Xbox have announced on their latest Inside Xbox show, that the long promised support for keyboard and mouse on Xbox One will be coming this year.
At first, keyboard and mouse support will roll out to select Xbox Insiders (beta testers) before rolling out to everyone later this year. Keyboard and mouse support won’t be enabled by default on games, instead it’s going to be up to developers to add the support to their titles and choose how to make this fair. This is particularly important with regards to competitive multiplayer, where a mouse gives significant advantages to movement. On FPS titles this is a huge potential issue, so developers will need to be careful with how they implement this.
Meanwhile, this support could help massively with genres that are better suited to keyboard and mouse, such as strategy games and simulations. The upcoming Stellaris Console Edition would benefit hugely from this support, with it’s huge scale and myriad menus, so too would Elite Dangerous. This could also mean huge changes to accessibility. The new Xbox Adaptive Controller provides excellent support to gamers with limited mobility and this keyboard and mouse support feels like an extension of that. If this leads to allowing generic input devices to be supported naturally through USB then no matter your preference or limitations, you could find a control method to suit you. Whether this will become reality will be revealed in time, but for now, keyboard and mouse support will hit Xbox One before the end of the year, with Razer and Microsoft teaming up to provide new Xbox branded hardware to fit Xbox colours and forms, and this gets us pretty excited.