Will Wright: Next Gen Controls “Still Feel Like a Big Bottleneck”

SimCity creator Will Wright recently spoke to NowGamer about what he wanted to see from next-generation consoles. And while there have been lots of improvements on the technical side, Wright thinks that “the interface side still feels like a big bottleneck. I was never really satisfied with Kinect, it feels too sloppy, too imprecise. The idea of having to learn these 16-button controllers too, feels like a big bottleneck.

“I still find the mouse to be one of best input devices ever made but it’s not very comfortable for the living room environment. I think that addressing the inputs would be one of the few things I would look at from the technology side.”

But surely new control schemes like the DualShock 4 for the PS4, with the new touchscreen and lightbar, would present some remedies? “Yeah, I mean stuff like that might not be one solution for a number of different things,” states Wright.

“I feel like the amount of data that we have coming out of these games with the rendering and the visuals is tremendous now, and it’s improved thousand-fold from when games started. But the input going back into the computer has only just barely crept up a little bit, in terms of the number of bytes we’re inputting back into the game.”

While “emotional” input looks the way to go, Wright believes that “it’s probably going to be a hybrid of all these things and probably a lot of it is going to end up being on the software side.”