I’ve noticed that the controller deadzone is axial instead of radial. It doesn’t feel good to control if the character keeps snapping to the cardinal directions on a controller. The way it’s implemented makes it impossible to fix with antideadzone options. Seems like an oversight. For example, it’s now impossible to turn the character throughout the whole 360 degree range when walking. The proper implementation with the best feel for 360 degree freedom of movement is a proper radial deadzone, that doesn’t snap movement to the cardinal directions no matter what. Please look into this and evaluate the difference. It’s the difference between Dark Souls (radial deadzone) and Dark Souls 2 (axial deadzone) movement. Clearly Dark Souls 2 cardinal direction snapping is much worse. Thoughts?
Just to illustrate my point better, here’s an image I made of some common deadzone types. Red is the full deadzone, blue is the individual axis deadzones, green is usable range. Radial deadzone feels the best, it’s clean and corresponds 1:1 to the stick angle. This game uses the middle axial cropped type (or something similar), which actually crops some of the range, so basically near the axis it snaps to the cardinal directions and it doesn’t allow you to angle your movement in the cropped range. This one cannot be fixed properly with anti-deadzone measures. The axial full deadzone is similar, but it actually still contains the full range outside of the deadzone range. This one can be easily fixed with anti-deadzone corrections to work as a radial deadzone.
Some examples of movement deadzones (if I’m not mistaken) in games where you generally expect 360 degree movement.
Radial deadzone (usually japanese devs use this):
Demon’s Souls
Dark Souls
Dark Souls 3
Bloodborne
Sekiro
Helldivers 2
Bayonetta
Devil May Cry
Shadow of the Colossus
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Axial cropped (this one is not that common as the others):
No Rest for the Wicked
It Takes Two
Split Fiction
Granblue Fantasy Relink
Axial full (usually western devs use this):
Dark Souls 2
Elden Ring
Stellar Blade
Stray
Cocoon
Ninja Gaiden Black (as far as I remember)
If nothing else, this might be interesting to know.
I’d like to double up on this. I’m waiting for a possible Xbox release, but it’d be ideal if the stick controls were ideal when it drops on console.
Unscaled axial deadzones are an issue in a variety of different games, and it eats all the input within that range.
It makes controls in the games using it feel sloppy since you obviously snap in and out of diagonal movement instead of having a smooth gradient.
As MTaye metnioned, ordinary scaled axial deadzones can be countered with antideadzone methods, but that doesn’t work when unscaled because those subtle angles don’t exist, and you end up flipping dramatically off an axis when trying to.
This is a visual example to add to MTaye’s:
The Ori games used a radial deadzone with full diagonal movement for swimming, which felt great, so that would be nice to have for movement in Wicked.
Grim Dawn is an example that using this type of unscaled axial deadzone, with a radial deadzone. This ends up making a gear-like shape, and the hard pivots are very clear.
A few other games that share this unscaled axial deadzone issue are:
Nioh(PC) when using PlayStation controllers. Xbox controllers get radial.
Ninja Gaiden 2, 3, 4(Black did use a scaled one) (all Xbox)
Prince of Persia Trilogy(PS3).
Dragonball Xenoverse & The Breakers(Xbox)
Darkwood(Xbox)
Full diagonal movement is ideal for character movement, but if restriction is desired, please scale the input so angles aren’t lost, and offer options to players to control the level of restriction to their preference.
Thanks for providing a more knowledgeable perspective @Eternal_Dahaka.
For anyone who doesn’t know, @Eternal_Dahaka has a Youtube channel that’s dedicated to mapping out deadzones of all kinds of videogames. By now he must have mapped out hundreds and hundreds on his imgur page (Deadzone Graphs, Dotgraph Tests). For someone like me, who struggles with non ideal deadzones in videogames and wants to fix them, his contributions are extremely valuable.
I wish reputable videogame tech channels (etc. Digital Foundry) talked more about game feel and the impact of bad deadzones on the player experience. They flat out make the games feel worse to play on a controller. But since it’s all about game feel, it’s hard to meaningfully demonstrate this to people who don’t notice it at all.
There are some games that do benefit from the angle restrictions, like Super Mario 3d World, but they’re few and far between. You generally don’t want to restrict player angle in a 3d game unless you have a good reason. An example of not having a good reason is, when in Dark Souls 2, due to the scaled axial deadzone, your thumbstick angle doesn’t map 1:1 to the character angle, resulting in a higher chance of you walking straight off a tight beam/crossing, if you don’t set your camera exactly behind your character beforehand and walk straight ahead. Same issue in No Rest for The Wicked, but worse cause of the unscaled axial deadzone and a fixed camera angle which compounds the issue.
Lastly, I wanted to also highlight that the mouse controls in Wicked allow for perfect 360° movement, so the issue really is only with the currently implemented unscaled axial controller deadzone. Fixing it by changing it to a proper radial deadzone won’t impact the game in a bad way, quite the opposite.