You’d be surprised how many different keyboard assignments there are when it comes to games. I remember a thread at some point in the distant past (well a few years at least) where people posted their favoured layouts. Probably the most surprising was exchanging WASD for ESDF. It does make some sense as you get a lot more keys surrounding your hand, but to me, and a lot of other WASD, users it’s like the difference between a laptop mousepad and desktop mouse. There are also a lot of gamers who still use the arrow keys, the industry moved away from this layout a long time ago, yet some people do find it more comfortable.
The evolution of WASD is one of those things where you wonder how we ever did anything different. The off-centre position of the W fits the left hand very well (depending on keyboard placement) and the surrounding keys are very useful, the most fortuitous being R for reload. But even these have changed over the years, I don’t think it ever really took off but there was a time a year or two ago where ‘Use’, traditionally assigned to E was moved to F. I found this very uncomfortable and strange, and not just because I was used to E but the small stretch from D to F is enough to annoy and isn’t nearly as quick as the vertical movement to E. I think the main reason for this change was repurposing E to ‘Lean Right’ as it’s on the opposite side to Q, and that does make some sense but I’ve never actually used lean controls in a game.
There is another game that puts a twist on this issue, The Elder Scrolls games (Morrowind, Oblivion, etc.) use E for ‘Jump’ and take the traditional jump key and assign that for ‘Use’, the spacebar. This does make quite a lot of sense, in RPGs you ‘Use’ things a lot more than you jump, it’s only a small difference but it makes collecting lots of items quicker. Other than this exception the only other key to be assigned to jump is the Up key, this was mostly used in older platformers but as the genre has split into 3D platformers and flash games spacebar is nearly always jump, definitely in FPS’.
Going back a number of years to when I first played Wolfenstein 3D, I remember the key layout so well, arrow keys for movement, space for open, ctrl for fire. The meant your hands were both on the keyboard, it gave a very tactile thrill in comparison to a mouse. Shift was used to toggle strafe, a concept I never understood until my first FPS phase with Unreal Tournament and Half-Life, now I find playing any old games that use left and right for turn much less effective. It is strange how quickly you fall back into it though, all the old tactics come back, whereas now you would turn the mouse and strafe right; back and turn right, forward and turn left would be the equivalent, this simple manuvoure and several others made a lot more use of the back key.
Another layout of the past is the WASDX layout, X being backwards, S forwards and W run forwards. This layout didn’t last long however, and for good reason it’s not particularly comfortable and I guess it died the day Shift came along.
One quite contentious key assignment I remember was crouch. Some games assigned this to C, but I Ctrl has always seemed the best to me, I think that may have been the origianl assigment too. In the WASD layout the little finger doesn’t get much use, the most natural position being to Shift which is very useful as run (if the game has varying speeds), you never use run and crouch together so the little finger is free to stretch down to Ctrl. Thinking about it, how would you perform a crouch jump with C and the spacebar?
There are so many possible layouts, and in the end it’s just your personal preference, this little ramble doesn’t even cover the wide range of accessories that attempt to offer the perfect solution, when it comes down to it, it isn’t merely fortunate that games give the option to change key assignments.
Sorry for the brevity (not to mention the rambling) but I’ve been very busy building my house (in Wurm not Real life 😉 ). The picture has done the rounds on several other blogs but I think it’s very appropriate.
I don’t have the option of choosing my keys these days, I got a Zboard Merc so it has a FPS gamepad strapped to the side.
I do like it though.
I’ve often wondered what they would be like to play with. Have you had any compatibility problems with certain games?
I can see the benefits, although I think I’m too used to the keyboard, plus I don’t have the space…or the money…or the inclination…or the skills…
Well I like to customise some of my controls and over time these have slowly started to change. For example I know prefer to use the shift key in TF2 and L4D instead of the ctr key. This was originally only meant to be a short term change whilst I got a new keyboard because my current one had decided to have several keys not work, including the crt keys which was a little annoying. That said now I prefer using shift because it right next to where you fingers are for movement.
I do like using ‘c’ for crouch in some games. I dont mind for example in SWAT 4 or something like Rainbow Six Vegas 2 because they are tactical and therefore quick reactions for crouching generally are not needed as much.
I think though the whole setting up controls is the most annoying part. Once you have a certain style it is ok but having to re-assign all these new layouts to games when you install them and even when you re-install them sure can get annoying. That said that would be where Steam Cloud would come in real handy.
Shift does feel a lot more comfortable than Ctrl, I just don’t want to get used to it because of games that use Shift for Run.
Haven’t heard much about Steam Cloud lately, it should be good for maintaining settings if nothing else.
I have had no compatibility issues, all the keys are just read as duplicates of existing keys, though they can all (including the regular keys) be programmed to be whichever keys you want so even if a game does not allow you to redefine your keyboard layout you could use this to do so. You can store as many different profiles as you like as well as setting keys to do macros. Very good keyboard. I don’t like the look of the one they do where you buy keysets though.
That sounds good, so you should be able to get compatibility with anything.
I remember seeing the expanded keyboard when I used to go into Gamestation, seemed like a huge waste of money.
Ahh quite true about using shift for run. COD games use that key. Damn haha.
Yeah true it seems to have gone quiet although I do believe Left 4 Dead uses the system and they were using that game as a trial for it.