In contrast, look at the wonderful array of audio options you get in The Last of Us, in addition to sliders. Most useful for a lot of people seems to be the dynamic range setting, which can help even things out.

Wow, that's impressive. Due to how my TV room is designed one of my rear speakers is farther up than is ideal and those azimuth settings would be fantastic to have in every game I play.

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.

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 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.

You can't think of any reason why you might want to see what your current leveling progress is? Why would this be contextual?

That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about relative importance and immediacy of importance, and to be honest what I'm used to factors into it. Yes, the health bar only disappears if you've been at full health for something like 10 seconds, and the level bar becomes translucent if it doesn't change for a while, but you can always press start to check your level

Checking your health is very contextual: since it automatically replenishes, if it's not being shown you can assume you're at full health. If you're not in combat, you don't really need to know about it either. Levelling progress on the other hand is something of a ‘slow burn’ thing that, particularly as you approach the level cap, you will probably be keeping an eye on to see how much longer you have to go. Since there are lots of different contexts in which you might want to look at it, if players had to drop into a menu to view it would require they interrupt whatever activity they're in to check it. You may not find yourself looking at it regularly, but be careful not to confuse your own play habits with the majority: ever-present experience bars are a staple of MMOs and RPGs, and with good reason.

Maybe they could do like halfway between primary and heavy weapons, and have you lose some special ammo when you die, but not all of it; I'm thinking it would be cut in half.

I'd be cool with this; so long as it's relatively available for other players to find.

Speaking of Tower NPCs, I forgot one thing: I'd like to congratulate whoever came up with the idea of the sweeping Exos/robots. I'm intrigued that war machines, or, if they're not Exos, things that at least look very capable and humanoid and probably intelligent, are sweeping the floor. To borrow some phrases, what's up with that? who are these sweeping robots? That's why it's brilliant. Minimum amount of effort, maximum amount of me wanting to know what their deal is.

You don't have robots sweeping the floor at your house? Geez! What century are you living in.

Robots are sooooooooo last century. Everyone has LMDs or Replicants now.

- why would I want zoom on a trigger?

- why would I want zoom to take so long? this one I accept more as a design decision, while not being able to have zoom on something that's not a trigger while having "fire weapon" be on a trigger is just bad to me

- I kept thinking the left trigger was for the grenade, why is there not a control scheme that has the gun on the right trigger and the grenade on the left trigger? I can't be the only Halo player that got tripped up by this

Bungie have moved to an Aim Down Sights (also known as Iron Sights) aiming mechanic for Destiny. If you've not played any of the Call of Duty console games, this is their preferred mechanism for aiming, using left trigger to aim down the sights, and right trigger to fire.

I'm certain they made this decision for two big reasons: it makes it easier for Call of Duty players coming to the game (important, as it was Modern Warfare that finally stole Halo's crown as the most-played XBL game), and secondly to support the style of weapon they (mostly) incorporated in the game. You'll note that almost every weapon benefits from aiming in this fashion (the shotgun is the only one for which it's not beneficial to ADS).

Concomitantly, throwing grenades is something you'll do far less frequently in Destiny, so it makes sense to relegate this to another button so as to free up the trigger. I've played some Reach and Halo 4 MP this week to remember what it was like, and by comparison the Halo method of zooming (clicking the right stick) feels clunky and error-prone by comparison (your aim can subtly shift in the process of clicking), so I think it was the right decision.

Well it's good to know that; it would've been nice to have some explanation previously or officially. I will say, and I thought about adding this, I have a habit, as I'm sure many do, of pushing the triggers all the way in even if I don't need to, which makes the wait to be zoomed in feel slightly shorter than having it on a button you hold, and it kind of feels like I'm actively doing it, like it's a continuous thing, if you know what I mean. It would be great if zooming in took the same amount of time as a a regular or at least slightly slow trigger pull.

- why no ability to make a custom control scheme? you've been making console games for like 15 years now, Bungie, and at least some of your games before that had customizable controls, you should've worked this out already... eh, baby steps I suppose, swap triggers and bumpers, next hopefully will be swap left and right, then maybe something to swap face buttons with each other or swap some face buttons with bumpers or something, then fully customizable controls

It's a common saying in user experience that every time you make something an option instead of choosing for the end user, you're shunting off some of the responsibility for your job onto the user. Now, for some cases there are legitimate reasons to leave things as an option (a significant number of people are left-handed, another large group of people prefer to invert the Y-axis and so on), but when you talk about making the entire control scheme customisable, you're asking anyone who uses it to do a lot of work.

I don't buy any of that because there's still the default. Not only that, but a lot of games that have customizable controls, in fact I think over half the console games I've seen with customizable controls, have multiple pre-set configurations in addition to letting any button have any function.

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?

So just how many practical, worthwhile control schemes are there left?

That leaves all of them.

Is it worth devoting all that time and effort to creating a system for choosing between all of these if only a tiny percentage of your users will ever use them (as opposed to one of the stock defaults), and even then would probably be sufficiently happy with one of the defaults?

To me it is. I know about being drowned by choices, I have difficulty making decisions and making them quickly so it's part of my life, and I have seen it in software before. I believe this is different. 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.

- the health bar doesn't show up unless you're taking damage but the level bar is always there? WTF?

You can't think of any reason why you might want to see what your current leveling progress is? Why would this be contextual?

That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about relative importance and immediacy of importance, and to be honest what I'm used to factors into it. Yes, the health bar only disappears if you've been at full health for something like 10 seconds, and the level bar becomes translucent if it doesn't change for a while, but you can always press start to check your level, and if they're going for less clutter, which is a noble goal, they should make the HUD level bar and indicator disappear completely when not in use, like, say, the health bar.
Since I'm on the subject, they could do to make some other elements smaller if they're going for less clutter, there's stuff blocking a lot of the lower left of the screen and I can see it all clearly an on SDTV, they could make it a little smaller and still be discernible-- not by a lot, but some.

- I didn't have a problem with this but I feel safe in predicting it will be a problem: the special ammo in competitive multiplayer (the Crucible), there's a lot of it and you keep all of it or nearly all of it when you die; this will probably become a problem because anyone can equip a sniper rifle as their special weapon, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's played multiplayer with snipers, and the same thing could be a problem in confined maps with shotguns

This is a common complaint. I'm not sure how it'll be addressed, because I much prefer the idea of guardians’ health pools being increased than this ammo becoming more rare (which would ensure that the really skillful have yet another advantage over more middling players like myself).

This is a completely separate issue, unless it's a major, major increase and they make snipers and maybe shotguns not act the way a lot of people expect (the majority of FPS players, I think?). Even with a lot more health, people would still be able to shoot for a long time. (In fact, with more health they would live longer, so they would probably be able to shoot for longer.) The amount of health it would take to balance that so that ammo management and ammo scarcity, well, so that they would exist, would make kill times go from too short to too long, I think. If they want to not have ammo management, or if they want to limit it heavy weapons, I'm OK with that, but then why have ammo pickups, why not just have it regenerate or even be infinite? The fact they didn't do that says to me they want people to think about when and where they're getting ammo, and in the beta I had literally one game where I had trouble finding special ammo, and it was my first (and only) game on the Venus map.
Maybe they could do like halfway between primary and heavy weapons, and have you lose some special ammo when you die, but not all of it; I'm thinking it would be cut in half.

Speaking of Tower NPCs, I forgot one thing: I'd like to congratulate whoever came up with the idea of the sweeping Exos/robots. I'm intrigued that war machines, or, if they're not Exos, things that at least look very capable and humanoid and probably intelligent, are sweeping the floor. To borrow some phrases, what's up with that? who are these sweeping robots? That's why it's brilliant. Minimum amount of effort, maximum amount of me wanting to know what their deal is.

You don't have robots sweeping the floor at your house? Geez! What century are you living in.

Speaking of Tower NPCs, I forgot one thing: I'd like to congratulate whoever came up with the idea of the sweeping Exos/robots. I'm intrigued that war machines, or, if they're not Exos, things that at least look very capable and humanoid and probably intelligent, are sweeping the floor. To borrow some phrases, what's up with that? who are these sweeping robots? That's why it's brilliant. Minimum amount of effort, maximum amount of me wanting to know what their deal is.

Gee, wouldn't it be wonderful if we had AUDIO OPTIONS. VOX / SFX / MUSIC sliders. Turn up the voices. EZPZ. Why is this something Bungie won't do?

If I recall correctly, I remember Marty saying a few times in different ways something to the effect of "artist control" - presenting the audio in the way they wished to present it.

But the quality and type of the user's technology alters the end product of audio levels too wildly. I know they test on a variety of different setups to ensure the audio works consistently... but I think there's too many factors in the wild to account for.

A few simple, minimal adjustment options would be very handy for my more-than-a-decade-old Koss 5.1.

Adjustable audio would be great. I would settle them for just making the dang Tower NPCs speak up.

- lights (or whatever those arching things are) on the road to the starting area only show up if you're far enough away

What lights?

I mean the streetlights, they stick up and arch over the road. Popping in at a short distance would be understandable, if still bad, but only showing up when you're far enough away is just really weird.

Gee, wouldn't it be wonderful if we had AUDIO OPTIONS. VOX / SFX / MUSIC sliders. Turn up the voices. EZPZ. Why is this something Bungie won't do?

I can't fathom how any AAA game these days doesn't have these options. I posted a thread during the beta that mentioned the lack of audio options, so I'm hoping somebody at Bungie saw it.

The low dialog volume combined with lack of audio options in the beta is one of the (many) reasons I'm not preordering Destiny.

In contrast, look at the wonderful array of audio options you get in The Last of Us, in addition to sliders. Most useful for a lot of people seems to be the dynamic range setting, which can help even things out.

The idea of artistic control is nice and all, but on the film side it's like that because the film mix has to be done beforehand (to fixed picture!). Game mix is done on he fly via the hardware pulling from tons of audio channels. Thus, give as much control to people as possible while making sensible defaults.

Gee, wouldn't it be wonderful if we had AUDIO OPTIONS. VOX / SFX / MUSIC sliders. Turn up the voices. EZPZ. Why is this something Bungie won't do?

I can't fathom how any AAA game these days doesn't have these options. I posted a thread during the beta that mentioned the lack of audio options, so I'm hoping somebody at Bungie saw it.

The low dialog volume combined with lack of audio options in the beta is one of the (many) reasons I'm not preordering Destiny.

Gee, wouldn't it be wonderful if we had AUDIO OPTIONS. VOX / SFX / MUSIC sliders. Turn up the voices. EZPZ. Why is this something Bungie won't do?

If I recall correctly, I remember Marty saying a few times in different ways something to the effect of "artist control" - presenting the audio in the way they wished to present it.

When I start playing the game, I am now the artist. So give me control.

--- having a hood when I wear a cape, a helmet with a hood just strikes me as really dumb, and having the cape but not the hood when I don't have a helmet on (in the Tower) also strikes me as dumb; I don't want to have to give up this item that looks cool because it requires me to also look like some kind of redundancy-focused idiot

If anyone wants me to stop complaining about this let me know. I was just pumped that I didn't have to wear a silly hood as a hunter. I could rock just that scarf.

Actually looked pretty cool in my opinion.

--- having a hood when I wear a cape, a helmet with a hood just strikes me as really dumb, and having the cape but not the hood when I don't have a helmet on (in the Tower) also strikes me as dumb; I don't want to have to give up this item that looks cool because it requires me to also look like some kind of redundancy-focused idiot

It's a little known fact, but all Guardians are never-nudes, especially Exos.

- why would I want zoom on a trigger?

- why would I want zoom to take so long? this one I accept more as a design decision, while not being able to have zoom on something that's not a trigger while having "fire weapon" be on a trigger is just bad to me

- I kept thinking the left trigger was for the grenade, why is there not a control scheme that has the gun on the right trigger and the grenade on the left trigger? I can't be the only Halo player that got tripped up by this

Bungie have moved to an Aim Down Sights (also known as Iron Sights) aiming mechanic for Destiny. If you've not played any of the Call of Duty console games, this is their preferred mechanism for aiming, using left trigger to aim down the sights, and right trigger to fire.

I'm certain they made this decision for two big reasons: it makes it easier for Call of Duty players coming to the game (important, as it was Modern Warfare that finally stole Halo's crown as the most-played XBL game), and secondly to support the style of weapon they (mostly) incorporated in the game. You'll note that almost every weapon benefits from aiming in this fashion (the shotgun is the only one for which it's not beneficial to ADS).

Concomitantly, throwing grenades is something you'll do far less frequently in Destiny, so it makes sense to relegate this to another button so as to free up the trigger. I've played some Reach and Halo 4 MP this week to remember what it was like, and by comparison the Halo method of zooming (clicking the right stick) feels clunky and error-prone by comparison (your aim can subtly shift in the process of clicking), so I think it was the right decision.

- why no ability to make a custom control scheme? you've been making console games for like 15 years now, Bungie, and at least some of your games before that had customizable controls, you should've worked this out already... eh, baby steps I suppose, swap triggers and bumpers, next hopefully will be swap left and right, then maybe something to swap face buttons with each other or swap some face buttons with bumpers or something, then fully customizable controls

It's a common saying in user experience that every time you make something an option instead of choosing for the end user, you're shunting off some of the responsibility for your job onto the user. Now, for some cases there are legitimate reasons to leave things as an option (a significant number of people are left-handed, another large group of people prefer to invert the Y-axis and so on), but when you talk about making the entire control scheme customisable, you're asking anyone who uses it to do a lot of work.

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. So just how many practical, worthwhile control schemes are there left? Is it worth devoting all that time and effort to creating a system for choosing between all of these if only a tiny percentage of your users will ever use them (as opposed to one of the stock defaults), and even then would probably be sufficiently happy with one of the defaults? I for one can think of a load of other things I'd rather Bungie spent their time working on than this.

- the health bar doesn't show up unless you're taking damage but the level bar is always there? WTF?

You can't think of any reason why you might want to see what your current leveling progress is? Why would this be contextual?

- I didn't have a problem with this but I feel safe in predicting it will be a problem: the special ammo in competitive multiplayer (the Crucible), there's a lot of it and you keep all of it or nearly all of it when you die; this will probably become a problem because anyone can equip a sniper rifle as their special weapon, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's played multiplayer with snipers, and the same thing could be a problem in confined maps with shotguns

This is a common complaint. I'm not sure how it'll be addressed, because I much prefer the idea of guardians’ health pools being increased than this ammo becoming more rare (which would ensure that the really skillful have yet another advantage over more middling players like myself).

Gee, wouldn't it be wonderful if we had AUDIO OPTIONS. VOX / SFX / MUSIC sliders. Turn up the voices. EZPZ. Why is this something Bungie won't do?

If I recall correctly, I remember Marty saying a few times in different ways something to the effect of "artist control" - presenting the audio in the way they wished to present it.

But the quality and type of the user's technology alters the end product of audio levels too wildly. I know they test on a variety of different setups to ensure the audio works consistently... but I think there's too many factors in the wild to account for.

A few simple, minimal adjustment options would be very handy for my more-than-a-decade-old Koss 5.1.

- lights (or whatever those arching things are) on the road to the starting area only show up if you're far enough away

What lights?