Why 2022 was Year of the Gyro

Fortnite and Call of Duty. God of War Ragnarök and Deathloop. Neon White and Severed Steel. The Steam Deck and Splatoon 3. These are more than just a random collection of gyro-repping games and hardware from 2022. They represent the most recognisable multiplayer gaming franchises in the world, acclaimed singleplayer blockbusters, stand-out fast-paced indies, and historically influential gyro control devs (both hardware and software) returning for their best showings yet, respectively. Not forgetting House of the Dead: Remake, Deep Rock Galactic, Horizon Forbidden West, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Zombie Death Quota, The Callisto Protocol, The Last of Us Part 1 -- this has been a fantastic year for gyro gaming. All of these either launched with gyro in 2022 or received updates that added gyro aiming for the first time. I had the great pleasure of advising on a few of these games myself, but the first and most significant experience for me was getting to put a lot of work into Fortnite's February gyro update. This was where I had the most control, driving most of the design of the settings, handling all of the implementation, and even getting to have a video introducing gyro aiming and flick stick. This was in the game and seen by millions of players! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSS5OsNCNU [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSS5OsNCNU] Even apart from Fortnite, February was a great month for gyro, with the Steam Deck launching as well. The Steam Deck has been wildly successful [https://cohost.org/jibbsmart/post/435743-1-million-reasons-to], and as more people try it out, more people have been embracing Valve's solution for mouse-like controls on a handheld -- no, it's not the trackpads; it's the gyro. In Aperture Desk Job (which everyone with a Deck should play -- it's free, it's short, and it's made by Valve to show off what the Deck can do), "gyroscopic controls" are highlighted as an "even better" way to aim. Valve encourages developers, similarly, to explore gyro controls: https://twitter.com/JibbSmart/status/1465561659548733440?s=20&t=rOSpy1bIwG6Y126YztAHBA [https://twitter.com/JibbSmart/status/1465561659548733440?s=20&t=rOSpy1bIwG6Y126YztAHBA] Valve says: "But we do think that the gyro, when combined with the joystick or the trackpad, are ideal for a large class of games and something many players will want to use. They offer finer precision for people that are used to gamepad inputs, but also take the mouse paradigm from the desktop into a portable form factor. We recommend trying out this style of input for anyone shipping a game that has player control of a camera or cursor and seeing if it makes sense for your game." Steam's built-in input remapper has made gyro controls possible in PC games for years and years, whether with PlayStation or Switch controllers, the Steam Controller, or as of 2022 the Steam Deck. They know what they're talking about. CS:GO quickly added powerful settings similar to Fortnite that I've been pushing to see in games for a while. And now, even as a bunch more games have added gyro controls by the end of the year, CS:GO is the only game I'm aware of with the same breadth of options as Fortnite for gyro gamers (although they each still offer a couple of options the other doesn't). But even without matching that breadth of advanced options, we're seeing standardised sensitivity settings across Fortnite, CS:GO, Deathloop, God of War Ragnarök, Call of Duty Warzone 2.0 / Modern Warfare II, and Severed Steel. The first four games in that list also have the same super simple steadying settings -- called "tightening", "precision zone", "precision threshold", or "reduce small motions", respectively, but all working the same way and unseen in games before 2022. We're also seeing nice standards for acceleration, with Fortnite and CS:GO offering the most customisability, but Deathloop and God of War Ragnarök giving enough control for players to get a nice balance of precision and range of movement. "Player space" gyro is a simple way to adapt as players hold their controller flat or upright without compromising on accuracy, and it featured in games for the first time this year, too -- in Fortnite, Deathloop, and Severed Steel. Severed Steel enabled gyro controls by default when players are holding the aim button, bravely offering the best new player defaults even if some seasoned stick players are going to go straight to the settings to turn it off. If you have good gyro controls, you'll want to teach your players to use them, of course. Because then your game is giving them distinctively good controls that most other games still don't offer! On the PlayStation blog, the dev of the excellent Neon White said [https://blog.playstation.com/2022/12/01/neon-white-is-coming-to-ps4-and-ps5-december-13/] "Neon White supports Gyroscope aiming using the DualSense controller, and I personally never play without it. Gyroscope aiming can take some getting used to, but it’s well worth it for an extra degree of fine-grained control when sniping demons from the start of a level." The game is fantastic, by the way, and well worth playing. I played through it on PS5. God of War Ragnarök has come up a few times now, but I do want to give it a special mention for having a standout gyro aiming implementation. While it was exciting to see Horizon Forbidden West launch with gyro aiming in February, it still has some glaring issues that make it feel clunkier than other gyro-aiming games. Ragnarök, by contrast, feels fantastic right out the gate. Its settings are simple but powerful, and it makes the whole game feel like it was designed to be played with gyro for your fine aiming. Ragnarök sets a high bar that I hope we can expect from future PlayStation Studios games. I've focused on PlayStation and PC platforms, but only because the gyro has historically been so underutilised there. I skipped the PS4 console entirely despite a large catalog of well-received exclusives, because I couldn't expect them to make proper use of the controller. Thumbsticks cannot match the mouse-like precision and versatility of gyro aiming. They just can't. But now, from 2022 alone, my PS5 library has more games than I have time for with robust gyro controls -- and they play much better for it. Call of Duty was the one that took me most by surprise. A gyro update in November coincided with the launch of Warzone 2.0. It stumbled out of the gate with some issues, but as of its December update it hits a basic standard that I wish we could expect from every shooter. Actually, every game that involves any aiming or cursor control at all. If it plays better with a mouse, it plays better with gyro. If you know what you're doing, it's relatively little code and very simple. Have a look for yourself [https://cohost.org/jibbsmart/post/394811-intro-and-how-to-m] -- this is where everyone exploring gyro controls should start. On Switch, gyro controls continue to be expected. Fortnite and House of the Dead: Remake raised the bar for what players can expect on Switch, though, and it was fantastic to get a new Splatoon game this year. The original Splatoon on the Wii U was probably the first to go all in on gyro / motion aiming, and now controls like these are expected in any game on Nintendo platforms. Splatoon 3 had a huge launch, setting absurd records in Japan in particular, and is a franchise in which the vast majority of players rely on gyro controls. More games are entering this space than I've had time to try. I'd love to know which ones stood out to you. Or who do you think will be next? Knowing what AAA dev cycles are like, I suspect Fortnite's gyro update early in the year can claim some responsibility for the splash of new gyro supporting games on PlayStation in the last quarter of the year. And these are big games! Deathloop, God of War, and Call of Duty will influence other games going into 2023, I'm sure of it. And that's why 2022 was the Year of the Gyro.