Or, will have support
The first official keyboard and mouse for Xbox One has just released (as sort of a CES stealth launch), and it comes courtesy of Razer. It’s the Razer Turret, a wireless keyboard and mouse combo that runs a staggering $250. The Turret is designed with couch play in mind, as it features a mouse pad that slides into the keyboard — all while maintaining a form meant to be placed on your lap.
However, there’s an interesting tangential result from Razer’s marketing materials for the Turret. Razer has listed games that have/will have official Xbox One keyboard and mouse support. They are:
- Atlas
- Bomber Crew
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
- Children of Morta
- Day-Z
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Fortnite
- Gears of War 5
- Gears Tactics
- Microsoft Flight Simulator
- Minecraft
- Minion Masters
- Moonlighter
- Paladins
- Roblox
- Sea of Thieves
- The Sims 4
- They Are Billions
- Strange Brigade
- Surviving Mars
- Vigor
- War Thunder
- Warface
- Warframe
- Wargroove
- Warhammer: Vermintide 2
- X-Morph: Defense
Xbox had told us about some of these previously, but the number of games keeps growing — and it seems pertinent to refresh that list now that people can actually invest in Xbox One keyboards and mice.
There are a couple noteworthy inclusions here. Gears 5 supporting keyboard and mouse is hardly surprising considering developer The Coalition’s approach to competitive play in Gears 4. Two years ago, The Coalition started mixing PC and Xbox One players in ranked playlists after it found there wasn’t a real skill disparity between gamepad and keyboard/mouse users. It seems that mindset will carry over to Gears 5, as Gears continues to be the rare breed of shooter that doesn’t place gamepad players at a disadvantage.
Also, Razer had initially listed PUBG as supporting keyboard and mouse on Xbox One, but PUBG Corp has come out and said that information is false. PUBG seemingly has no intent on dividing those two player bases — at least not quite yet.
Fortnite, however, will separate the two. Fortnite‘s keyboard and mouse players on PS4 are put into lobbies that only contain other players who are using the same setup. This is apparently the plan on Xbox One as well.
As more peripheral manufacturers release their Xbox One keyboards and mice (and as time moves along), we’ll undoubtedly see a glut of new games added to this list. However, at the launch of the first product explicitly designed for this purpose, there are at least 22 games signed on. Microsoft’s approach to letting the developer decide whether to implement keyboard and mouse support feels like the right way to go about this, especially since not every game is necessarily cut out for this sort of thing.
Official Game Integration [Razer]
Published: Jan 8, 2019 05:30 pm