Hello everyone,
since for some reason I can neither create topics in General, nor in the Shadowlands Beta sections of the forums, I thought to post this here, since I think it’s the closest section to my topic.
So just as a bit of backstory:
I play WoW for about a year of so now, coming from Final Fantasy 14, playing both games side by side.
Since I always played Final Fantasy 14 with an XBox One controller + the keyboard Numpad for buff skills I was incredibly excited, when the WoW Dev team announced, that they are going to implement controller support for the game.
Now since then some time has passed and some basic controller support is already in the game, accessible via a couple of chat /commands.
So far it is already functioning greatly, and the dev team did a fantastic job, implementing this additional option to play the game.
However, I still have a couple of issues in regards of this topic, which I’m gonna elaborate on now.
Also, since it makes a lot of things easier for me, and I guess the WoW dev team got some inspiration from Square Enix’s FF14 dev team during a couple of visits on both sides, I’m gonna draw a couple of comparisons between the two games, where it is appropriate and inspiration could add a benefit.
Furthermore, I’m gonna be a bit technical here and there, as I’m an aspiring game developer myself (already created a game at a GameJam & studying Media Computer Science at a FH in Germany).
- Navigating the world:
I believe, that this is the most important aspect I’m gonna talk about, so this has to come first.
Interacting with the world on controller turns out to be rather difficult with controller at the moment, especially with things like talking to NPCs, interacting with objects and targeting in general.
From my observations, there are 3 stages of player-character-interaction present in WoW:
-
mouseover: when the mouse cursor is hovering over a character or object. On most things a tooltip appears, stating the name or some description of the object or player. It is also the requirement for mouseover actions.
-
target: when something is normally clicked and selected as target. It’s the requirement to cast skills/spells on the object (unless it’s a mouseover action).
-
interact: kinda hard to explain. The state, when for example you are auto-attacking an enemy, activating a portal, talking to an npc, etc.
This works great for keyboard + mouse, but for controller there needs to be an alternative state, that takes the place of mouseover, for controller gameplay to be intuitive & easy to use.
In FF14, there is such a state, which I’m gonna call “hovered” in this topic. By pressing left or right on a controller’s D-Pad you can hover between targets on screen. Hover is indicated by a thin, rotating circle in front of the hovered entity and by pressing the “Conform Button” (see next section of this topic) you target that entity (just like when you click on a mouseovered target).
I believe that WoW needs something comparable, so players can navigate the world properly, use portals, talk with NPCs, etc.
- Interacting with the world:
Again, a FF14 comparison.
A major game changer for interacting with the world on controller would be a universal “Confirm Button”. In FF14, this is the A-button on XBox One Controllers (X on PS4 controllers)(Num0 on keyboard), and what this does is the following:
- setting a “hovered” entity into the “target” state
- interacting with a target
- selecting a menu item where the cursor is currently pointing at (e.g. Items in the bag, spell book pages, etc.)
- the equivalent of clicking “next” during a npc conversation
Likewise FF14 has a universal “Cancel” button (B on XBox One Controllers, Circle on PS4 Controllers, ESC on Keyboard).
This button does the following:
- untarget a currently targeted entity
- close the currently active UI window, when nothing in it is selected
- cancel a selection in UI elements
- the equivalent of “cancel/decline/no” during a noc conversation
Both such a confirm and cancel button are most likely required for good controller gameplay. Teach me otherwise, if you have a better sollution 
- The skills/spells/hotbar system:
This is also a very important aspect for gameplay.
In Final Fantasy 14, this was solved with the Cross Hotbar System - a system, where instead of one or multiple normal, horizontal Hotbars you have one special hotbar in the shape of 4 crosses (4 actions on each cross).
To use the actions on this cross hotbar you first have to hold either LT/L2 or RT/R2 on the controller to choose which side of the hotbar you’re going to use (LT = the two crosses on the left, RT = the two crosses on the right).
Once you hold either LT or RT, you can press either one of the 4 D-Pad keys or one of the ABXY/
to use an action (the left cross is for the d-pad, the right cross for the abxy buttons).
This system allows for 16 hotbar slots to be directly accessible.
Additionally, by pressing RB/R1 or by holding RB/R1 and pressing a D-Pad/ABXY button you can also switch between different cross hotbars (just like switching between normal hotbars). There are up to 8 Cross Hotbars (one for each dpad/abxy button), resulting in up to 128 action slots.
Such a system can already be partially emulated in WoW with addons like Bartender4, but it requires macros to switch between cross hotbars and is really clunky to use.
I’m pretty certain that such a system would benefit WoW’s controller support and I’m certain that the Blizzard Devs are competent enough to create a similar or comparable system than the FF14 devs - maybe even a better one, who knows?
So that’s my take on the Controller support in its current state on the live game.
I hope that these issues will be worked on (maybe they already are) and I hope my feedback was useful.
Cheers
