I play a lot of MMORPG games, and lately it seems to be Final Fantasy XIV. As you progress in levels, though, your abilities get more complicated, and your ability to manage them properly becomes paramount.
But, there are some inherent flaws in human meat bags:
- You tend to fat-finger the buttons
- Sometimes your brain just isn’t sharp, so you’re a little slow on reacting to something
The game forces you to be extremely agile in ability to flip from movement and using the right ability at the right time. The easiest way to become effective in this is through muscle memory, but your fingers/hands need to be in their comfortable neutral place to activate the familiar thing in the zone that it’s in.
The Keyboard
First, I started with a keyboard and mouse. Typical start, just like with any mmo. But it had inherent flaws. I could only reliably activate my abilities if they were on the numbers 1-5, because I had to keep my hand nearby WSAD keys in order to maneuver my character. To activate the second hotbar, you have to hold the CTRL key and press the number.
Trying to use ctrl to activate them put a lot of strain on my hand. Ultimately, it meant I had to take my hand off the keyboard and hunt and peck for the number I needed. This took my attention away from the screen, and my hand away from moving my character. My eyes then had to refocus on the screen again so I could see what’s going on, and my hand had to re-find its familiar neutral position on the keyboard so I could control my character again.
Enter the Controller
The controller made playing this game so much easier. I was able to easily access 16 abilities instead of 9 (I could use ctrl+1-4… ctrl+5 was nigh impossible), and controlling my character with analog control afforded me a far higher level of control over their movement.
But, targeting was a pain because I couldn’t just click the thing I wanted. I’d eventually target the thing I needed, but man oh man… Sometimes you needed to distinguish between battle targets, PC’s, alliances, and just interactive things I had to operate. With a mouse it was as simple as clicking or right-clicking… but with a controller, it took extra time.
With a controller in hand, my hands rarely ever needed to move too far. My eyes never left the screen, so that was a huge improvement of efficiency. But, I had to flip through menus to access other hotbars. It was fine for the most part, but it still took time. Also, having to move my thumb to the buttons and back again created the dissonance with muscle memory’s familiarity neutral zone I talked about earlier. Having to move my thumb from the joystick to the button zone meant I had to feel around for the familiar neutral zone of the buttons, then press a button, then move it back to the familiar neutral zone of the joystick, and then control the joystick the way it needed to be. This left room for error, and resulted in me pressing the wrong button sometimes. Flipping menus back and forth, plus all the recentering to familiar neutral zones… mistakes were made.
Not only that, but SE’s UI design is crap. The ability would not activate unless you were holding the meta button to make it appear. The game itself needs to pick up the controller inputs and react accordingly. This will be important later, but understand that the game needed to make this determination of what you wanted to activate and not the PC itself.
The Logitech G600 Mouse
Finally, I settled on an MMO gaming mouse that put 12 buttons on the side. My thumb, from its neutral position, did not have to strain to reach any of these buttons. Now a single hotbar afforded me access to four MORE abilities. And, with the meta-click built in, those same 12 buttons would activate all the abilities I’d normally activate with the ctrl key. Where I had access to 16 abilities natively before, I now had access to 24…
Compared to my world in the original keyboard and mouse land, I had almost tripled my ease of access to abilities. My left hand could stay firmly planted with my index, ring, and middle finger on the WSAD keys, my thumb on the spacebar, and pinky resting on the shift key. My right hand would be in the same position on the mouse, with my thumb in its neutral resting place for all the buttons. It took some getting used to (all new control schemes do), but after a while, I discovered I could use that shift key with the mouse buttons to access yet another hotbar. I now had access to 36 abilities without having to change the UI at all, nor my hand positions… and all from a simple mouse upgrade. Moving my pinky on the shift key meant I never had to move my hand away from WSAD controls nor the space bar as a jump key. I had full control of my character at all times, and the ability to quickly and easily access everything at all times. No more refinding familiarity zones. No more looking away from the screen. No more flipping menus.
Also, a keyboard button is more responsive than a controller press. Yet another flaw in SE’s design. Maybe you’ve never noticed this… but I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and have witnessed this several times. Pressing 1 on the keyboard is faster and more responsive in-game than pressing L2+Triangle. That’s because the game has to make the determination of what you press on the controller… it has to know that you’re holding L2 as you press Triangle, and bind that to a control itself. With a keyboard, however, it’s more like a command is being sent to it. All inputs are treated equally… From the game’s perspective, 1 vs Ctrl+1 is just a difference in value being sent. It doesn’t have to know that Ctrl+1 was a meta key, if that makes any sense.
With these efficiency tweaks to my process, brain farts and fat-fingers weren’t as much of a problem as they were, and my ability to reach abilities fast and comfortably made my effectiveness at my class far greater than it was.
Was All of This Even Necessary?
I’m the kind of person who creates my world around me the way I see fit. If I can tweak aspects to make fewer annoyances, it results in more happiness overall.
SquareEnix created control schemes that work well enough for most people’s needs. Thing is, it’s not going to be 100% perfect for everyone, and it doesn’t need to be. It simply needs to be “good enough”. And for me, “good enough” isn’t “good enough”. I want it in a way that works with my mind and my ways. Kudos to them, though, for creating a platform that allows me to customize the game to this degree.
For many, the controller is more than enough. I can totally understand that, and encourage people to use the controller (at least over the plain keyboard and mouse setup). But if you too are wondering if there’s any other options out there that might help improve your effectiveness at your class, try some of these newer mouse/keyboard/controllers out.