New World is getting controller support in Season of the Guardian on March 12th, and the team breaks down all of the details on the feature, from how you’ll be able to customize your experience to accessibility.
In a new devblog, the team discusses how they set out to develop native controller support, what their goals were in doing so, the features, function, and how they determined the depth of options on offer. Having controller support regardless of what platform you play on is something that gets a lot of requests. The New World team has mentioned that it was in the works, but now we know what it will look like.
As for getting started, the devs had a couple of things to consider, including the basic design on paper, redesigning the UI for controller use, and then to figure out how combat and movement, and navigation felt. Another thing they needed to consider was that New World has varying levels of casual to hardcore players. They ultimately focused on what the majority of players would be served by, but are open to feedback on what they could add. They are still tweaking things, but getting it in front of players via the PTR and in the live build will help them offer continued improvements, with updates like button remapping already on the way.
One thing that the team is moving carefully on is PvP balance. There will be no target lock or aim assist in PvP when the controller support launches. They will evaluate this going forward, but they obviously don't want PVP to suddenly get super out of whack with auto targeting.
So what features can we expect from controller support? You can choose to use aim assist and enemy target lock to help with finesse when using a controller. There’s a target friction option that will reduce reticle speed when aiming. controller support will also offer freeform movement in all directions. There's also an option to use the camera direction for melee attacks instead of the default character facing.
Accessibility options are also included, but can benefit everyone. There's a new radial menu for common functions, new shift modifiers so you can access combat abilities more easily, and also help bars and shortcut buttons for UI controller navigation.
