Last week, Microsoft revealed that it was adding new features to its Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 and its Xbox Adaptive Controller. In short, owners of those controllers that are a part of the Xbox Insider Program could map PC keyboard keys to those products.
Microsoft first added this feature to members of the Alpha and Alpha Skip Ahead Xbox Insider rings. It has since added the same features for members of the Omega ring, and the Beta ring.
This week, Microsoft posted up an Xbox Wire blog post dedicated to the new keyboard mapping feature, including a walkthrough of how to get this new addition working for Xbox Insiders. It mentions that this feature will work on nearly any PC game with these controllers, along with the over 100 Xbox games that support keyboard controls.
In case you are wondering, Pure Xbox has a list of those keyboard-supported Xbox games. They include recently added titles like Aliens: Dark Descent, Company of Heroes 3, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, and more.
Microsoft has some examples of how this new feature could be used with the supported controllers in games:
You can do things like map the Left Bumper to a keyboard letter key, for example. This feature also supports mapping modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, Alt, and Win). While you can assign as many modifier keys as you’d like to a single controller button, only one non-modifier key can be included in the mix. This makes it possible to perform actions like Ctrl + Shift + C with the press of a single controller button!
Hopefully, Microsoft will make this new feature available for the more affordable standard Xbox wireless controller in the near future. It would also be great if this keyboard mapping setup could be extended to third-party Xbox controllers as well.