Battlefield 3 Won't Be "Consolized," Claims Developer
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
- Start date
Guess you could have an island. The land in the middle being the points to capture while the boats can move around the ocean and eventually will be attacked like the titan ships.Lord_Panzer said:
Ah, but it is. A Mouse will always, ALWAYS be technically superior to a controller for controlling a first person shooter.
This means you absolutely MUST change the game if you are making it for consoles.
Need proof? Shadowrun on the 360 and PC. Players from both were allowed to cross over and play against each other.
Outside of the controls, it was the SAME EXACT GAME.
The PC players routinely did FAR FAR BETTER than the 360 players. Why? Because they had a superior aiming apparatus.
All other technical details aside (graphics, resolution, sound, etc) control is one of the most important because it's what places limitations on how a player can respond to the gameplay (until we create systems that allow for fully immersive controls, the most you can expect the average player to use at once is a camera control and 2, maybe 3 functions simultaneously. This is true of most PC games too, and doubly so back when Winduhs did not allow for more than 2 simultaneous "interrupts/inputs" for keyboards outside of Ctrl Alt and Shift).
Because game controllers are technically inferior to a keyboard and mouse, the gameplay will require adjustments, and that cuts into development time (and budgets). Halo presents the illusion of a fast FPS when in reality, it's actually fairly slow and floaty, but that's fine because it's made specifically for a console!
Metroid Prime took 1st person controls and turned them into serviceable platforming controls; I assure you that if you could use a mouse for that game, you would find it incredibly easy and boring (this actually happened when I played the PC version of GTA Vice City, at least for the combat parts. I found driving and especially flying was far easier on a gamepad. Context is key!).
So how does this fit together?
For a competitive "action game", you need to design the controls and pacing of the game to match the system you're developing for.
What has happened for the better part of the last 5 years is that because consoles have become more popular (along with the shooter) more shooters are being made for consoles specifically.
No surprise there.
But when many of these shooters get ported to PC, the development/conversion team doesn't spend any real effort recalibrating the game for a keyboard and mouse.
So we end up with these horrible and slow (for a PC) interfaces. Fallout 3 springs to mind, as does Oblivion and Borderlands (whose terrible menu is no less shit on a console, but it was made so players could use the shop in split-screen mode. It barely accomplishes this, but the point was that the intention created the problem).
Taking that all in, when you port the controls to PC, they work, but they are definitely "dumbed down". It's like taking a Ferrari and installing a governor so that it can't ever go any faster than 65MPH.