The Conduit gets 6.5'd on Gamespot

[WereKitten]

dahuman said:

WereKitten said:

If "good" means fast and accurate aim with the reticule then mouse is much better than IR pointing that is much better than analog sticks. But turning is very different with a mouse and with the wiimote.

But let's say you want to pursue KZ 1 & 2's feel of controlling a guy who has a body with inertia and weight, or in other words where your aim and sight has an acceleration and doesn't follow 1:1 your input. Doing it with mouse or wiimote would probably be defined "floaty" or "laggy", and analog sticks might even be better in this case. In a slightly different context that's why the PC version of Dead Space was vocally bashed by many people for its mouse controls: people expect mouse (and Wiimote pointing) controls to have extreme accelerations.

I happen to love this aspect of KZ2 (never played the first one), thus I find its controls feel better than MP3's ones (currently my best FP experience on the Wii) and better than that of any FPS I played on my PC. In general "good" will depend on what you want from the game. So I'm ready to state that yours is an opinion, unless you replace "good" with "easily accurate", which is surely a fact :)

judge for yourself, I can control the turn speed in this game by how much the wiimote is moved, it can be only slightly or very fast.

SPOILER ALERT!

 

Exactly. I don't want to get technical, but being able to change the speed of the aiming reticule almost instantaneously equals huge accelerations. If your Wiimote weighted 10-20 kgs like some huge gun you wouldn't be able to do that, and that's what a slow acceleration curve like in KZ2 can simulate. Equivalently, the aiming reticule should "trail behind" where you point at a given moment, never accelerating more than a limit amount.

My post was merely food for thought: the word "good" only has meaning when you specify good at what.

You can be goal-oriented ("my goal is putting my aiming reticule on bad guys and clicking. Controls are good in the amount in which they allow me to do this") or experience oriented ("the experience I want to try is being an armour-clad, weapon-encumbered soldier who runs and stumbles and slams into cover. Controls are good if they help to convey this experience").

Real games will ususally aim for you to be somewhere in-between those extremes. Some FPS games like my beloved HL and HL2 have really never relied on the visceral feel of the gunplay, being more about the story, puzzles, setting and design. Many great FPSs on PC work the same way, because they rely on the mouse input. CS is all about accuracy and quick aiming. For them, Wiimote controls would be a boon in a console port, instead of the double analog. I have not played the Conduit yet, but I understand that it works great with them too, and by your talk about "raping" people I understand that you're saying the controls are good in a purely goal-oriented sense.

On the other hand the KZ2 experience is all about the feeling of weight and momentum, forcing you to consider the environment much more and into a slower pace (you can't run in any direction, but only sprint forward for a certain amount of time. You have a cover system, slow reloads, enemies entrenching in positions etc.) For that heavy feel, i think that pointing with a Wiimote would not work as well as analogs, or at least the "floaty" feeling if you introduced inertia would be weird and "bad" for most players.

I actually give great credit to Guerrilla for taking a controller limitation and finding a new take on the FPS feel that works so well with it, where others had to resort to auto-aim and other shortcuts.