My impressions from the beta (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 11:23 (3545 days ago) @ kapowaz
edited by General Vagueness, Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 11:40

Also, most control schemes only swap a couple of buttons, with good reason: certain functions are only really practical in a few ways; fire with a button other than a trigger wouldn't make much sense.

Then why did they put a thing in the control setup to let you swap bumpers and triggers?

I think you may have misunderstood what the Mirror layout does — it swaps the left and right trigger, left and right bumper, presumably to make things easier for left-handers. None of the supplied layouts uses anything other than one of the two trigger buttons for fire.

It's not a layout you can choose, on the screen where you choose layouts you can press a button, I think it was X, and switch the bumpers for the triggers (and you can change your layout and the switch still applies until you press X again). The Mirror layout is the default layout with triggers and bumpers swapped, left for right and right for left. Applying that as a toggle to any layout, like the one that swaps triggers with bumpers, seems like the next logical step to me if they don't just go to full customizable controls.

It's a bold statement but I think anything less than full customization of controls in a game, especially well into the 21st century, is bad UX design.

Hundreds of UX designers would disagree with you, and they ought to know. I would say the opposite is true: games not making opinionated decisions about how to layout joypad controls is a relic of the old days of games, and indicative of a lack of strong opinion within the studio about what layout works well. Bungie will have done a lot of research and testing on this, and ultimately decided these six layouts represent the most useful ones.

None of that matters because no one layout, no four layouts, no six layouts, no twelve layouts, will be the best for everyone. I don't care about the statistics, I don't care about the opinions. If it's buggy, I care, otherwise, I just want the functionality, and so do a lot of people.