Console Gamers Want "More Sophisticated" Action

[Wicky_42]

Spoiler: snip

Take the 360 controller:
1) Two thumb sticks give analogue movement and turning, but their very nature makes fine control impossible without compromising speed.
2) Left hand uses two buttons - trigger and shoulder button. D-pad is occasionally used for extra functions, but requires leaving the thumb stick, thus compromising movement/look.
3) Right hand has six buttons, some of which are convenient, but others require moving hand position or awkward finger stretches.

vs the PC:
1) Mouse gives perfect balance between control and speed, and is almost unanimously regarded as a superior tool. Movement is commonly controlled by the w, a, s and d keys, using one or two fingers for most movements, allowing eight digital directions that more than suffices.
2) Left hand has easy access to numbers 1 through 5, tab, shift, ctrl, z, x, c, b, q, e, r, f, g, v, and t, with only a slight stretch to those last three.
3) Right hand is limited to the mouse, with a minimum of two keys, often having a third middle click and mouse wheel. Specialist mice can have up several more, though not all games support them.

Of course the whole argument becomes retarded when you consider how easy it is to hook up a flight-stick, wheel, or console game pad to a PC... and that modern consoles (since PS2 for certain, USB) are all totally capable of sporting kb&m. The best controller would be something like the left side of a gamepad with a mouse taking over for the right-side controls. My friend insists such a thing exists for PS3.

Personally I think keyboard and mouse sucks, there's only so much the mouse can do, and any "action" controlled through the keyboard is ham-fisted and RSI inducing (damn you Gunroar) at best. Mouse control is instantaneous and extremely precise, which is horrible for controlling a character that's tied down to any sort of realistic physics... inertia, acceleration, momentum, etc.
Shooters developed primarily for PC always feel really floaty compared to those developed for consoles, since the movement controls are shite and aiming is just a question of whipping a crosshair around... since you have to set sensitivity and acceleration right for a stick it's much more like you're actually swinging something with a bit of wieght to it.

You have a bit of a point with the 'horrible for controlling a character that's tied down to any sort of realistic physics' - there have been a few turret/on rails sections in PC games I've played that have been annoying to control - but playing Mechwarrior: Living Legends, with torso turn rate limited in speed but controlled by the mouse has shown me that it one can very quickly adjust to different environments when the effect is consistent and well portrayed.

I also agree that many PC shooters do feel floaty - but then again, so do many console shooters. Early PC FPS - Half Life n CS for example in particular stand out, but then they were early games. Halo feels floaty, Crysis doesn't. I think it's mostly to do with how acceleration and friction are handled by the game engine, and what effects the dev decided to add to the player's POV - weapon bob, screen bob, motion blur etc. Basically, that's more to do with the game than to do with whether you're commanding the movement with a joystick or four buttons.

I also agree that a lot of this argument is made a bit moot by the ability to use game-pads on the PC and kb/m combos for consoles, but I think you'd find that on a PC the lack of aim assist would make using a game-pad a frustrating experience.

On the flip-side, there's much I disagree with you on.
Firstly, left side of game pad crossed with a mouse would fail hard due to the lack of buttons - you'd have to mount them all on the underside of the gamepad and be very careful about how you gripped it, and even then you'd be limited for space and number.

Secondly, I would argue with this point:

since you have to set sensitivity and acceleration right for a stick it's much more like you're actually swinging something with a bit of wieght to it.

The screen is your POV, your eyes. To look around, normally you wouldn't turn your entire body, it's just that games havn't worked out how to enable you to look around independently of your movement in a way that intuitive. I don't know about you, but in many FPS games I like to be able to glance both ways when coming to a T intersection. On a PC it's natural - just a quick sweep both ways and you've seen everything you need to in half a second. On a console it can take a good 5 seconds on default sensitivity on Halo to turn one way and back the other, which on the cusp of a firefight will end you. Well, it's ended me plenty of times when I started to turn the wrong way and simply couldn't physically turn back before I was dead.

That's not a measure of realism or anything lending itself positively towards gameplay, that's the basic symptom of the limitations of game pad input into an FPS game. Someone mentioned above how UT3 have to be slowed down on the PS3, again because of the slowness of the input system. It's a flaw, and sure, games have evolved to deal with it, but the speed and accuracy, not to mention the intuitive nature of mouse input puts it ahead in most people's regard. (Or at least, that's how it appears to me. Obviously there are exceptions, but I struggle to see it from your point of view - sorry :/ )

 

[NamesAreHardToPick]

Before I get going on this, I gotta say omg it's good to argue with someone who actually knows about video games.

That's good to hear - I've had nothing but bad experiences with games that implement physical lag as the character tries to follow the mouse pointer... either I've got to return the mouse to a "center" position to prevent further movement, or I've got to provide constant mouse movement and keep having to re-center the damn thing on the pad. I'm sure a game could figure *something* out to make it work.

I also agree that many PC shooters do feel floaty - but then again, so do many console shooters.
...
I also agree that a lot of this argument is made a bit moot by the ability to use game-pads on the PC and kb/m combos for consoles, but I think you'd find that on a PC the lack of aim assist would make using a game-pad a frustrating experience.

I find Unreal-engined games float pretty badly too, but I think it's like Havok physics... it CAN be made to work, it's just that the developers don't necessarily put the time and effort into tuning it properly. The tricks that make your characters seem real like acceleration and momentum go back as far as Super Mario for console games... my guess would be that a control pad is comfortable and responsive enough to accomodate it. WASD to move your character is inconvenient enough, you can't reasonably expect them to also wait for their guy to start moving at top speed and then make fine positional adjustments as they're sliding to a stop or around a corner. I think that's where the "sophisticated action" comes in, console gamers have grown up with games where they're "driving" their character, that feeling is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition among PC titles.

Firstly, left side of game pad crossed with a mouse would fail hard due to the lack of buttons - you'd have to mount them all on the underside of the gamepad and be very careful about how you gripped it, and even then you'd be limited for space and number.
...
The screen is your POV, your eyes. To look around, normally you wouldn't turn your entire body, it's just that games havn't worked out how to enable you to look around independently of your movement in a way that intuitive.

That's not a measure of realism or anything lending itself positively towards gameplay, that's the basic symptom of the limitations of game pad input into an FPS game. Someone mentioned above how UT3 have to be slowed down on the PS3, again because of the slowness of the input system. It's a flaw, and sure, games have evolved to deal with it, but the speed and accuracy, not to mention the intuitive nature of mouse input puts it ahead in most people's regard. (Or at least, that's how it appears to me. Obviously there are exceptions, but I struggle to see it from your point of view - sorry :/ )

There's no question that the mouse is a better performer for FPS games, you would have to be a zen master to be able to make precision adjustments with an analog stick if the maximum sensitivity was anywhere near as fast as a mouse. On the other hand, like you said, your POV is also your character's facing. Your character is by necessity capable spinning at 7200 rpm or whatever to keep up with that. In the third person perspective it looks really unreasonable, being a geezer I want my games a little more grounded in physical reality so I can suspend my disbelief about more important things lol.

Metal Gear Solid had a lot of really brilliant touches on the control scheme to compensate for analog stick inputs, context-sensitive support for necessities like automatically looking around corners if you're touching the wall as you approach. Third-person shooters work much better than first-person for console controls since they can support independent character and view facings with some function that quickly pops your view to match the character. I really wish western developers would pick up on this now that they're serious about consoles.