Originally Posted By: Tim
The keyboard/mouse combination isn't bad for FPS games, but some MMOs have up to 5 or 6 levels of hotkeys for your skills. That is just insane. On consoles, the key combinations are obscure and needlessly complex. It got to the point where if I don't finish a game without any significant breaks (like if I don't play for more than 4 or so days in a row), I can't remember the key combinations and just won't play it again. It drives me crazy.

Some games are getting better about this. I noticed the need for manually created hot bars in World of Warcraft shrank quite a bit when 4.0 came out, and the new character ramp up is much more gentle now. The recently released DC Universe has a limit of 8, to deal with the limited combinations on the controller. The specials are all done via the four face buttons, and using a shoulder button as a modifier. So 1-4 is left trigger and one of the 4 buttons, and 5-8 is the right trigger. The downside is the UI is a straight line, so you still have to do some symbol matching until you can remember "Ok, the 3rd over over is going to be the bottom button".

Complicated controllers did help the Wii become a success, and possibly Kinect. I'll be curious to see what the next generation console controllers look like, if they decide to try and meld simplicity with motion.