TheNumber1Zero said:
Woudln't taking away buttons imply that the player is too stupid to know how to use them?
The mere thought of it makes me feel insulted, imagine how the people this is supposedly being done for would feel.
They'd probably feel relieved that there's actually a game out there that they can play.
I think a lot of people are taking this article a bit /too/ literally, and thus missing the point of it. I'm also seeing a lot of people saying things like "if anything we need more buttons", but that's the complete opposite direction gaming should take if it hopes to continue roping more players in. Take the Wii for example. As much as people mock the inaccurate waggle controls (especially Yahtzee), there's one thing that goes without denial: It's the mainstream king of gaming consoles right now.
People who aren't currently gamers look at the current consoles out there, and here's what they see: One console is over $300 and has a LOT of buttons on its controller. Maybe they've played it at a friend's house and they were just completely overwhelmed playing something as simple as Halo because they just couldn't wrap their heads around all the buttons. Then they look at the other console. It's under $300, and most of the controls for the game are motion-based. The controller itself has maybe 6 buttons. That's the console they're going to buy. And it's the console they HAVE been buying.
Gamers keep saying that more people should play game, and that gaming needs more acceptance, and blah blah blah blah. And yet we always insist that our games should be as inaccessible as possible. Any time that anything is made easy it turns into a shit-storm of gamers whining because they want it as hard as possible. And then they move-on to the next topic where they post in wonderment of why gaming isn't more accepted by the general populace. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
We want more people getting into games, we need more games that are /similar/ to what the article is talking about. Obviously we don't want to go so far back as to breaking-out our old Atari controllers, but we do need to start narrowing the scope a little to make the games more accessible to people who are newer to the gaming scene.
Perhaps something like a control set-up that would be similar to the button-light example in the OPs post, but the trade-off is that you have less actual control over your character. This would allow newer gamers (to the hobby or to the genre) to get into and learn the basics. Meanwhile there would also be the normal control set-up that would be something closer to what we're familiar with. It would allow for better control over your character and would be required for anyone playing the game seriously.
Thus, you have a game that's accessible to newer gamers by letting them have simple controls for a while, and then they can maybe step it up later or keep it on a casual basis. Meanwhile the hardcore gamers would still have their own control set-ups that they're already familiar with.
To be honest I don't think there's such a thing as too many buttons, when it comes to PC games at least. Especially with fast-paced multi-player FPS games like Quake, I like to have a key bind for each weapon. I want to be able to switch from rocket launcher to gauntlet or shotgun in the split of a second.
