A new Xbox Series X/S controller has come up on a listing that has now been pulled.\
Canadian retailer Microplay created a preorder page for the controller, with the label “Xbox Wireless Controller Mineral Camo”. The listing has been pulled but not before the page was aggregated by Twitter bot account Aggiornamenti Lumia and a picture of the controller got tweeted out.
As you can see for yourself below, it’s mainly the same controller with an attractive color variation. The buttonsm, sticks and d-pad sport a warm dark green, while the controller’s surface has a splotch pattern with splotches of black, brown, and various shades of green. The camo isn’t intended to make the controller hard to find, but it does make it attractive.
The original listing places the controller at $ 79.99 with a September 27, 2022 release, so it may not be that long before Microsoft officially reveals it.
It may surprise you that Microsoft takes a lot of pride and care in designing its own controllers. While the company famously entered the industry out of the gate with the unwieldy Duke controller, most gamers agree that they set the standard when they released the Xbox 360 controller alongside the console in 2005, and the company has continued to revise on the console’s primary input device, multiple times even within one console generation. The company set up a dedicated Xbox Design Lab to iterate their controllers, which much like the Microsoft Office and Surface teams, have made some of the best tech design of the past two decades.
For the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, the Xbox Design Lab created a new iteration of the Xbox Wireless Controllers from 2020. These controllers are fully backwards compatible with Xbox One X and Xbox One S consoles, but demonstrate a lot of small but significant refinement.
As noted in this behind the scenes article, they made changes to the game to better suit players who fit the 3rd percentile of hand size ranges. In plain English, these controllers made adjustments to make them easier to use for Asian hands, which are considerably smaller than European and African hands. The 3rd percentile represents tens of millions of people around the world.
After learning they couldn’t make the controllers smaller, they found ways to make changes by rounding off bumpers, trimming down bumpers, and reshaping the grips. Players will note that there are microbump patterns on the trigger and bumper for this purpose.
Most notable is the d-pad itself, which is now shaped like a deeper dish, an iteration intended to combine the best elements of cross shaped d-pads and dish shaped d-pads.
Getting back to this new controller, it’s very similar to the Arctic Camo controller Microsoft released two years ago. You may not the splotches and patterns look pretty much the same, with the main difference being the Arctic Camo being in pure grayscale colors.
Of course, if you have your own ideas of what your own controller should look like, you can have it custom made with Xbox Design Labs yourself. If this one interests you, stay tuned on news when Microsoft officially reveals it and makes it available.
Source: VideoGamesChronicle
