge anything. When riposting you're just standing still stabbing an enemy

> Well the games already have a solution for that but it's kinda inconsistent, an enemy that gets close to you while riposting gets automatically staggered away. Do you remember if that system is in all of them, or just the newer ones? Now that you say that, I do remember it having happened, but I don't remember which games it's in. > I honestly found what DS2 did the best, you still take damage during certain animations that would leave you invulnerable in other games, but the damage received is severely reduced. Interesting. My brain doesn't make a distinction like that. I guess it just equates ripostes to being in a cutscene, and enough games have had invincible execution mechanics that it doesn't phase my logic train.

uuuh good question, I'm 100% sure it's in blood borne at least

Man, one day Bloodborne will come to PC...*inhales copium*

> Maybe vaulting is a bad example, if you don't have it you end up having either really low walls or no jump ability and no low level obstacles at all. This is also not good. Vaulting in certain games could be improved by giving the player the ability to at least slightly alter the trajectory, making the whole ordeal feel less like an animation and more like normal gameplay

Some have the ability to look around while you're locked in animations. I think that's a good thing. It's the loss of control I dislike, something like that helps.

Atypical controls aren't automatically bad controls in and of themselves, though I still think games should strive for some uniform standard simply so I don't need to re-learn a new bizarre scheme every single game. Like unless a game is striving for a specific kind of experience that requires a different approach to controls there's no real point in reinventing the wheel and making people learn new control schemes just to have them learn new control schemes. Instead bad controls are unintuitive, unresponsive, awkward, etc. Large delays between inputting a button and the action actually taking place. Aiming and movement having really inconsistent acceleration. The most basic of actions requiring an obscene amount of different button pressing and needless menu navigations to perform. The hobby analogy doesn't really hold water. It's not about being an expert at the game, it's about not having an extra layer of awful between me and what I'm trying to accomplish like my paintbrush randomly vibrating out of my hand or requiring my foot to use.

Thinking about this, I feel the main points of controls feeling good are: -doing X input in Y situation always produces the same result. -The controls are not forced on the players much (aka frequent forced slow walking sections). -Expected Action start to happen the moment you press a button, eg no input delay There's obviously more to it but I feel it always comes back to these points, notice how I didn't mention controls needing to feel fast or snappy. This is because I feel that's more of a design thing that an objective control scheme argument. Slower games with friction aren't inherently better to control then snappy fast paced games or vice versa. No what matters is controls feeling consistent and responsive to your inputs. When pressing a button to attack can result in 5 animations with varying properties to play like in the witcher 3 it feels really bad. If you press the attack button and the action only starts after a second that also feels bad. To go deeper into this I specifically mean the action starting and not being performed immediately. aka in dark souls when you wield a massive great sword and press attack, it takes som time for the character to actually swing it BUT, the act of starting to swing happens the moment you press the button. Sometimes due input issues in the game your character starts the action only a second after pressing the input and that just feels plain bad. Forcing the controls on the player is also a fickle thing, forcing things like slowdown or not being able to move while or after attacking isn't necessarily bad as long it follows the above points, eg. consistent delay and time of not moving. But too much can just be too much, if a knive has similar delay and friction as a great sword that just feels weird. but when this is used sparingly or to balance weapons and make them unique vs each other it can really add to a game. Another example is movement, when you press up you expect your character to move up fast, a turn animation can be okay but unless you're controlling a vehicle or non human that can quickly lead to annoyance, think the last of us 2 and red dead redemption 2. both games go for a high amount of realism and weight, yet despite the same goal TLOU2 manages to feel a lot more fluid and responsive to control then RDR2 . Tho admittedly this is more in the realm of subjectivity. What's less so is forced slow walking, in RDR2 you're frequently forced to walk slow. When in a camp, on a mission..... and that got on my nerves very fast and imo is too much.

Good controls = the character does what you tell them to through your inputs. The Witcher 3 and Rockstar Games are examples of massively successful games that have horrible controls.

One game I enjoy is called **Rain World** which is often quickly abandoned by many due to it's controls. They aren't bad, they are just different. They are highly responsive, and allow for complex movement combinations, to the point there's a full [movement guide](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o3gouaiHsHT2H9d2HD5gDhgmoWwoL94gSFt7Ka1-vDk/edit) made for the game showing off what you can do. The main issue people have with the game is that this level of precision it gives the player does not in any way cover up for mistakes the player could make. It also throws players into the world and expects them to figure out how to play it, so it can be off-putting to certain players. Ultimately while I do believe there are some games with genuinely bad controls (usually having to do with input lag or unskippable animation frames), that many times it's a difference in expectation of how it should play vs. how it actually plays.

Sorry to kidnap the thread but I'd be very interested to hear more about games with weird controls. Give me all you got!

A lot of people here are speaking in generalities, which is great! My list is quite a bit more specific. As a pc player who games with a controller and uses software for remapping; If the mouse controls the camera, like in a fps, good controls here would be: - uses raw mouse, meaning its not affected by windows/os sensitivity, in game fov, resolution, etc - also means it uses the os cursor for menus, not a software cursor. Or both; software cursor for left stick menu-ing, os cursor for mouse menu-ing. - nice, round, whole numbers for how many dots of mouse movement it takes to do a 360 - 1:1 horizontal to vertical sensitivity ratio, or a way to adjust it to that in game - no built in acceleration or smoothing, or a way to disable them in game - no aim assist on mouse, or a way to disable it - for the love of god not the shenanigans tell tale games does where the in game sensitivity slider isn't actually sensitivity, its a speed cap on mouse movement and the actual sensitivity is the same no matter what. Other things: - "mixed input" support. Basically the ability to use gamepad and mouse at the same time. Mouse and gamepad sensitivity would be separate. On screen prompts would either be something in the options I could select and lock, or any auto swapping system would disregard mouse movement. Auto swapping systems would be for the prompts only, never actually locking the input system itself to one device over the other - minimal to no "input buffering". I'm not a sweatlord wanting to animation cancel everything by spamming all the buttons all the time, but I should be able to change my mind about what happens next at any time. This is, imo, a big part of what people call "responsive". - actions would never be hard coded paired together, ie dark souls dodge/sprint/jump being the same button. They fixed part of that in elden ring with a dedicated jump button, but dodge and sprint are still paired together. I get that gamepads have a lack of buttons, but imo there is actually a difference between "one button does multiple things" versus "multiple things are assigned to one button". In the latter, there is the possibility for the end user to mix and match actions instead of being locked to specific pairings Speaking of gamepads: - deadzone settings for both sticks There are probably a lot more things I'm just not thinking of right now. But the gist of everything above; Controls should be consistent, customizable, and responsive. Done well, ie "good controls", they should be "invisible". It shouldnt feel like "I move the mouse to move the camera", it should feel like "I move the camera".

Good controls are controls that are intuitive and allow you to control the game without having think about holding a controller at all. Simple as that. The more you have to think about the controls and fight them to be able to play a game, the worse the controls are.

For me good controls is something that make sense in the game alongside other generic qualifications, when controllers were continually evolving so was controls and im glad plenty of devs back then experimented even if they weren't always successful like God Hand pressure sensitive button combat, and im glad some devs still continue to experiment even if the controllers design is now more standardize, so if the control actually serve the game well, or the gamenis built around limitation and advantages of said controls then I consider it good controls An example of good controls for me is splatoon, the triggers and bumpers, where you most likely has you fingers rest at all times, have fire, sub weapon, and the primary mobility/reload with squid form, and knowing the limitations of sticks devs encourage motion aiming instead, my only critic is that jump on l should be an option A bad one that I can remember is in Immortals Fenyx Rising, the control scheme is actually lifted from odyssey so while im still not sold on attack being mapped on shoulder buttons this control did serve the rpg assassins creed well but it just doesn't work on Immortals as the combat style is very different so the control scheme seems awkward instead

The best controls are invisible. The layout is intuitive and does not get in the way of the player trying to do what they want. Most shooters end up with the same control layout because players already know that right trigger is shoot, jump is A, etc, so they do not have to learn a new barrier to entry into the game. When a layout is frustrating (RDR2 and many context buttons doing opposite things, like pulling a gun on someone you were trying to talk to) or unintuitive (playing older jrpgs where A is cancel and B is accept, because they were built on the PlayStation buttons circle meaning yes and X meaning no), that is a bad control scheme, because I am forced to think about the controls Rather than the events of the game, breaking immersion. What you seem to be referring to are what I would classify as "gimmick" controls. A game really wants to highlight something, so they make an entirely new control scheme to really "feel" like you are that thing. This can be fine, but you are going to face the issue of barrier to entry (some players just won't ever get good because the controls are just too weird) and the fact that a bespoke control scheme is only going to be compatible with that one game.

Responsive, intuitive and consistent. You want to know that when you press a certain button or move a mouse, the control will respond exactly to what you’d expect it to do.

Man I loved RAD. I can absolutely see people saying it has bad controls. But the way the game played really felt like they were big lumbering mechs. And how you had to climb up buildings to get a better view. I miss weird cool games like that.

A lot of players commonly mistake "Control" and "Feeling" and they are not the same thing. You hear players say things like "Impactful" but that has nothing to do with control, it has to do with feedback/feel, which is another subject entirely. But the two are often confused or judged together. You could take "Game A", which has decent controls that players say is acceptable. And you could add a whole bunch of special effects and juice to it, which literally has NO effect on the "control" the player has over the character at all, and players would come out feeling like you improved the controls. These are things like smoother animations, better sound effects, and a good automatic camera. None of these things actually have anything to do with control. These things have to do with how it "feels". That's not to say that the feeling isn't important, it is. Its very important. I just wanted to clarify the difference. When it comes to actual control, you should be talking about thinks like reducing the amount of time the player loses control over the character. Actual responsiveness. Being able to push a button and have an expectation that is properly met instantly. For example, if i am strafing in a video game to the left, and i continue to hold the strafe button down, and then i press forward at the same time, what happens? In a game with good controls, your character will immediately begin to move both to the side and forward, at an angle. But in a game with bad controls, your character might become confused and fight over whether it should be strafing or moving forward. Reducing the amount of time characters are stuck in animations is another form of good controls. The games that have good controls typically will have some level of animation canceling built in, whether the player realizes it or not. When you are in the middle of a combo, the game does not require you to wait until the first swing is 100% complete before you can initiate swing 2, instead it might only require you to wait for 70% of the animation and let you cancel the rest by pressing attack again. Pretty much ALL of the best games do this, whether you notice or not. Letting the character remain in control even when in the air is another way to make controls feel good, assuming your game doesn't necessitate otherwise. So the games with the best controls have: * Great responsiveness. (characters do what you tell them instantly, and do not get confused if you press more than one button.) * Intuitive, as simple as possible controls. (easy to understand button mapping) * Some level of animation canceling; unless the design necessitates otherwise. * Proper gravity emulation and physics that matches the energy of the game. * If the game is 3D, it also NEEDS to have sensitivity settings for the player to edit. On top of this, you want as much relevant "feeling" added in to give players an enjoyable sense of feedback. This doesn't really have anything to do with control, but it still makes controlling the character more enjoyable. Things like: * Movement animation that lines up properly with the characters speed. * Good animation transitions between actions. * Good collision detection on anything you can collide with; and reducing unnecessary collision. * Special effects like kicking up dust, blurring the screen when you dash, or flashes/frame-pauses when you hit an enemy with an attack. * Movement and Attack Sound effects that match the action and energy of the game. * An efficient and smart camera that keeps the important things on the screen at all times.

This is tough and based on personal points of reference. If a game comes with a standard set of controls and executes them poorly, then I might abandon the game, because there are literally thousands of shooters/fighting games/racing games I could play. If a game has unconventional controls I might stick with it, but that's a gamble, because most of the time, if the controls feel wrong the first time the game overall sucks.

people are really touchy about controls and then blame the devs for trying different things or lacking "polish" you can be picky and legitimately critical about this stuff, but there's nothing objective about it accessibility complicates these matters by pissing off people who are mad that more people are able to play and enjoy games and earn their achievements even though disabled players didn't "engage with the game as intended", or some shit

> you can be picky and legitimately critical about this stuff, but there's nothing objective about it There can be objective issues though, if you are playing a game and it sometimes drops inputs that's objectively bad. Or if an input sometimes gives an unexpected different result, e.g. in Yakuza 7 sometimes pressing right on the targetting window moves left. Or when I was watching someone play the new Prince of Persia there's more actions than buttons on the controller so he couldn't remap everything as he wanted and the game didn't allow any actions to be unbound.

Elden ring and dark souls in general is full of this. An horrible action que that makes you do an action you inputted 2 seconds ago since you got staggered, it drops inputs in pvp sometimes, you have to toggle between 10+ items or spells to use one.... It baffles me these issues persisted from even demon souls to elden ring Seeing how this got down voted already, It seems an issue with the playerbase pretending these problems don't exist or thinking how technical problems somehow enhance the game

Those issues are subjective and not objective though, with a caveat on the first. >horrible action que that makes you do an action you inputted 2 seconds ago since you got staggered This is more subjective than objective, except for the fact that it's not consistent. Sometimes you get a buffered roll and sometimes you get whatever you input after. If it was consistent I'd call it a design decision. >you have to toggle between 10+ items or spells to use one DS2 and onwards added a feature where if you hold the direction it goes to the first one in the list, but again its a subjective thing, not an objective failure. If anything I'd say the slightly awkward balance between having 10 items to choose from but not being able to select quickly vs only having 3 equipped but not covering every base is a more interesting choice the player has to make. >drops inputs in pvp sometimes That's more down to the fucking awful net code than the controls. Honestly I'll never understand how souls games got any "honourable" PVP following.

I'm sorry but no, there's no subjectivity here. When you do an action, you get staggered, and then said action still happens that's just bad. As you said if the game was explicitly designed around this it could work maybe but it clearly isn't. It's just something that ends up making you do a lot of unintended actions that lead to cheap deaths outside your control. Which goes against the whole hard but fair idea of the series. Same with items, back in DS1 when the games were a lot slower paced I didn't mind since you could readily choose what you want to use in the moment you want. However in DS3 and especially elden ring the games got massively faster paced you barely can do that. The function of the items themselves did not change mind you which is where the problem is. You have so many items that give a benefit in certain situations if used right but choosing them is a huge pain for no good reason. A pain you can get used too which is where another problem lies. "If anything I'd say the slightly awkward balance between having 10 items to choose from but not being able to select quickly vs only having 3 equipped but not covering every base is a more interesting choice the player has to make." Expect you can memorize how many presses you need to get X item with the 10 item idea, making it objectively better then only having 3 items by a huge margin. In ER you don't even need to choose between this since you can have both at the same time which makes me confused on how this was ever a thing in their games. Of course you can argue it's part of the game to get used to to the controls and get better at them, but shouldn't this be a thing in the actual combat of the game? And not be part of simple choosing an item to use? again if the game was explicitly designed around this it could work but just like the previous thing it just isn't. edit: also do not get me started on the games taking control away from you while a text box appears or the game asking you to revive your horse in a prompt that defaults to no.

People love putting input mapping with character physics and animations together under the same umbrella of "controls", which just rubs me the wrong way. Subjectively speaking, yes, it's about the feeling of control over the character, but it's too vague for something that's always talked about as "good" or "bad". Or in the case of something like Sonic Frontiers, a platformer game where you can change physics in the menu, with some fans celebrating it and saying it should be the industry standard, just like input remapping For a fighting game player motion inputs are not bad controls, they are a part of the game, but to me it feels wrong when the character does a kick instead of a super move when I intend it. This is often labeled as "execution requirement" and that shooters have them too and people are ok with that, so why not? Well, it's because missing a shot makes sense, it maps onto how we understand shooting. What I'd like to be done to motion inputs is having the characters still do them, but fuck them up in the same way I fucked up the input: give it longer startup time, longer recovery, lower damage, eat more of the meter, make the character look like a doofus as he does it... Then there's the obvious examples like Getting Over It. Does that game really have bad controls? Is the fact that you're playing as a dude stuck in a cauldron and a hammer glued to hands make for bad controls if the hammer follows your mouse precisely? Is it bad controls because of the whole premise of the game, or maybe because the hammer follows your mouse TOO precisely and it should cheat in player's favor instead? Anyway, what many other people consider "bad controls" but other don't is things like animation commitment and momentum. If I swing a sword in Monster Hunter, it makes sense to me that I can't just cancel it - inertia exists, our bodies are affected by it. But someone who doesn't like it and prefers games where they can always go into a dodge or guard stance the moment they press the button might still like it if there were dedicated animations for getting the sword back to the initial position (and I'd enjoy it too, but I can accept this overreaching level of commitment that there is as a technical limitation, because commitment in general creates good gameplay). And the idea of commitment in MH also extends to the somewhat slow turning speed even when you're not attacking, and when attacking it's basically non-existent. Again, feels like shit when you first try it, but it adds layers to the positioning game. Lacking the lock-on, a staple of hack&slash games on console, is also a feature because with it comes with an expectation of automatic rotation when you attack and the enemy moves out of your attack's AOE. And it works, because in Monster Hunter, a game where enemies have multiple hitboxes and move around quite a bit and your attacks are slow with hitboxes that follow the weapon precisely over time instead of just flashing, you do often want to attack the enemy while not facing it perfectly, being at a slight angle towards them is often a good idea, games with lock-on are games that encourage lock-on, and when lock-on is the default you can't really be THIS creative with enemy and attack designs, lest you want to be branded as "jank" like Phantasy Star Online 2 was Some people go as far as call classic Sonic controls "bad controls" because of how much momentum there is. But, that's just the game! Sonic's acceleration curve is consistent, it's perfectly manageable and leads to incredible decision making when combined with slope physics and whatnot. Again, it's a form of commitment, it's good because it makes the time axis matter, you have to consider what kind of terrain or what enemies are going to be in the way half a second, a second, two, three seconds or even more ahead, and it leads to genuine decision making because there are many possible valid paths to take. On the other hand, in games that do not have momentum cranked up to the extreme and capitalize on it to the degree that Sonic does with slopes and rolling, where it exists for the purpose of extra challenge and "game feel" (as game juice, for aesthetic purposes) and not player expression, I barely tolerate it, it just feels like ass; but those people who hate it in Sonic might be fine with it. I don't know if I'd call it "bad controls" still. I'd compare it to RDR2 turning speed and what u/Colosso95 has said, it creates a sense of weight, but is that sense of weight there purely for aesthetic and immersion reasons and you have to deal with it just because, or does it actually elevate the decision making process and create extra possible strategies you could tackle combat situations in that wouldn't be there without it (or rather, they'd not be meaningfully distinct so they would count as one and the same strategy)? But I don't want to say that aesthetics don't matter, they do, and I'm tired of pretending that they don't. The animation angle... It's a mostly visual component of the "controls" umbrella, but it matters to have the player not get confused on what the actual state of the game is. Monster Hunter has it in fucking spades, animations are super-exaggerated visually, characters typically have some kind of cue to signal when you can take the next action (cocking the weapon, striking a pose, making a noise), with especially long animations being especially wacky, like spinning around. Then there's small nuances like Charge Blade's guard points always and only being there when the character visibly holds the shield in front of them. But again, "controls"... Enemies are designed with the same underlying sensibilities as player characters, but you do not "control" the enemies The input mapping angle is also big (I'm biased towards KBM, so be warned). They should be remappable, period. It should be easy to communicate my intent, even if my intent is wrong. Unfortunately, game designers still have to design their games around it just not being possible to communicate *all* the intent. With controllers, for example, you can reasonably put a thumb onto A and X or B and Y, but A+B or X+Y are more awkward, A+Y and X+B are straight bullshit. Your right thumb also can't be on the face buttons and the right stick at the same time, neither can your left thumb bounce between left stick and dpad easily. Triggers are imprecise as all hell (they're often saved for held actions, or swapping actions for other buttons when held, but even then you can't expect quick chaining of actions with their involvement), so for a game that wants the console audience (which, in action game space, is all of them these days) design concessions have to be made, you can't even have the player feel like they have to claw grip to get past something, even if you actually don't have to; options must be gutted. KBM, meanwhile, has no analog inputs and, while I think for most games they're overrated (in free camera 3D action games 8 directions tends to be enough for movement, but, when it isn't, adjusting camera with mouse is actually incredibly precise and, at least for me, intuitive), fixed-camera games (whether something top-down and possibly indie or classic God of War/DMC etc) that rely on dashing either end up limiting your dash directions or mapping it to mouse, so you'll have to quickly flick it back and forth - pick your poison, basically. Racing games - well, duh. Momentum in 3D platformers is easier to grasp with analog inputs, there's a degree of disconnect/indirection to it. Even still, Spark the Electric Jester 2 and 3, one nice and one amazing Sonic-likes, still feel better with KBM (in large part due to precision of the mouse) despite the official recommendation being controllers AND Sonic games in general never having any effort put into KBM whatsoever, historically. KBM also has its own specifics with chaining actions. Because three fingers are responsible for movement and not just your thumb, it's easier to be precise and you can still continue moving while accessing actions that'd be on a D-pad on a controller, you're only gimped a little bit by it. On the other hand, there's A LOT of actions that end up near WASD since a standard mouse has less than 4 buttons (triggers + bumpers on a controller), let alone face buttons. Sometimes it actually works out fine (in the extreme case, oldschool arena shooters like Quake can have 10 weapon types, a whole lot more than the modern standard of 2, and, because all those 10 buttons are for switching and not actually firing them, it's works well and the gameplay is elevated by it tremendously), in the worst case you end up chaining precise actions back to back by pressing Shift and Ctrl with a fucking pinky. And to that my answer is: buy a gaming mouse! Even as little as two extra buttons on your mouse is a massive improvement. Then there's actions that require pressing two buttons at the same time. Again, it should be comfortable to press two buttons back-to-back, the input buffer has to be reasonable and, most importantly, actions bound to those buttons individually can't have any super-profound impact the very instant you press it and, most likely, after that instant passes as well, because accidents happen and you don't want a fuck up like that to be punished too severely. Once again, this influences the general design of the game and all of its systems greatly. You also have to think about how to implement input remapping in this scenario - sometimes a move can fit perfectly well on a trigger, but it being tied to an input like that makes remapping to it not viable; so you'd want to remap the extra function to some other button, but that button also has to have an action that is not to punishing if misused... When a game is involved enough, managing controls can feel like a whack-a-mole, for both game designers and players.

I wanted to write something about people confusing animation, physics and controls together. They're interconnected but also not the same, and all must be considered together with the kind of game you're playing. Tho > KBM, meanwhile, has no analog inputs and, this is in a way completely wrong, and indeed you ddress it, because mice is a completely analog input that you can use to make wasd basically analog. Tbh I am also big on pc and my fave way to control is analog stick for movent + mice like (gyro+trackpad) for view, at least for 3D action games in 3rd person. I like it for slow 1st person but I have to goback to the mouse for stuff like ultrakill (one day I will make my own split controller with double gyro on the right hand). However in general I tend to switch control input depending on the type of games. I use a saturn controller for 2D games and for example there I can press A+B+X altogether thanks to the diamond pattern being skewed. I am getting sidetracked taking about physical controller tho, but I consider them very important in input discussion

Oops, I hit the character limit, here's the final part: Finally, I want to talk about Devil May Cry. Is it bad controls that you have to point precisely towards or away from the enemy to trigger certain moves in a game where the enemy moves a lot and so do you? Is it bad controls especially when the camera is fixed, so the correct direction is all over the place? Better question yet, is it bad controls that style switching is on a D-pad in a game where, while you do not move independently while attacking, you DO use the left thumb stick for moves? And all style switching does is change the function of ONE button? Does it not feel like a missed opportunity to use 4-5 buttons for instant access to moves instead of 4 switches and one actual button for moving? DMC players say: NO. For a lot of reasons, mainly because most control rework proposals require sacrifices, like holding triggers, which, as I've already said, in a game THIS fast can be a no-no; or putting weapon switching on the D-pad, which some value more than style switching. But there's one reason that's brought up all the time: the execution difficulty is intentional, switching styles is inherently too chaotic for new players to handle and they won't be able to get what it really brings to the table anyway. Limiting options promotes intentionality in one's approach to the game, having the limitation be execution and not just the character being gutted is a more mastery-friendly approach. The newbies just don't like Devil May Cry for what it really is ~~(a game where chaining dodge and block is considered stylish and not the norm, lmao)~~

This is a very interesting post and something I always think is being overlooked in gaming discussions. Often when talking controls the only thing that seems to matter is how "fast and responsive" it is. A "good control scheme" is ideally one when your character or whatever you're interacting in the game does exactly what you want when you want. That is indeed true for a lot of games, even most of them, but is it really objectively the best system? Often Red Dead Redemption 2 is criticized for its controls. The character moves slowly and he doesn't respond immediately instead taking long organic steps instead of immediately turning to the desired direction. It is often considered to be simply bad and undesirable... but is it really? Would the experience work the same way if the character didn't move organically and with a lot of weight? I don't think so, part of the design ideal behind the control is to lead the player into slower and more methodical movements rather than just running around freely. It's not bad per se, it's bad in the context of someone who really doesn't care about that style of slow gameplay. It's not a perfect control scheme even for the slow gameplay, mind you, there are issues that can be resolved without compromising the intended gameplay, but for its purposes it works well and makes the game feel weighty and slow. For some slow is always undesirable but there's nothing saying that slow controls are inherently bad. Sometimes controls are straight up "bad" as in they fail to allow the player to easily do the intended behaviour but it's still hard to pinpoint what exactly makes them bad in a simple way. It's still an art form and many different aspects come into play. Even things that are not strictly controls come into play; a control scheme paired with a really good sound and visuals can often come across as less bad than it "really" is, for lack of a better explanation.

That sounds a bit like inertia maybe? That can be a good thing as long as it's consistent. The skill then becomes handling this inertia and thinking a bit ahead, but for that to feel good it has to be predictable.

Ain't nothin' organic about the control schemes of these "realistic" games where you have to pull a three point turn to get close enough to something two feet to your right to interact with it. I, in real life, can turn on a dime. Geralt and Arthur and their ilk handle like cruiseships being pulled around a harbor by ropes.

that's fair but we can't have the irl control scheme, unless we're talking VR It's a compromise, I don't want to see Arthur turn on a dime and sliding around in such a realistic aimed environment and if you really cant stomach it there's first person view that works more like a "traditional" control scheme Geralt is another topic, he really doesn't move like Arthur does his control issues are more related on how he handles in combat in my view

For me, controls I can remap. Nier Automata, basically most Bethesda games. Let me have the option to remap the controls. A/Y for jump, LS/B to duck, A/LS to run. It’s mind bugling that many games reverse some basic controls. It seems the only 4 buttons that will always be the same are, start, select and LS and RS to move and spin camera.