>>723220380
>until they ossified in the early 2010s and pretending that they are still relevant
They are still relevant. RDR2 was 2018. Dead Space 1 Remake was what, 2023? Controllers are still the dominant way everyone plays games including FPS games, except in the case of FPS games and things like RTS games PC controls are obviously considered way more. This can be seen from how you interact with menus, how games are balanced, and how general movement is done in games (Third-person movement being a good example).
>but there are already difficulty options in games
Difficulty options in games change very little, and it doesn't matter if you play something like Assassin's Creed Shadows on Nightmare or Normal it's still balancing combat around the fact your aim snaps to people or objects and kunai auto-aim towards people's heads. It's why when you go to MKB the parkour sucks ass on AC games but being able to freely aim without auto-aim with 99.9% accuracy breaks the combat in games with bows that free aim like Origins or Odyssey because you can kill enemies faster than they can run at you due to always landing headshots.
>there is already a massive gulf within consoles themselves due to gyro aim
Virtually no one but Nintendo uses gyro for actual aiming and the few games that do are exclusives. It's not even remotely a thing that's dominating the thought of developers because Microsoft's controllers are holding everyone back from advancing to that state.
>there isn't much effort put into coherently plotting out game difficulty anymore.
There is, and if you watch these "Behind the scenes developer" videos you will almost always see them testing everything with controllers first and foremost.
Back then they were sort of just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck a lot of the time, but nowadays a lot of focus is put into the limitations of controllers and how to build around them. Again: Birds in RDR2. They're awful on mouse and braindead easy on controller.
