Forums » Suggestions

New Quest Scheme Needed

Apr 03, 2025 Az Neter link
The default Quest controls are universally unliked, unintuitive, and often immediately changed.
I have not spoken to a single person in VR who can tolerate the default controller scheme, much less anyone who actually liked it.

First off, the controllers are fundamentally biased toward right handed users.
The pointer and selection buttons should be available on both controllers simultaneously, otherwise left handed people are entirely excluded without personal adaptation.

Your game should be mostly playable with a single hand, when controls are properly mapped.
If that seems unreasonable to you, I'm keen to introduce you to some of the limb-disadvantaged people I play VR games with regularly.
I've known multiple people just in the last game I played who performed in high level VR pvp while operating one or more prosthetic limbs as their only input method, rather than the flesh and bone hands you take for granted.

X button needs remapped to act the same as the A button when in PDA, with both hands having selection pointers. At minimum.

Here is my control scheme for reference; note that literally everyone in my guild (all VR players) play with a completely different setup, from the ground up, and not all of us are using quest controllers:

(Joysticks are unchaged)

Left Trigger: Shoot Primary
Right Trigger: Shoot Secondary
(Unchanged)

Left Grip: Roll CCW
Right Grip: Roll CW
(Unchanged)

- Left Hand Buttons
Y: Toggle Auto-Aim
X: Toggle Voice
Menu: Opens whatever PDA menu you were last on, and cannot be remapped.

(Voice chat should probably be enabled by default, and extend to local sector chat. Most people are using meta calls instead of Teamspeak. We DO NOT need a dedicated mission pda button, when we have an unmappable hotkey to the menu already.)

- Right Buttons
B: Point to Target
A: Activate
Oculus Menu: Still the Menu.

(Cannot be remapped, but it does crash your game sometimes, and applies your ship's breaks for no reason when used, often getting you killed)

Combinations:
(Button combinations on quest controllers ALWAYS dual-trigger commands. It is functionally impossible to press both buttons at exactly the same time, so all combos should be set in a way that does not conflict with other keybinds)

Y + B: Weapons Safe

(Sometimes triggers A/A. A weapon safety is required due to trigger sensitivity, which is analog and cannot be adjusted.)

X + A: Select Weapon Group 1

X + Y: Open Chat Textbox
(Sometimes triggers A/A, easily solved)

A + B: UNUSED
(Conflicts immensely with the Activate button)

Both Grips: UNUSED
(The default set having both grips used for Point to Target is the single most uncomfortable, unintuitive schema choice that was made.

Quest controllers aren't exactly high qualility, and 90% of VR games are actually rather intensive, causing grip sensitivity to vary significantly over time.
They're also analog, with full degree of readability: they are not simply on or off when depressed.

For one of the single most important functions in this game, Targetting, no more than a single, intuitive button should've been chosen as the player default.

Likewise, rolling, a nausiating and unique experience for VR, should not have easily conflictable controls: with how easily grips can get stuck due to intensive play, it's already rough to spiral out in VR.)

I'm not saying you need to adopt my control scheme, yet without a doubt: you are killing your own player conversation with such an apparent lacking understanding of player preferences on quest.

Spend two hours playing another VR game and you'll see exactly where VO currently fails in this regard, and likely how you could improve it through minimal investment on your teams part.
I've seen comments on the quest store highlighting this EXACT complaint: even after all this time, VR still feels like an afterthought, when it has the potential to be one of your primary selling points.

If I didn't help every single player in my guild optimize their controls, one by one in a meta voice call with each, none of them would still be with us playing, and they'd have managed a refund within the alloted timespan by meta.
No one would know how to talk to eachother, they all hated flying at first, and they didn't know where to go or what to do to fix it until I spoon fed it to everyone.
We have members everywhere from 12 years old to 32 years old in our VR group, ALL of them with similar complaints about a lack of intuitive input and embodiment.

It's already confusing enough to most quest users, being required to press the A button for menus, when both in operating system and in the vast majority of other VR experiences direct input is always and explicitly handled through trigger or grip clicks.

Everything from using the browser to typing to item grabbing to ui dragging is done with triggers as priority, with A and X button being mapped additionally, sometimes.
That's just how VR controllers work, rather universally: I did not set this industry standard, and thus, user behavior pattern; I just fall into it like everybody else.

In summary: the default control scheme on quest controls sucks and immediately pushes players away from the game, and there is a noticable lack of effort put into addressing accessibility features for the limb-disadvantaged among your userbase, to say little of those lefties simply lacking ambidexterity.

I really think these things should be addressed, as they're more important than mere gameplay elements, mechanics or experiences: your input is fundamentally tied to your existence within a given world, and VR as a medium expects enhaced presence and persistence in the user interactions that it enables.
Lacking this, users just go somewhere else.
There is no shortage of acceptable free experiences on the quest right now.