Every preview I’ve read about Halo 2’s online multiplayer experience makes it out to be the game most likely to insure a fun, balanced experience for players of every skill level ever released. Then I read about this:
If all the Halo 2 online players start getting these damn things (which, presumably, will be configurable for Halo 2 through the myriad advanced settings), then multiplayer will really be fucked up for those of us who just want to play with a controller.
Quite welcome to me, if it works… It might make console shooters bearable. I still think that there needs to be some sort of slick integrated mouse/glidepad controller for shooters though.
If this uses any kind of software modification, wouldn’t this trip Live’s protections against gamesharks and the like. And if they try to get around it, aren’t they inviting a nice big DMCA lawsuit with the big M.
If it doesn’t use software modification of the program, then it will be of little use. The main advantage of a mouse in an FPS is the almost instantaneous turning you can pull off. If all it does is map the analog stick to the mouse, it won’t be nearly as useful.
Let’s just see how it works out. Halo 2 wasn’t written for kbm input, maybe it will be impossible to find the right balance of sensitivity and in the end not much of an advantage.
After all the years of suffering under the yoke of the thumbstick, I would have thought that console players would be happy to get a solution to the problem. I’m mildly surprised to hear it pronounced the Death of Halo 2. Personally, I wouldn’t ever buy a conventional FPS on a console unless I could use something like a mouse.
And the complainers on this thread seem rather, uh, whiny. “Yeah! Yeah! The imitation mouse won’t work right! And if it does, it won’t work with Live! And if they find a way around that, then Microsoft will slap them silly with the DMCA!”
I’m getting used to console FPS controls to an extent, but they are still a pale shadow of what can be done with a mouse. I still remember when I decided to dump the joystick as my preferred control in Doom - it was when I got my butt handed to me by a succession of mouse/keyboard users.
I’m very interested to see how this thing functions. Like zabuni said above, it won’t help much if it just maps the mouse to the control stick function. If it can give a good imitation of mouselook, I’m all for it, but I’ll need one of those keyboard & mouse surface gadgets from the Phantom.
In terms of Halo, Warlord of Mars is entirely correct, although perhaps not for the reasons he thinks. Games almost always control better on the platform they were designed for and on the control device they were developed for. I find most console ports of PC games to be borderline unplayable in comparison to their PC predecessors, and vice versa.
I realize many of the PC fanatics will (and already are) pointing and laughing, but I think they’re wrong in this case. Halo 2 was designed from the ground up with an Xbox controller in mind. It will play better with the controller.
Matt, this isn’t a platform issue. It’s a control issue.
Doom 2 was the last FPS I played with a joystick. Just because the consoles haven’t figured it out yet, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The thumbsticks are an awful control model for shooters.
You know, another thing that bugs me is this idea that mapping the thumbstick to a mouse is hard. IMHO it really isn’t. If you know, already, how the player’s aim reacts to the thumbstick, then it isn’t hard to map a mouse’s movements to it and send the correct output. And I expect that it’ll also be thoroughly tweaked before release. So the end result should be normal mouse control, except that your turn rate is capped by whatever turn rate the game caps out at. That may not help for quick turns, but it should be very helpful for precise aiming.
You’re kidding, right? The only times I’ve ever been foiled by a console port to PC is when it didn’t properly recognize my gamepad. And I’ve never met a console emulator that couldn’t do a decent and highly-playable mapping of console controller to PC controller/joystick/keyboard. If I can successfully play through GTA3’s port to PC, and the biggest gripe I have is the disappearing cars, then the PC doesn’t seem like such a bad platform even for a highly gamepad-dependent game.
Obviously ports from PC to console are a different ballgame. But what this really suggests is that the console itself is what is deficient in terms of control. The PC will accept a gamepad, but consoles do a bad job of accepting a mouse. And guess what? Lik-Sang is trying to solve that problem. Stop bitching about it.
Mapping a mouse to an analog joystick may not be as easy as it seems.
The mouse works so well as an FPS controller (and GUI controller for that matter) because the on-screen movement maps directly to hand movement.
Okay you move your mouse to the left, the cursor goes left. And if you STOP moving your mouse on the left side of your mouse pad, the cursor stops. The faster you move the mouse, the faster the cursor moves. You can change speed midway, even. (duh, right?)
Analog joysticks don’t work like this. Move the stick left, and the cursor/view moves left. Stop it, and your view keeps moving left, at a rate that corresponds to how far the stick is pushed. Hold the stick all the way left, and you’ll turn left very fast, even though the stick is actually no longer moving at all. Rate of movement is dependant not on how fast you move the stick, as it is with mice, but with how far from center you put it. And continuous cursor/character/view movement does not require continuously moving the stick, only holding it off-center.
I guess if you got really clever about it you could crank the “thumbstick sensitivity” in the game up to the max; the device would translate mouse speed and vector into a “the joystick is this far off center in this direction” command to the console.
