The way a player manipulates their character or units within a game reflects a lot about the style and skill of the player. RTS games present a significant challenge of controlling a staggering amount of details as quickly and efficiently as possible. FPS games also rely on switching weapons or utilities out as the situation requires, and RPG's will often use a quick-action bar to provide access to skills and abilities with a single keystroke. Good games will provide intuitive hotkeys or maybe even allow the user to assign their own custom hotkeys or command-groups.
Examples[]
Starcraft 2[]
As the player enters a battle in Starcraft 2, they are presented with the task of gathering resources, managing their economy, producing units, advancing their tech tree, coordinating scouts to gather information on enemy troop composition, and most importantly, directly commanding their army with distinct unit strengths and weaknesses, many possessing active abilities that will turn the tide with the use of proper "micro." Hotkeys and command groups are a crucial part of this symphony of actions, and memorizing them and executing them in the high intensity of combat is what separates victory and defeat .
Red Alert 3
Similar to all the other RTS games, Red Alert 3 also has its own hotkeys for players to manage their units in an efficient way. It is important to let players know the hotkeys so that they will be able to craft units immediately instead of going through a series of pages and find the units they are looking for.
Example: World Of Warcraft
Having hot keys in "World of Warcraft" is super useful because it allows players to combine abilities together. "World of Warcraft" has hundreds of abilities and there was no way to cast them all unless you hot key some of them. This is a super important feature for PVP because you're constantly trying get an edge on your opponent.
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Example:
League of Legends
In League of Legends (LOL), having hot keys is super useful because using abilities in game at the right time is important so in order to time the attacks at the right time, the player should have easy and quick access to all the keys. As the directions in LOL are done using WASD keys, all the abilities are usually placed around it, like Q, W, E and R. Using these keys the player can just tap the key at the right time without looking at the keyboard. This is a life saver in MOBA games as quick actions reward a player. There are also hotkeys like 'Tab' to open in-game stats. The keys Y and spacebar locks camera on champion and centers camera on champion respectively.
Exmaple:
Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization
Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization is a PS4 game, so the keys of the controller are not so many as keyboard. So designing the proper hotkeys for players is very important. In Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, although players can also choose to use skill palette, it's very inconvenient so the game has several hotkeys that players can attach them to the skill they like. In this way, it's convenient and fast to release skills so players will have a fluent game experience.
