Antiparticle said:
Logan Westbrook said:
Sood sources claim that the Microsoft pitted the best console players using control pads against "mediocre" PC gamers with mice and keyboards and found that the console players were "destroyed every time."
This seems highly unlikely to me. But it'll be music to the ears of the PC elitists of course...
I can't really comment on the veracity of this fellow's statements, or whether there would have been a PC renaissance had cross-platform connectivity remained on the table, but the disparity between the best console FPS players vs mediocre PC FPS players has been demonstrated before - staff from Official X-Box magazine challenged staff members of PC Gamer to a Halo competition.
Now Halo isn't cross-platform interactive, but since there was a PC port and it allowed you to plug in and use the X-Box controller, they could essentially simulate the console vs PC experience, while also eliminating any niggling doubt about hardware discrepancies, as the machines themselves were identical and only the control method differed. Using that setup, the team of extremely experienced Halo players from X-Box Magazine, who knew the maps in and out and played Halo Deathmatch all the time... were handily trounced by a team consisting of Halo newbies, it was a one-sided pouncing match for the folks using mice.
Gamepads are simply an inferior control option when the title in consideration is an FPS - developers program in all sorts of behind the scenes "cheats" to counterbalance how analog sticks are a terrible option for precisely aiming at things, and even if the game presents you with options to turn aiming assistance off it will still leave the rest of the tricks it's using to counterbalance your shitty aim in place - the alternative is a game that is basically unplayable and no fun for anyone.
Which is fine really, consoles are an active market segment and FPS titles are quite popular on consoles, irrespective of their interfaces not really being well designed to play them. But when you pit people who have mastered the art of distance running by
walking on their hands against regular old marathon runners who use their legs for the purpose of locomotion, only a crazy person would conclude that running along by balancing on your hands upside down is going to put you at an advantage against people running normally - you're going to lose, badly.
Which is why more FPS games aren't made that let people on the PC compete with people on the X-Box, and why the ones that have employed coding tricks to try and 'gimp' the PC players - it's the only way to (somewhat) level the playing field if one side is stuck using an analog stick to aim - there's a good reason we don't all have joysticks sitting to one side of our keyboards instead of mice.
