Controller Versus Mouse

I'd be piss'd if my available controlls was decided on me based on "context." The fact is they would never be able to know when I want to use certain abilities. Plus clicking through possible enemies and players or using the analog sticks would be terribly slow for quick reactions.

Take for instance on my level 36 mage, what is going to happen when I say... want to AOE grind. I go and aggro about 10~11 mobs and cast mana shield, get them all together and then cast frost nova, pull back and cast Blizzard, run forward and cast a few arcane explosions, fronst nova again, cone of cold, pull back and finish off with the last blizzard. Now this might work with context, but what the heck would I do if I accidently aggro another mob and have to throw a few spells on it? What happens if I'm attacked by another player (bastard alliance!)? The context menu's might dynamically change but how would they know when? Clicking on the enemy would set them off possibly but I often have no targets selected at all with doing AOE grinding. Same type of moves can be used for PvP in Warsong Gluch when a flag carrier is returning and is being escorted by a number of other players.

 

I think about it this way, Mouse + KB == 2 independent controls, console controller == one control.

I remember when games like Tribes, HL2 and some others came out for consoles in a MP role and they didnt allow them to mix with the PC crowd.

I honestly believe one of the reasons would be the complete domination the PC crowd would lay on the console crowd due to a better control system. People would simply quit playing the game or call consoles defective.

 

It most certainly does.

 

Q3:A on the Dreamcast interoperates with the PC version just fine. You just had to download the matching map pack and you could go play on the Sega servers. Mouse + Keyboard + Railgun and a bunch of people with gamepads = shooting fish in a barrel.

Now, back when I was GOOD at Quake (yeah, back in the old DOS days) I got into a firefight with someone that had a spaceorb and knew how to use it. With one of those, you can walk in any direction and look/aim any other. No 45 degree strafe+forward, it threw off my aim completely.

 

There are only certain types of games that I will play with a gamepad, and those certain games are the ones that do not have very many controls to operate, even though my controller is a Logitech USB-attached PS2-alike so it has plenty of buttons (four on the top, six actual buttons on the front, plus an additional two underneath the analog thumbsticks, digital direction pad)

Prime examples of when I like to use the controller:
All my Need For Speed versions: NFS-HP, NFS-HP2, NFS-U, NFS-PU
The entire GTA series: makes it feel just like the PS2 but at high res = good
Old-school space / flight sims

And that's about it. I utterly refuse to play a first person shooter with a gamepad as it's utterly worthless. There simply isn't enough control speed nor button capacity nor response time from a control pad; I can perform 10x better with a mouse and keyboard combination.

 

Fear has more buttons to needed than any other FPS I've played with a gamepad recently, and all that fits nicely on my 360 controllers with only the need to bind the activate and reload functions to the same button as is done in Halo. As for control, it controls well enough for me to have a blast playing on medium difficulty. Granted, I can whip though the game on hard with a mouse and keyboard, but that does make me enjoy the game any less when playing on medium with a controller.

 

Wow would pretty much be unplayable on a controller. Imagine only having like 6 button mappings and otherwise having to navigate through your spellbook for anything else. It'd be terrible.

Unless you also map the shoulder buttons (how would you switch targets?), healers would only have enough buttons for something like renew, pw shield, flash heal, greater heal, prayer of healing, and dispel. That doesn't leave any room for things like cure/abolish disease, fade, shadow protection, inner fire, shackle, pw fort, divine spirit, resurrection, holy nova, psychic scream, sw pain, mind control, etc. Not to mention other spells and abilities like fear ward, desperate prayer, or shadow meld.

Then, there is the issue of quickly drinking a health or mana potion in those time critical situations, and needing an action button to activate chests/flags/corpses/mines/etc. More buttons to map to your time limited trinkets before or during the fight. Oh, and another button to jump.

It would be absolutely terrible.

Nite_Hawk

 

How many games are there that seem to be impossible to play on a gamepad when looking at the PC interface, but that turn out to be quite playable on consoles, when using a different interface?

Many.

How many games are there that have a very poor interface on the PC due to being developed for a console and simply ported to the PC as they are?

Many.

 

I think the distinction needs to be made between discussing what is feasible for a MMORPG in general, and what will give you a significant disadvantage in PvP situations. PvP is always going to be the most difficult part of the gameplay, and will always benefit those with more adequate control schemes. People who shelled out the cash for the z-boards and crap are probably a lot better off in PvP than those of us with just plain keyboards as well.

That said, controllers have much more than 6 buttons. And they can be used in simple combinations without getting into rediculous fighting-sim control schemes. I don't own a console or advocate purchasing one, but it's interesting to picture how it would work. And in that respect, I have to admit that despite my extreme preference to a keyboard and mouse, the number of actual keys/buttons I use in 99% of my /play time could easily fit on a gamepad controller and I don't think I would be significantly worse in my healing duties in groups, raids, or general interaction in the world short of heavy PvP.

 

Do you know how a radial menu works?

When you open it, it presents you with a circle split into segments that are the menus. And when you click a menu, you can either add the new options to the side of that menu, or simply paint a new circle split into segments.

Targeting is harder. There are multiple solutions to that. You can make it context sensitive or use a button to switch to target mode and simply use the digital direction keys to switch between targets, or use a menu as well. A dynamic one.

And using a dynamic menu can actually make things easier. Let's split the radial into eight pie slices: allied tanks, allied ranged damage dealers, allied support troops, enemy tanks, enemy ranged damage dealers, enemy support troops, inventory and spells. And of course, each menu opens a likewise selection of functional unit choices.

That way, targeting the main enemy tank becomes a lot easier than having to hunt him or her down from all the avatars on the screen. You don't even have to know where he or she is located! That saves you on macros as well.

Edit: and for healers, you could simply make two menu's: one that shows you the main tanks, the other that shows you the allies that are most damaged.

 

The system is far to slow.

 

Perhaps. I'm not convinced, though.

And it would remove all those angry sessions about: "NO! YOU ONLY ATTACK WHO OUR TANK IS ATTACKING! AND YOU ONLY HEAL OUR TANKS UNLESS A WIZARD IS ABOUT TO DIE! AND LEAVE THE CROWD CONTROL TO OTHERS! JUST DO THAT AND NOTHING ELSE!!!"

You know.

It would make all that a piece of cake: just tell them what buttons to press in what sequence. They cannot go wrong if they do that.

Or, do you think that losing all that annoyance is a big price to pay for being able to do and fuck up as you like?

 

I don't think you have to know where the avatar is located in the game world, you just click on his healthbar in the raid screen. note: I've never played in a WoW raid, just EQ. I can't imagine they would have gone backwards though.

 

my roommate swore up and down that a Controller could be just as competitive as a mouse keyboard setup. In Battlefield 2. So he went out and bought a Xbox 360 Controller and went through a ton of headache downloading programs and figuring out how to get it to work in BF2 over a couple nights. Finally after tons of trial and error tweaking in single player he decided he was ready and we logged into the same server for a round of SF Warlord. About 3 minutes later he went back to Mouse and Keyboard and never mentioned the controller ever again.

 

Ok, now wait... How is a "radial menu" going to compete with keyboard and mouse functionality? Seriously. I can map a single key to the function I need to perform, versus having to push a button to open the "radial menu", pushing my analog controller in a certain direction, hope that my frenzied push somehow fits the proper 45 degree radial increment that I really wanted to hit) and then potentially hit a third button if it needs an additional input.

What if I need that second analog controller during my frenzy? The left controller I'm using for movement, my right controller I'm using for aim -- I don't have yet another controller to use for my menu unless I want to stop aiming or moving...

I'm still not getting how it's going to be somehow considered equally effective. If you could make two analog sticks and ten buttons equally effective to a two-axis 1200dpi handle and 108 keys, then we wouldn't need keyboards and mice anymore period.

 

Not to belabor this, but I'm with the other PC gamers on this one. Halo was not really a very good game by any standards. On Standard it was ridiculously easy and on Hard it was kinda frustrating. The recharging shield idea was cool, but the controls were just meh ok. I actually prefer Turok's controls (steep learning curve but effective) to any other console FPS i've played. goldenEye was a good game, very nicely balanced with great control over MP options -- better options than almost all PC games then or since, which is simply shameful -- but a bad, bad FPS control scheme. These games feel balanced because everyone is stuck with the same (crappy) tools. But do you remember running around with one hand on the c-pad trying to head shot all the time? and then every group has that one lamer who always takes Oddjob? wtf.

zelda!? how is that going to be difficult to implement on a pc!? it could only be better on a PC. The only downside is the blatant lack of challenge when fighting enemies would be rather amplified. But woo, a Zelda with textures, that'd be neat! ^_~ I actually like cel-da's art style though. Anyway I am a gamepad gamer. I LOVE my thrustmaster (even if a good number of games dislike it -- fuck you and your cheap ass pads, logitech!!!). But it's really only superior for driving and flying games, and roms, how i LOVE my roms!!!.

Lots of unlikely games HAVE been ported to consoles with success. However, if you have played SimCity 2000 on a PC, and you played it on a friend's PSX, as I did, then, likely, you can forgive me for murdering that friend and mailing his pieces to SoA. It had more menus than a Cantonese diner! It took ten minutes to do ANYTHING, and then you got to see about one square block at a time (hardly the fault of the controller). I imagine the same could be said of the Sims and a host of other games. The first time I played Command & Conquer was on a PSX -- perhaps why I've always hated the series, even on PC.

So much for not belaboring the point, sorry. To console owners, by all means, enjoy the gamepads. They're very nicely designed these days and usually about three to four times as durable as a PC analog gamepad. Enjoy that innovative designers keep coming up with good ways to play FPS and RTS games with gamepads. But don't come to my house and tell me your gamepad can hang with a mouse & keyboard in those genres, unless you want to go home with your ego in a ziploc baggie, bruised and bleeding!

...SpaceOrb looks great! I want one! ;_; but so far I've only found one here -- $200!! wtf! and with questionable game support to boot, so sad, so sad...

edit: lastly, on WoW -- I think it could work. Would it be great? Not perfect, no. Might it need a separate console server, tweaked for gamepad play balance? Maybe. But I think, with four shoulder buttons, each one could be a shift-modifier for the rest (throw in combinations of 2 shoulder-button-modifiers and you'd get an easy 32+ hotkeys). It would be complicated, but not THAT much more complicated than WoW seems to be for diehards anyway. I mean, arguing that "it's impossible" is just absurd, because, again, they've ported far more ridiculously inappropriate games to consoles before. It might not be exactly the same but it'd be possible, we all know most anything is possible...

 

Using the analog for movement was was just newbies who couldn't keep their aim straight with the stick and had to rely on autoaim. The real control schemes used the analog for look and either the d-pad or the c-buttons for movement, or two controllers for dual analog. And Oddjob is there for those newbies to use so to give them a little more of a fighting chance.

 

Oh, it's true! I'd forgotten about that control scheme. And of course we used it for a long, long time. Auto-aim was turned off to some horrible complaints but we ignored them and things got much better. But iirc, my primary annoyance was still there -- if you took your hand off the stick your aim would return to neutral, right? so you still had to run around everywhere with your finger trying to get the cursor to head level ALL the time. I developed so many awful cramps playing that game. ^^; It was a solid game -- I still just think the controls were its weakest link.

 

Nope, but that would suck. You must be thinking of a different game though.

 

GAH! i swear everyone here has a better memory than i do! ^^; i could swear i remember HATING that about goldeneye though. maybe i'm still confusing the newb controls for the alternate setup. sorry, i apologize to rare. i still remember it being a bitch to shoot at different heights, but they may have devised the best fps controller scheme ever. i'd still take mouse & kb anyday, but it certainly is possible to make it work ok with a controller.