Microsoft’s plan to provide the keyboard-mouse support for Xbox One remains unconfirmed, and the debates pile up accompanied by concerns. Of course, you can use adapters to make it savvy for your Microsoft games, and the company is aware of it. But it has been a long time since they have been saying that an official solution for the gamers is to come. Even Mike Ybarra, the corporate VP for Xbox Program Management, said last September that this is “definitely coming.”
Ybarra didn’t say anything about time nor revealed details on what form. “We have to be very smart in how we do that. We’ll leave it a lot up to developer choice. A lot of people tweet me and say, ‘You can’t do this because of fairness,’ and we understand that. We run two platforms; the Windows platform and the Xbox platform,” he said then.
As for the concerns, the major is regarding the multiplayer shooter games, where keyboard-mouse players would have advantages. For the sake of argument, many of those who have been used to the controllers may not want to switch, but rather settle for an already established comfort.
Also, Microsoft aims to provide freedom to the developers for operating the games as per their suitability, which is why it won’t block the keyboard-mouse setup for the console. Obviously, the setup is also a helpful solution for gamers regarding accessibility. Ybarra pointed out that the company is considering that gamers with keyboard-mouse setups have a deliberate upper hand over their counterparts with controllers.
Ybarra as well added a solution where gamers get to pick their opponents based on either keyboard-mouse or controller usage. For this, developers may come up with new systems, he said. It’s worth mentioning that Gears of War 4 of Microsoft allows cross-play between PC and Microsoft Xbox One. The company did check the possible scenarios on the controller versus keyboard-mouse, and the game enables Xbox One users to choose whether they want to play with PC users.
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