I recently pre-ordered From Dust from Steam because after watching some gameplay footage from the xbox 360 version I thought that the game would be excellent once it had mouse controls. When I finally played the game, I found out that they in fact did not really make mouse controls for it and instead made the mouse act like it was an analogue stick (which it is not). Other people complain about the DRM in the game, but for me the real problem is that they never made the correct version of the game, the one that you can play with a point and click interface.
I encourage everyone that reads this to never buy the game From Dust unless they fix the controls.
Showing posts with label pc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pc. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Infamous 2 and SCC
In the last 2 days I complete both inFamous 2 (on PS3) and Splinter Cell: Conviction (on PC). For inFamous, I played through the game continuing the evil story from the first game. I had a really good time with it and found the story interesting. In particular, the ending was pretty surprising to me. I can't wait to play through the good story line. I would recommend this game to anyone that has played the first one (which is free to download from the welcome back program).
As far as Splinter Cell: Conviction goes, I wouldn't really recommend the game to anyone. The story is pretty forgettable to me (having not played any of the other titles in the series) and the gameplay was only sort of good. I initially tried playing the game with a controller, but the controls made the game unnecessarily hard. Once I switched to mouse and keyboard, the difficulty went from impossible to easy. The random bad guys walk around swearing all the time, so if that is something you don't want to deal with, then there is no reason to play this game.
As far as Splinter Cell: Conviction goes, I wouldn't really recommend the game to anyone. The story is pretty forgettable to me (having not played any of the other titles in the series) and the gameplay was only sort of good. I initially tried playing the game with a controller, but the controls made the game unnecessarily hard. Once I switched to mouse and keyboard, the difficulty went from impossible to easy. The random bad guys walk around swearing all the time, so if that is something you don't want to deal with, then there is no reason to play this game.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Console vs. PC Controls (controller vs. mouse+keyboard)
It is pretty common for gamers to discuss which control scheme is better for FPS games. I'll go ahead and state my opinion up front that a mouse is way better for aiming in an FPS and for that reason, PCs win outright in the competition for better First Person Shooter controls. However, despite the fact that many game developers seem to think that shooters are the only kind of game in the world, there are many other kinds of games that people make and that are fun to play. Perhaps a better way to look at these control schemes is to consider their roots.
The console controller with dual analog sticks that is the prevalent control scheme for console games (they even have them on the wii classic controller) first appeared in the late 90s and seems to have won out due to the increased precision of control over a simple direction pad or camera buttons for the 3d games that were being released. Analog sticks provide a much needed increase in the number of levels of movement available so that the player can in theory move exactly where he wants to. In practice, the issue is nearly always bad camera control, either with automatic camera movement, or with player controlled movement that can sometime be too sensitive, or too slow, or both. Camera control is a very hard problem for console games.
For this same reason, first person shooters do not work well with an analog stick camera control. If you turn the sensitivity way up to be able to turn around fast enough, you lose the ability to make small movements to aim accurately, while if you have the sensitivity low enough to be able to aim accurately, you can no longer turn around fast enough to deal with threats behind you (or circling around you). The mouse somewhat solves this problem, although there is still a limit to how far it can move, based on the size of the mousepad. In practice, there is nearly always a sensitivity level you can choose for a mouse that allows for all of the necessary movements quick enough while maintaining the subtle precision aiming capabilities.
The weakness of PC controls comes from the keyboard, which was designed to mimic the text input of a typewriter. The keyboard is quite good when you need to input text, which is occasionally important for some video games (particularly ones with text chat in multiplayer). However, when used to control movement, the keyboard is much less accurate and only provides two options for each direction of control, on or off. If you want to move forward, you can press the move forward button (usually 'w') and you move forward, but you can't really slow down your movement by only pressing it halfway down. The common solution is to have a speed modifier button for "sneak", "walk" and "run" speeds. This input is still a digital choice and does not allow for the full analog selection provided by an analog stick. Thus for precision of character movement, a console analog stick wins out. A key point to realize is that for FPS games it is much more important to be able to face and aim the right way than it is to be able to move to a slightly more precise position, giving PC controls the advantage. In platformers, where precision of movement is more important, the analog input of controllers wins out every time.
In this post I've discussed the two control schemes I deal with most of the time in my gaming, however there are many more possible controls that have been explored that you can read about on wikipedia. Touch screens and motion sensors seem to be a newer input type that is growing in install base, but I believe there has yet to be seen a game that best uses those inputs for gaming. FPS games control poorly, or at least non-intuitively using motion and touch controls. I am excited to see what things people can come up with to innovate gaming.
The console controller with dual analog sticks that is the prevalent control scheme for console games (they even have them on the wii classic controller) first appeared in the late 90s and seems to have won out due to the increased precision of control over a simple direction pad or camera buttons for the 3d games that were being released. Analog sticks provide a much needed increase in the number of levels of movement available so that the player can in theory move exactly where he wants to. In practice, the issue is nearly always bad camera control, either with automatic camera movement, or with player controlled movement that can sometime be too sensitive, or too slow, or both. Camera control is a very hard problem for console games.
For this same reason, first person shooters do not work well with an analog stick camera control. If you turn the sensitivity way up to be able to turn around fast enough, you lose the ability to make small movements to aim accurately, while if you have the sensitivity low enough to be able to aim accurately, you can no longer turn around fast enough to deal with threats behind you (or circling around you). The mouse somewhat solves this problem, although there is still a limit to how far it can move, based on the size of the mousepad. In practice, there is nearly always a sensitivity level you can choose for a mouse that allows for all of the necessary movements quick enough while maintaining the subtle precision aiming capabilities.
The weakness of PC controls comes from the keyboard, which was designed to mimic the text input of a typewriter. The keyboard is quite good when you need to input text, which is occasionally important for some video games (particularly ones with text chat in multiplayer). However, when used to control movement, the keyboard is much less accurate and only provides two options for each direction of control, on or off. If you want to move forward, you can press the move forward button (usually 'w') and you move forward, but you can't really slow down your movement by only pressing it halfway down. The common solution is to have a speed modifier button for "sneak", "walk" and "run" speeds. This input is still a digital choice and does not allow for the full analog selection provided by an analog stick. Thus for precision of character movement, a console analog stick wins out. A key point to realize is that for FPS games it is much more important to be able to face and aim the right way than it is to be able to move to a slightly more precise position, giving PC controls the advantage. In platformers, where precision of movement is more important, the analog input of controllers wins out every time.
In this post I've discussed the two control schemes I deal with most of the time in my gaming, however there are many more possible controls that have been explored that you can read about on wikipedia. Touch screens and motion sensors seem to be a newer input type that is growing in install base, but I believe there has yet to be seen a game that best uses those inputs for gaming. FPS games control poorly, or at least non-intuitively using motion and touch controls. I am excited to see what things people can come up with to innovate gaming.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Are consoles holding back PC gaming?
People close to me know what my answer to this question is. A resounding yes. I've played a variety of games in recent years and I own a couple consoles (ps3 and wii) as well as a decent gaming PC (though it is a couple years old now). One game from the last few years that really got me interested was Borderlands. I'm one of the people that is of the opinion that FPS games are best controlled with a keyboard and mouse, and are therefore always better on a PC. I got the game for PC and as I played it, I noticed a huge annoyance in the way the menus worked. It was almost always better to take your hand off the mouse when in the menus and use the arrow keys and enter key to navigate them. This is terrible. The mouse was designed to make user interfaces better and more accessible but in Borderlands, the mouse is unusable for the interface entirely. Sadly, Borderlands is not the only game that I've played in the last few years to have this problem.
Today I found a blog post from the developer of Battlefield 3 about their position on this subject. They believe, like I do, that pc games in recent are plagued with engines, graphics, and user interface designed for consoles with minor changes to the PC version. To quote the Battlefield 3 blog, "console games are generally ported to the PC with some higher resolution textures." It is good to hear that Battlefield 3 is being developed in the opposite way. The PC version is the definitive version while the console versions are going to be ports with scaled down textures. I hope that more developers will see the light and develop for the PC when the game in question makes more sense as a PC title. They can still release console versions, but PC games should be PC games primarily, and console ports second. I suppose mobile phone ports could come third since people only really want to play angry birds on those platforms, but that's a discussion for another day.
Today I found a blog post from the developer of Battlefield 3 about their position on this subject. They believe, like I do, that pc games in recent are plagued with engines, graphics, and user interface designed for consoles with minor changes to the PC version. To quote the Battlefield 3 blog, "console games are generally ported to the PC with some higher resolution textures." It is good to hear that Battlefield 3 is being developed in the opposite way. The PC version is the definitive version while the console versions are going to be ports with scaled down textures. I hope that more developers will see the light and develop for the PC when the game in question makes more sense as a PC title. They can still release console versions, but PC games should be PC games primarily, and console ports second. I suppose mobile phone ports could come third since people only really want to play angry birds on those platforms, but that's a discussion for another day.
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