3 ms·

It's very popular right now, but it's really hard to tell if it's just a fad. Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died

by vlunkr 4y ago

It's very popular right now, but it's really hard to tell if it's just a fad. Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died off. It will be interesting to see.

dylan604 4y ago
>Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died off. is there a consensus to why this is? was it just a fad/phase, or is it just too physically demanding so people literally and figuratively tired of it?
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  With Wii Sports, it somewhat felt like you were doing the correct action for the associated sport. With every other game, and Wii Sports after the novelty wore off, it felt like a clunky input method that usually led to mindlessly waggling the remote around.
  - explaininjs 4y ago
    Zelda's bow mechanic was fun. Sword fighting too. The switch controls feel drab in comparison, I can't really get into Breath of the Wild the same I did Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess.
    - ytreyrty 4y ago
      skyward sword was basically unplayable for me until the switch version with normal controls came out. i never was even able to get past the 2nd dungeon with motion controls. i do like the games where you can use motion controls of the controller to enhance your aiming.
      - boomboomsubban 4y ago
        Aiming with the Wii remote was always obnoxious for me. Even going through menus was a regular annoyance as the aiming was so finicky.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  That's a great question. I think it was just a fad. There weren't enough really good game ideas to carry it forward.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  or is it just too physically demanding so people literally and figuratively tired of it? Partly that. Playing something like Zelda with motion controls gets insane pretty fast. Think about playing Zelda for an hour and how many sword slashes you do. Also, existing control methods (gamepads, keyboards, mice) are really good. If you think about it, they are miracles of efficiency and accuracy. Compared to motion controls, you do an order or two of magnitude less work, and in return you get an order or two of magnitude more precision in many cases. There are some genres that are fun with Wiimotes. Wii Sports is always fun for short bursts at a party. Also arcade light gun style shooting games are just phenomenal. But in general, yeecccch.
- grumbel 4y ago
  It's easy to see why the motion controllers we had failed, but it's hard to tell if a better ones would have been successful. The original Wiimote only had an accelerometer, that worked well enough in a game like WiiSports where all your actions are predetermined and you only need to measure how 'hard' the player moved the controller. But that approach doesn't work in games where you have multiple actions at the same time. MotionPlus added an gyro, that's better, but still not good due to lacking a magnetometer, so you had to constantly recalibrate it every couple of minutes. That gets old fast. It also still had no position sensing, so still a lot of guesswork involved in trying to figure out what the player was actually doing with the controller. The Nintendo Switch is also still stuck at this level. Meanwhile Playstation Move had full 6DOF tracking all the way back in 2010, no need to ever recalibrate thanks to a tracking camera. Amazing in theory, but in actuality that controller was handicaped by a terrible button/stick layout, as in they didn't have any analog stick on the 6DOF controller and instead had a untracked NavController with only one stick. This rendered the Move controller impractical for most regular games. Worse yet, they never updated it and kept using it on PlaystationVR, only finally replacing it this year with PSVR2. The Move controller handicapped a whole decade of motion gaming. Would a better controller succeeded? Hard to tell. Gyro-aim is still popular on SteamController, Switch and Playstation and is a big upgrade over stick controls, but not as widely adopted as it should be, due to Microsoft not having any motion sensing in their Xbox controller, thus making it impossible for multiplatform games to depend on it. The laser-pointer input of the Wiimote was also working really well and is essentially what most VR games use for UI navigation, but it requires having a split controller. Going the obvious path of just taking a regular controller, splitting it in two and adding motion tracking to each half was never done by any of the big companies. Even modern VR controllers don't go that route and end up with a layout that is unsuitable as a drop-in replacement for a regular controller.
alliao 4y ago
I blame Nintendo... it's rare for a next gen to perform worse than previous gen, but that's what happened to wiimote, the supposedly "HD" joycon just don't have enough fidelity when compared with Wiimote, I doubt it performs better than wiimote when tracking in air.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  The wii is probably not as good as you remember. I don’t know the technical terms, but the original controller didn’t actually do 1:1 tracking. Someone smarter than me explains here: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Wiimote/MainPage.html https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Wiimote/MainPage... They added motion plus later, which was better, but also required frequent recalibration. In addition to Nintendo, MS and Sony took a shot at it. I don’t blame Nintendo, I think people just stopped caring.

by vlunkr 4y ago

It's very popular right now, but it's really hard to tell if it's just a fad. Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died off. It will be interesting to see.

dylan604 4y ago

>Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died off. is there a consensus to why this is? was it just a fad/phase, or is it just too physically demanding so people literally and figuratively tired of it?

boomboomsubban 4y ago
With Wii Sports, it somewhat felt like you were doing the correct action for the associated sport. With every other game, and Wii Sports after the novelty wore off, it felt like a clunky input method that usually led to mindlessly waggling the remote around.
- explaininjs 4y ago
  Zelda's bow mechanic was fun. Sword fighting too. The switch controls feel drab in comparison, I can't really get into Breath of the Wild the same I did Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess.
  - ytreyrty 4y ago
    skyward sword was basically unplayable for me until the switch version with normal controls came out. i never was even able to get past the 2nd dungeon with motion controls. i do like the games where you can use motion controls of the controller to enhance your aiming.
    - boomboomsubban 4y ago
      Aiming with the Wii remote was always obnoxious for me. Even going through menus was a regular annoyance as the aiming was so finicky.
vlunkr 4y ago
That's a great question. I think it was just a fad. There weren't enough really good game ideas to carry it forward.
JohnBooty 4y ago
or is it just too physically demanding so people literally and figuratively tired of it? Partly that. Playing something like Zelda with motion controls gets insane pretty fast. Think about playing Zelda for an hour and how many sword slashes you do. Also, existing control methods (gamepads, keyboards, mice) are really good. If you think about it, they are miracles of efficiency and accuracy. Compared to motion controls, you do an order or two of magnitude less work, and in return you get an order or two of magnitude more precision in many cases. There are some genres that are fun with Wiimotes. Wii Sports is always fun for short bursts at a party. Also arcade light gun style shooting games are just phenomenal. But in general, yeecccch.
grumbel 4y ago
It's easy to see why the motion controllers we had failed, but it's hard to tell if a better ones would have been successful. The original Wiimote only had an accelerometer, that worked well enough in a game like WiiSports where all your actions are predetermined and you only need to measure how 'hard' the player moved the controller. But that approach doesn't work in games where you have multiple actions at the same time. MotionPlus added an gyro, that's better, but still not good due to lacking a magnetometer, so you had to constantly recalibrate it every couple of minutes. That gets old fast. It also still had no position sensing, so still a lot of guesswork involved in trying to figure out what the player was actually doing with the controller. The Nintendo Switch is also still stuck at this level. Meanwhile Playstation Move had full 6DOF tracking all the way back in 2010, no need to ever recalibrate thanks to a tracking camera. Amazing in theory, but in actuality that controller was handicaped by a terrible button/stick layout, as in they didn't have any analog stick on the 6DOF controller and instead had a untracked NavController with only one stick. This rendered the Move controller impractical for most regular games. Worse yet, they never updated it and kept using it on PlaystationVR, only finally replacing it this year with PSVR2. The Move controller handicapped a whole decade of motion gaming. Would a better controller succeeded? Hard to tell. Gyro-aim is still popular on SteamController, Switch and Playstation and is a big upgrade over stick controls, but not as widely adopted as it should be, due to Microsoft not having any motion sensing in their Xbox controller, thus making it impossible for multiplatform games to depend on it. The laser-pointer input of the Wiimote was also working really well and is essentially what most VR games use for UI navigation, but it requires having a split controller. Going the obvious path of just taking a regular controller, splitting it in two and adding motion tracking to each half was never done by any of the big companies. Even modern VR controllers don't go that route and end up with a layout that is unsuitable as a drop-in replacement for a regular controller.

alliao 4y ago

I blame Nintendo... it's rare for a next gen to perform worse than previous gen, but that's what happened to wiimote, the supposedly "HD" joycon just don't have enough fidelity when compared with Wiimote, I doubt it performs better than wiimote when tracking in air.

vlunkr 4y ago
The wii is probably not as good as you remember. I don’t know the technical terms, but the original controller didn’t actually do 1:1 tracking. Someone smarter than me explains here: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Wiimote/MainPage.html https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Wiimote/MainPage... They added motion plus later, which was better, but also required frequent recalibration. In addition to Nintendo, MS and Sony took a shot at it. I don’t blame Nintendo, I think people just stopped caring.