The idea that consoles hurt Jade Empire has to be the dumbest fucking notion someone could have on the game. Oh yeah, you can't do action and top down vertical scrolling shooters on consoles, those lived on the PC. BioWare should've probably just been looking at AKI's wrestling games, or something like Sega's late '90s 3D beat 'em up SpikeOut when it came to combat for Jade Empire. The problem with Jade Empire's combat wasn't the controller, the problem with Jade Empire's combat was BioWare.
I blame consoles for a lot of the decline. They were so limited, especially back then. I think they looked at something like Baldurs Gate on a 14" TV and figured it was impossible. Too small to see stuff from your sofa, too fiddly with a gamepad, not enough ram to load everything, not enough storage, etc. The lack of buttons is why fighting games ever since need
↓ ↘ → combinations.
They could've easily kept doing shit like they'd been doing it if they wanted. If they wanted to make some real-time with pause combat system, or just some completely tactical turn based system on the original Xbox, they could've done that and nobody would've given a shit...could even went out to a wide isometric view during combat to easily see things. Like maybe BioWare had some weird idea these kinds of things wouldn't work on a console, but if so that's just a weird dumb idea they got in their head based on nothing. Weirdly the move to consoles never got BioWare to try a purely turn based combat system.
A lack of buttons is also not why fighting games have fighting game inputs. If Capcom wanted they could've built their arcade cabinets whichever way they wished; Midway too, in fact Midway did since the MK cabinets are those weird looking five button things. The six button layout is also not something that was done with consoles in mind, so that's a weird little jump you're making. Even if they just kept it six buttons, Street Fighter 2 could've been something like two buttons for normals, and four buttons that just do your specials when pressed; some characters would actually need more specials added to them just to fill out the four buttons.
Those old games have you pixel hunting for chests and tiny objects on the ground, and clicking on tiny icons in intricate interfaces. You can't do that with a controller, it needs a mouse. Controller is shit for typing too, so that was the end of naming your savegames and having text input for games, or even text commands (EQ still probably has 50 text commands). Moving items is a pain with controller too, compared to effortlessly dragging shit onto your character doll with a mouse cursor. So inventories got simplified. And these are all just the limitations of the controller, not to mention how limited consoles were compared to PCs back then in terms of RAM and storage and everything else.
The fact is gaming evolved around the NES, SNES, Playstation controller, and arcade machines with big plastic buttons for spazzy kids who spill coke on everything. Look at games like PC only flight sims from that time and you can see what developing with a keyboard and mouse in mind does.
You're all over the fucking place here. You're jumping from BioWare specifically, to EverQuest I guess, to fucking flight sims. Also who are the fucking animals playing flight sims with mouse and keyboard and not a joystick? It's been a long long time since I've played any flight sims, but that was the ideal way to play one when I was playing them. Flight sims without the flight controls is almost like Sega Bass Fishing with the reel controller, sure you can play these things without those extra things, but you haven't
really experienced them either.
At most, with the old standard definition CRT TVs most people probably had in the early to mid 2000s when BioWare started working on XBOX, you'd need to zoom the view of the camera in a little more than what they were doing on PC, and text size would need to be bigger. These are like the big changes BioWare would have to make concessions for. But if your contention is the controller disallowed BioWare from continuing what they were doing gameplay wise with Baldur's Gate, I disagree. Now BioWare did stupidly drop the tactical view from DA:O on consoles, but this was a very stupid thing to do and didn't really make much sense since the tactical view would've worked just fine their. Hell, even back in the old Xbox days they could've just slapped a pop up radial menu on shit like Temple of Elemental Evil and Freedom Force were doing on PC (before KotOR came out) to get around needing a keyboard amount of buttons to hotkey everything. They could've also just went to a better than what they'd been doing purely turn-based tactical combat system on consoles; and KotOR is a couple years after the bigger than anything BioWare had ever done up to that point Final Fantasy X, so there probably won't be anyone saying you must have a real-time combat system in your RPG because that's what's selling...since it wasn't what was selling. Needing a mouse to pick shit up and open chest seems like a really dumb point to make; at most you could just have the player manually walk over to any of that stuff to open or pick up like tons of console games had done without problem for years.
In regard to Jade Empire specifically, which kind of seemed like what you were talking about before given where the conversation was, the console had jack shit to do with that game turning out to be bad or its action combat system being as shitty as it was. There were a whole lot of good action games coming out around the exact same time as Jade Empire on consoles; could've also used the triggers to change the face buttons to hot keys like Reven's X-Men Legends/Marvel: Ultimate Alliance series and Dragon's Dogma did.
