Gearbox: Nintendo has listened to Wii U feedback, controller specs will “be awesome”

[NightDragon83]

famousringo said:

NightDragon83 said:

How exactly does making the thumbsticks clickable make them WORSE at their job?  The 360 and PS2/3 thumbsticks are way better than the N64, GC or Wii's thumbsticks ever were in terms of comfort, durability, and responsiveness.

 

Nope.

Look, you want to move a thumbstick, you apply force to it. The more force you apply, the farther it moves in that direction. Part of that force is always downward, because you need to maintain friction between your thumb and the stick or the whole system falls apart. With no button under the thumbstick, you don't need to worry about how much downward force you apply, so long as it's enough to maintain that friction.

Add a button under there. Now that downward force has somewhere to go. Press too hard in the wrong direction, and you get a click. By necessity, the whole apparatus becomes looser with this extra dimension of motion, and therefore less responsive. The user needs to be more deliberate about how much force you apply and what direction you apply it in.

The job of the thumbstick — detailed control of two whole dimensions of motion — is way too important to clutter the thing up with a crappy and often disused button. It's doing more than enough work already. It's like hooking up the e-brake of a car to a pull on the steering wheel.

And yes, the homogenization of console gaming sucks. New inputs allow for new gameplay. The message from third parties is that they aren't interested in new gameplay experiences. While console makers are free to experiment, they'll get buried by the third parties if they neglect to include the same old controller design we've had for fifteen years now. 

It's good that you like those 360 and PS3 controllers so much. Because if 3rd parties get their way —and it seems like they are — the next fifteen years of console gaming will be just like the last fifteen years.

Yeah, and what a shame that would be, because lord knows the last 15 years of gaming (from the 32/64 bit gen onwards) have sucked royally, right?

And the homogenization of console gaming is a very good thing IMO.  Going back to your car analogy... imagine if all the auto companies had different configurations for their vehicles rather than one unified standard... some with the steering wheel in the middle, some with the gas pedal on the left and brake on the right, etc... think of what a huge clusterfuck that would be, and how many problems it would cause.  Hell, look at every other major electronics manufacturer and their products... aside from a couple of special exclusive features here and there, things like TVs, home theaters, DVD and Blu-Ray players, etc are all built to the same general standards and specifications so as to allow for maximum compatibility between the consumers and the multimedia and entertainment industries.