PC gamers have dominated the FPS gaming scene for more than a while thanks to the keyboard and mouse. Now while I won’t dive into the controller versus mouse and keyboard debate, I do absolutely love my controller in certain titles, but for FPS, pretty much keyboards and mice are superior.
With competitive games such as PlayUnknown’s Battlegrounds making their way onto consoles with the Xbox One, there was quite a dilemma whether the title would support PC peripherals. As we reported a few days earlier, Matt Brown from Windows Central confirmed that there would be little to no aim-assist on the Xbox One version of PUBG, there’s a lot of gamers curious about how well they would be able to play the game on their consoles. Speaking to NeoWin at PAX West, Corporate Vice President of Xbox, Mike Ybarra confirmed that the Xbox One will support inputs from keyboards and mice. However, he did also confirm that a lot of these games would depend on the developers whether they want their game to support keyboards and mice. He said:
“So you’ll see our first games supporting keyboard and mouse soon, I can’t announce what that is, but soon. And based on developer interest, they’ll choose to do keyboard and mouse, or not!”
He then further clarified when he was asked about the precision advantage and fairness these controls would come with:
“We’ll leave it a lot up to developer choice. A lot of people tweet me and say “you can’t do this because of fairness,” and we understand that. We run two platforms; the Xbox platform, and the Windows platform.”
“And so, when we bring keyboard and mouse, we’ll coach developers and say “look, you’ve got to think about your multiplayer pools,….”
“…if you have a competitive game, people are probably going to want the choice to say I’ll play with other keyboard and mouse people or I’ll play only with controller people, or that I’ll play with any of those.”
Indeed some excellent clarification from Mike Ybarra that would allow developers to put in some extra work efficiently binding the controls and control what’s fair for Xbox One gamers. Indeed, I personally do agree with the last idea given by Mike, afterall Xbox One gamers would be able to play in an environments where they feel is great for them. But for developers deciding to allow Xbox gamers to use their keyboard and mice should be able to consider the options available to them if they want to play with a certain number of players who play with a controller or keyboard and mouse setup.
Afterall, there’s nothing that Microsoft is putting into this except that they’s support these peripherals. As Mike Ybarra said, its all up to the developers to support and implement these controls into their titles.
