Until a week ago, I’ve never touched a controller with paddles, in my mind they were nothing but an extra tool only people into the competitive scene will like or use, “What is the point?” said to myself everytime some Elite controller ad came, i’ve been using the claw method for pressing face buttons without releasing the Stick since the Gears of war 3 days.
That changed one week ago, a friend of mine sold me his Elite controller for about 100 Bucks, I’m kind of a controller collector, for example, used to own all 5 generation Dualshocks without actually owning a Sony console, weird
Back to the point, before turning arriving home, brain decided to be skeptical, yeah, just after spending money on the most expensive Xbox controller model, to be fair ,i was actually excited to use the switchable sticks, wondering how they felt, but the first thing my hand felt were the paddles, not surprisingly, those were in the exact position where my fingers use to sit, felt clicky and comfortable to press… So why wouldn’t i use those paddles? I got even less interested on them after testing the limitations, you can’t use them like macros, fair, it would be too OP… Neither combos like A + B in a single press, same as previous, it will give you advantages over people who either
- Do not own an Elite controller
- People who don’t use/map the paddles in that specific way
You can only map the paddles to do the same actions as buttons that ALREADY EXIST ON THE CONTROLLER, why would someone need another A, or another LT? Next day, i understood it. The limited functionality of the paddles were not due the nature of them, it was there to preventing Elite controllers to become somehow Pay2Win compared to standard controller
That’s when the question (that came along with the question, just after a few seconds) came in… Make the paddles Standard. This might be a crazy idea, “The controller would be more expensive”, “Casual gamers will hate it”, “More inputs would be overdesign”. But i think pushing for more buttons (Pun intended), even if they are disabled on default settings (To keep it simple, or just to give the player freedom to map them in any way they like without sharing the same input as other buttons) Is the way to go, developers would have less constraints on designing the HUD/Input method, i know some games that share inputs in different contexts on Console, like Dead By Daylight, which share the drop pallet action and healing action on the same button, which results on people mistakenly dropping pallets when trying to heal a teammate under one
Paddles being a standard would alleviate this problem easly, just letting any player to map the action on the paddle
On the same point, but more specific case scenario, games that otherwise would be HARD as hell to map on a controller, might potentially see this as a good solution, more buttons mean more inputs, more buttons mean more combos, more combos mean even more inputs
Do you agree with me that Paddles should be the new standard for next gen onwards?
