Meta brings a great improvement to the controls in his piattaforma social VR Horizon Worlds: the jump is remapped to the A button. Previously, you had to press down on the right stick. Now, however, even in Horizon Worlds you can use the key that gamers use for jump right back to the days of Nintendo’s NES.
Horizon Worlds, use the A key to jump
According to a blog post on the new v94 update of the app, starting today in the metaverse you jump with the A key. A key mapping that has been used extensively for jumping in video games for decades. Mainly because it’s more comfortable. Until today it was done pressing the right stick as if it were a button. But the right stick was also used to rotate the character, so jumping risked causing accidental turns every time.
The news comes “for all players in all worlds”, so much so that you should receive a notification by launching the app on your Meta Quest viewer after making the update. This is the default: if for some reason you are more comfortable with the stick (perhaps you are not old enough to have played Super Mario Bros. until you lost your eyesight) you can just change.
This simple change could make Horizon Worlds more inviting for playersi, or at least easier to use. Also because a few months ago we discovered that Horizon Worlds was not very popular among Meta employees.
The company’s metaverse VP had sent a memo to staff instituting a “quality lockdown” until the end of the year for fix “quality gaps and performance issues”. Little tweaks like this can actually elevate the user experience.
The point, however, seems more to be the distrust of many users for VR, which could make it difficult to launch a project as ambitious as that of the metaverse wanted by Meta. Jumping using the A Button, as Mario and Luigi taught us, might though make the transition easier.