Xbox is making it easier to play keyboard-focused games on a controller
By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Xbox’s latest update adds a way to map controller buttons to keyboard keys. If you have the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 and the Xbox Adaptive Controller, you can now assign specific keyboard keys to buttons on your controller. This should make it easier to play games that have limited controller support or just have a lot of different controls.
Microsoft first released this feature to Xbox Insiders in August, and now it’s rolling out to the Xbox Accessories app on both PC and console this week. With this feature, you can now map any button on your controller, such as your left bumper, to the keyboard key of your choice.
While you can also map as many modifier keys, like Ctrl, Shift, Alt, and Win, to a single controller button, you can only include one non-modifier key, like “C,” with them. But that enables you to map entire sequences, like “Ctrl + Shift + C,” to a single button. You can read more about controller-to-keyboard mapping and how to use it on Xbox’s website.
Along with this handy new remapping feature, Microsoft is also rolling out the ability to import Xbox game captures to Clipchamp, the company’s video editor for Windows. Microsoft is also making it easier to opt out of diagnostic data sharing by making it account-based. Once you opt out on one device, Microsoft will carry this preference across all the devices you’re signed in to.
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