Game controls should always be fully customisable. Discuss

This house argues that the next generation of console games must all include fully customizable controls, as opposed to a selection of pre-sets.

Discuss.

Customiable controls are never a bad thing, so I’d have to agree. From what I’ve been reading about the Xbox 360, it sounds like you can have a single profile that works across different games… I think this is so that you don’t have to configure the controls for each game in the same genre to have the controls that suit you. It’s a good idea, in theory, although different games can have quite different control setups, so I’m not sure how it will work in practice.

Edit: Oh yeah, another thing that’s slightly off topic: I’d like it if all games allowed you to create named profiles (such as in Halo), rather than just naming save files by datetime last saved, or the levels of your characters. Some of my friends were playing EA’s The Return of the King recently and we got quite confused as to whose save file belonged to who, because there was no clear naming system.

Concur’d. Pirates of the Caribbean is a fantastic example of the necessity of this. Also it’s confusing when I try to reload in Ghost Recon 2 only to find out I’ve switched night vision on.

That would definitely be a welcome addition, however I don’t know how many developers would adopt this system especially if they were to be making a cross platform game.

yeah i agree. I don’t think there is any exception really.
Except no one should be allowed to change the right trigger on racing games to anything but accelerate >=|

Some changes like shifting the attunment of the “punch” action from right trigger to A button can have an ambiguous effect.

Sometimes developers just don’t want you to be pressing as many times that specific button.Since you could throw 50 punches if you pressed A but only 20 if you pressed the right trigger (in the same timeframe).

But sure, playing Gun Valkyrie with a different control scheme would be sweet.
You tend to get used to it but it still feels hard.

Though it’d be great to have all controls for all games fully customisable, I’d be much more bothered about it for games in established genres than more unique games. For example, the Xbox version of Doom 3 irritated me no end because it only had a handful of preset control schemes, none of which was quite what I was after. On the other hand, not having customisable controls in something like NiGHTS or Burning Rangers or Virtual On or Shenmue wouldn’t bother me so much, because those games don’t belong to strict genres where I’ve gotten used to really specific schemes.