Nicole wrote:
There's an assumption here that games that have customizable controls with bad defaults would be forced to have good controls if they had no customization.
But the thing is, no one sets out to make a game with bad controls. Games with bad controls play that way because their creators thought they were good enough, whether because of weird tastes in controls, not having the skill or experience to come up with something better, or simply not caring enough.
Having such devs remove customizable controls, far from resulting in a game with good controls, would just lead to a game with bad controls and no alternative.
I can't disagree with any of this, but keep in mind I'm not talking from the perspective of a video game player here, but as a developer.
What you aren't accounting for here are all the hundreds of games with great controls that don't offer customizations. A lot of care was put into deciding the correct controls for those games. In Super Mario Bros. you hold B to run and press A to jump, and that works great for that game. The game would be playable with the reverse button layout, but the anatomy of your thumb makes it more intuitive to play it the way it was designed. You could argue that the game wouldn't suffer from allowing the player to change that configuration, but if it works as it is, why should you?
Essentially what I'm getting at here, is design your entire game with a configuration in mind, and if you want to add configuration options, do it as a final addition that won't interfere with your game design.