This made me chuckle because I never thought about the opposite problem! I remember a lot of press when the Xbox was being developed about the amount of design effort they were putting into the controllers, starting from scratch & not just copying Sony. They got a lot of crap-talk about the controllers being huge, but if we both like it, then Microsoft apparently got a lot closer to the “best” shape than anyone.
Some people hate the tall buttons, but I like them, much easier for me to switch between them.
I really enjoyed the thrustmaster t-flight on the xbox for this game. for gamepads, the current gen elite series 2 fits my hand the best and I really like it. I have serious arthritis and PS gamepads and the older xbox are very painful overall. I just wish the series 2 wasn’t such bad build quality. waiting on my 7th replacement thankfully all under warranty.
Just been a nightmare of revolving door issues. 7th one on the way in 12 months. two have shown up already defective out of the box and the rest failed withing 2 weeks to 2.5 months. various issues from bumpers double clicking to stick physically locking up and the last one showed up new in box instead of refurb, but the right stick click works less than half the time. Real shame because other than build quality the gamepad feels incredible and has good features but damn, I just want one that works and keeps working. Glad I had the extended warranty. (only bought it because I went through a similar problem without being able to replace them on warranty with their trackballs in the 90’s)
Didn’t the more accurate story come out recently about how a lot of that was down to their board provider not giving them small enough internals? Like, they gave us a good fluff piece at the time about ergonomics but it was really driven by what they could get.
It’s a little weird. In this 2016 article, Seamus Blackley is apologetic & embarrassed about the Duke, and confirms that the chosen hardware vendor couldn’t make small enough circuit boards, so they had to design a huge controller around the board:
But then two years later, after accidentally learning a lot of people loved the Duke, he was essentially the driving force in getting the updated one designed and produced:
I didn’t realize part of Microsoft’s internal justification for the size of the Duke was the size of the Dreamcast controller. I’d have to dig mine out of the garage to compare, but my recollection was that it had very smal handles, way out of proportion to the front surface, which made it feel more like handling a Frisbee than a controller.
Yeah, I picked up a Duke copy when they were released a few years back. I’ve always loved that thing, but I do sort of wish they’d added the bumpers from the Xbox One controller. Oh well.
So to continue this side conversation, I’ve been loving the Hyperkin Duke. However, sadly, the left trigger has been going nuts of late, engaging constantly even when the trigger itself isn’t pressed down. It’s SUPER annoying, so I’ve sadly disconnected the thing and contacted Hyperkin for some sort of fix or replacement.
Have any of y’all with this controller run into this problem? Apparently it’s pretty common, but all the “fixes” I can find for it are temporary.
I’m finally playing it, on VR. And… the game is kind of hard? I’m super bad at it.
I clarify I don’t have a joystick, and I know I could play better if I used a mouse, but I wanted to play with the controller, which goes better together the vr experience than keyboard/mouse (I’m still so bad aiming with controllers). Also, another factor to take in account is that the game is more disorienting in VR than in playing on screen, that also is increasing the difficulty.
So I thought ‘oh well, I will compensante and put it on Easy’. Honestly, this is a game I’m playing for the spectacle of playing in VR, not for the challenging and engaging gameplay, so I said to myself it was ok lowering from Normal to Easy.
The issue is, there is no ‘Easy’. There is ‘story mode’ as the difficulty previous to Normal. And Story modes goes to the extreme in making things easy! That’s my complaint here, it’s like four times easier than Normal. There is no in between. Now enemies die with a bad look of mine.
So this is another rant of companies not giving enough difficulty settings in their games. I hate when they do that, how a company can spend 3 years making a game and then throw all that effort to waste (from my pov) because they didn’t spend half a day in adding a few more difficulty settings.
I really do appreciate when companies add in fine tuning for difficulty settings, like enemy damage scaling, and weapon damage sliders. That stuff is awesome.
They can be, Mission 1 is a lot of twisting and turning in a visually busy space and it happens all at once. There’s a definite curve and once it clicks it gets a lot more reasonable.
