- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
- Location
- Spain
Real patricians use yuhjklbn, as god intended.
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
I agree that it is indeed a huge amount of games that are cut out but that is quite a bit to absolute a statement. You can play DOOM with only the keyboard fine. It is better with mouse but keyboard only works. And "all RPGs" is a very big statement. There are a lot of 2D RPGs for one. And as for simulation games I heavily disagree. The mouse is probably the worst input device for racing and flight sims. I would take keyboard only input any day for steering a car or flying a plane over the mouse.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Wait how are you controlling the camera smoothly in a racing game with just keyboard
wasd for steering and arrows for camera?
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
If it came to steering a simulated F1 car around Wet Monaco, I would far rather use a mouse-based solution than a keyboard.
(Though honestly, I would rather forfeit than try to do wet Monaco anyway.)
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- He/They
We can go further. Put motion inputs in there. Dragon Punch to quicksaveAnything is fully playable on your controller if you're brave enough.
I don't think I've ever bothered to control the camera in a racing game?
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
Usually I don't need to because looking straight ahead through the windshield is enough. And 3rd person view is just anathema for simulator games.
Using the arrow keys let me restrict the turning to only the horizontal axis much easier. If I tried turning with the mouse I would do a bunch of movements up and down that do nothing but throw me off. I also feel I have more control with arrow keys in finetuning how much i want to turn with keys. I have incredible shaky hands.
Last edited:
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Doom was an error of mine, when I wrote "Post-1990 shooter" I mistakenly thought that covered Doom. I had forgotten that it was actually released in 1993.
Similarly in retrospect "simulation game" was imprecise. I was using it to refer to Dwarf Fortress and other top down strategy-simulation hybrids. I forgot about Microsoft Flight Simulator and those types of micro-simulations. My bad.
That said I do feel RPGs is mostly fair. Sure you might get some 2D RPGs but are they a majority of the genre? You couldn't play Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate 3, New Vegas, etc. Any 3D RPG is right out. Hence my original point. This standard may not be wrong in very specific circumstances but they're going to be a minority of a minority of games.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
It is miserable, though.
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
Considering RPGmaker exists I would say yes if you measure by the amount of games made.
By total hours played in the last two decades? Probably not. Not sure how Undertale and the entire indie range of RPGs stand up to the AAA 3D RPGs in playtime.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Let's be clear, the point disagreement here is not about whether controller support is inherently bad. No one has argued for that position. What's been pushed back against is the idea that controller support is necessary to be good and by extension that a lack of complexity is axiomatically positive. That's what myself and others have criticized.
If anything that Age of Empires has controller support without compromising the complexity Firefossil was arguing against hurts his position. Clearly the AOE devs did not consider controller-centric "innovation" to be necessary. They added it as an option instead of overriding complexity and in return have gotten massive success and a revitalized series.
Last edited:
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
So, controllers in the modern day exist for one reason:
To be a collection of buttons positioned in a way that is easy to use at the same time as a pair of joysticks.
This is because joysticks are the best way to perform actions that require both a direction and a magnitude in a video game. Such as moving a character or camera around.
... they are absolutely terrible for every other kind of selection method, such as using menus or maps, but for character or camera control they are very nice.
Now, the issue is that you need buttons placed in good locations near the joysticks, so you make a modern controller for that.
Any game that does not need that sort of character control is better played with a keyboard, keyboard and mouse, or flight stick.
Even then, flight sticks are a niche use case only for higher end simulation games.
The reason that controllers even existed before the advent of the joystick is that consoles were deliberately limited in how they accepted input for the purpose of simplifying the development process. In the modern day it is mostly tradition and the desire to sell hardware that keeps keyboard and mouse away from console gaming, and makes those gamers mistake settling for controller controls for controllers being superior when used in unfitting applications.
Personally, I don't even think most games that require direction and magnitude controls suffer that much from keyboard and mouse when they are made to properly handle that alternate input, but I also don't play modern platform games or first person shooters.
To be a collection of buttons positioned in a way that is easy to use at the same time as a pair of joysticks.
This is because joysticks are the best way to perform actions that require both a direction and a magnitude in a video game. Such as moving a character or camera around.
... they are absolutely terrible for every other kind of selection method, such as using menus or maps, but for character or camera control they are very nice.
Now, the issue is that you need buttons placed in good locations near the joysticks, so you make a modern controller for that.
Any game that does not need that sort of character control is better played with a keyboard, keyboard and mouse, or flight stick.
Even then, flight sticks are a niche use case only for higher end simulation games.
The reason that controllers even existed before the advent of the joystick is that consoles were deliberately limited in how they accepted input for the purpose of simplifying the development process. In the modern day it is mostly tradition and the desire to sell hardware that keeps keyboard and mouse away from console gaming, and makes those gamers mistake settling for controller controls for controllers being superior when used in unfitting applications.
Personally, I don't even think most games that require direction and magnitude controls suffer that much from keyboard and mouse when they are made to properly handle that alternate input, but I also don't play modern platform games or first person shooters.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The primary reason I use controllers is for health reasons. While I see online discussions about controllers being better for avoiding RSI and carpal tunnel syndrome, the proof is kind of in the pudding for me, and that is which I can use longer with less pain or exacerbating less existing pain from my work which more or less has to be mouse and keyboard.
How does "good game provides controller support" undercut my position of "if controller support is not provided it is probably not a good game"? Where the probably is rooted in either "they made it more complicated than it needed to be so a controller with 10 buttons, 2 joysticks, and a d-pad isn't enough" or "a controller has enough inputs in theory but they didn't provide controller support and the way they designed the UI makes it inpractical anyways".
I disagree vehemently and I think anybody who has played a shooter game should understand why.
There are things a joystick is better for than a mouse, probably - I would favor it for purely directional pointing probably - but it's a distant second best for moving a camera. Probably because the magnitude control is atrocious. With a mouse you signal how far you want to turn directly. With the joystick you signal that you want to turn and then use time to communicate how far.
Kosjurake
The Wildest of Ronins
- Location
- Tokyo LOCCENT
Years ago, when I first got Devil May Cry 4 on Steam (Since I've yet to obtain anything from Sony past the PS2), I tried to play it with mouse and keyboard. I hated it so much I immediately drove to the nearest Bestbuy and bought myself a 20 dollar logitech USB controller. I have never regretted that decision.
Ok, it may not have literally been immediately, I might have done it a day or two after.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
- Location
- Cookie Jar
IMO there is no one singular answer to "controller or k+m". Some games work better with mouse and keyboard. Others are better with controller.
Case in point, Helldivers 2. I prefer to play it on controller, because it feels better to me compared to mouse and keyboard. Meanwhile, I play Risk of Rain 2 with keyboard and mouse because that feels better that way. Both are 3rd person action games, so you would think same logic applies to both, but no: one is better with controller and other is better with mouse and keyboard.
Case in point, Helldivers 2. I prefer to play it on controller, because it feels better to me compared to mouse and keyboard. Meanwhile, I play Risk of Rain 2 with keyboard and mouse because that feels better that way. Both are 3rd person action games, so you would think same logic applies to both, but no: one is better with controller and other is better with mouse and keyboard.
Note that a significant amount of that is coded support that can partially exist because the game is so old and has been supported for so long. There are several reasons why it's not a feature of other games in the series.
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
An RTS is complex by its very nature while a controller is inherently simplistic when compared to a mouse and keyboard setup. There are probably ways to make a controller-based RTS work (maybe use the shoulder buttons to swap between different "modes"; abandon 3D viewing of battlefields so the right stick can move your targetting reticule maybe) but we have yet to actually find one.
Possible hot take: Frankly Halo Wars was decent in spite of its control scheme, not because of it, and I never had as much fun with it as I did with, say, Warcraft 3 TFT.
One place where I do think a joystick, though preferably not a controller joystick, is often a huge win is vehicle controls. Mouse pointing is supreme when pointing is what you're doing. It's really not when what you're doing is signaling in what direction a gradual process should go. (Keyboard sometimes picks up the slack well but is less good at flexible magnitude and direction. Planes don't just use flight sticks for tradition.)
Kinda hate thumbsticks though as an ergonomic experience. Especially when they're used simultaneously as joysticks and buttons.
Kinda hate thumbsticks though as an ergonomic experience. Especially when they're used simultaneously as joysticks and buttons.
- Location
- Russia
I would like you to play Typing of the Dead on a controller.