Last week’s big Xbox One update was a welcome re-haul for Microsoft’s console, making the machine faster, making its dashboard easier to navigate, and adding backwards compatibility for more than a hundred Xbox 360 games. It also, as Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb noted, introduced control remapping options that allow gamers to change the function of their controller’s buttons.
Standard controllers can now switch functions between pairs of buttons. If you’re used to Japanese PlayStation controls, for example, where circle rather than X acts as the de facto “confirm selection” option, then you’ll be able to remap your Xbox One controller’s A button to B, with B becoming the new A. The $150 Elite controller can go a step further. Hyrb says that the A and B buttons are the only ones that need to be assigned to the controller, leaving users free to remove specific controls entirely — to avoid hitting them accidentally, perhaps — or to map more than one function to the same stick, button, trigger, or paddle.
The option to tweak what the buttons do on your controller was present in the Xbox 360’s settings menu, but was mysteriously absent at the launch of the Xbox One. Its reintroduction with the most recent console update is good news for physically impaired gamers who may wish to switch face button functions to the controller’s triggers, or vice versa, and for those (strange) people who regularly invert analogue stick controls. Rather than having to dig through a game’s menus to remap controls every time you play — if they even support the option — gamers will be able to set their preferred controls as universal from the console’s master “settings” menu.
