[QUOTE=Droniac;327019]Many recent console games do allow you to turn of most forms of aim assist (Shadowrun didn’t). Some console gamers are surprisingly competent with their system’s controller. That’s about as far as I’d go in agreeing with you, as a multi-platform gamer on both PC and Xbox 360.
Your ‘remembered’ study is fictitious. Microsoft has never released any indication as to the results of their in-house cross-platform testing. There have also been no official external studies or reports regarding PC vs Xbox player performance in Shadowrun. Your supposed study that indicates game controllers more easily allow for complex actions does not exist. The only person making any such claim, according to Google, is you.
In actual fact, Shadowrun was heavily modified to favor players with a controller. A mouse & keyboard gamer suffered from reduced turn speed and reduced accuracy when making quick movements (which is pretty much all the time with mouse & keyboard). A Xbox controller player on the other hand benefited from solid controls and a relatively rigorous aim assist function forced on. More importantly, both the developers and player feedback all indicate that even with these nerfs to mouse & keyboard play, the game was relatively well balanced in cross-platform play: neither Xbox nor PC players dominated the other.
FASA Studios did do in-house testing of balance in their game. They employed professional Counter Strike and Halo players to do balance testing and the final product according to them was balanced perfectly. That means that with heavy nerfing to the mouse & keyboard setup the two control schemes were found to be nearly equal by professional gamers, albeit an atrocious setup for any mouse & keyboard gamer. Contrary to your fictitious study, this can actually be traced back on Google to a developer interview at Strategyinformer.
The only indication regarding the result of general in-house cross-platform testing at Microsoft has thus far come from Rahul Sood, a seemingly reputable guy from Voodoo PC who claims to have spoken with an inside man who worked on the project (again, hundreds of hits on Google for a fairly off-hand comment on the topic). According to this inside source, Microsoft gave up on cross-platform play due to insurmountable issues with balancing the different control systems. In their testing “mediocre” mouse & keyboard FPS players not only defeated, but absolutely destroyed professional Xbox controller FPS players. Granted, none of that has ever been officially verified, but Shadowrun’s curious balancing and the complete lack of further cross-platform developments from Microsoft afterwards does seem to support that notion.
Lastly, the idea that a gamepad allows for swifter reactions to complex situations than a mouse & keyboard setup is ridiculous. The only situation in which that might be feasible is if the mouse & keyboard user is employing the arrow keys (a non-standard control setup) and an ancient one-button mouse. In any other case the mouse & keyboard user will always have far more buttons in close proximity to his fingers, and thus be able to execute different commands far more rapidly than someone using a controller.
Don’t believe that? Then here’s the math for you:
Xbox controller: 4 buttons, 2 front bumpers, 2 triggers, 2 joysticks, 1 D-Pad (4 buttons), and 2 system buttons. That totals 16 buttons and you will never use all of those simultaneously.
Regular Mouse & Keyboard default WASD setup: 5 buttons (mouse) and 25 easily accessible buttons (WASD setup). That totals 30 buttons and we’re being very stingy (note: mouse wheel counts as three buttons due to scroll function).
My setup (ESDF - gaming equipment) : 7 buttons (mouse with side buttons) and 35 easily accessible keys (ESDF on a gaming keyboard). That totals 42 buttons and we’re still being stingy.
Now I’m faced with a complex situation and in addition to my regular movement keys and camera controls I also need to use a complex sequence of button presses to make my way through a specific challenge. What do you think will work better: 16 rather limited buttons (and even that is an exaggerated figure) or 42 practically freely bindable keys? Is that really anything but a rhetorical question?
Oh and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is a freely downloadable game (developed by Splash Damage - Brink devs - no less!). There’s no need to “own” it.[/QUOTE]
And you are right… but I suggest you start asking questions, before you write a brick of text lol. It may just save you some time and energy. FASA Studios was owned by Microsoft, so when I mentioned that Microsoft did the tests regarding Shadowrun, well read between the lines = FASA Studios.
For the math… there are a lot of keys on the keyboard but… what is great about the 360 controller is the ergonomy are the primary actions.
Primary actions
[ul]
[li]Left thumbstick[/li][li]Left thumbstick press[/li][li]Right thumbstick[/li][li]Right thumbstick press[/li][li]Left bumper[/li][li]Left trigger[/li][li]Right bumper[/li][li]Right trigger[/li][/ul]
All those functions are unified since the player can use all of them and still keep his control over character movement and camera.
On a mouse, it is possible to have multiple buttons, but it’s not going to be as efficient as what a player can do with his right hand + 360 controller. On PC, some of those actions would require the left hand to be performed. Also, to move your character on PC, you have 4 keys, 4 directions. Basically the left hand on PC has twice the job of a console player… and whatever the number of keys available are, it can be extremely difficult and might need to twist your fingers in very weird way to perform certain actions and still keep a perfect control on your character movements. I mean just try to master perfectly your movements in Soldier of Fortune 2, good luck because with the leaning it’s going to be quite a challenge, but it may help you to realize how hard it is with a keyboard to perform complex actions.
But you may have a magic thumb and may be able to pull off miracles, but it may not be very healthy for your left wrist.
In a very simple game such as Quake III, whatever you pick up will work perfectly, but when you start having more complicated controls for the FPS genre, the keyboard shows it limitations. The 360 also has its limitations since it’s pretty hard by example to use the right trigger + right bumper and the same time.
The Razer Onza game controller is even more interesting exactly because it brings 2 of the secondary buttons (A,B,X,Y, etc.) as 2 additional bumpers, so it offers instead 10 primary actions.
For sure the keyboard is going to be more efficient for RTS and that’s because doesn’t require a player to move his character just like in a FPS game…
By the way it’s not math, that’s ergonomy. But in the end, it always comes down the the strengths and weakness of both accessories.
Bear in mind these stats are with me being pretty rusty and old - only getting to play once or twice a week tops these days. //excuses :)[/QUOTE]