Squilliam said:
Reasonable said:
Mendicate Bias said:
Exactly Squillam!
I would argue that a aiming with analog sticks takes far more skill than using a mouse. The difficulties of aiming with an analog stick represent a real world scenario far more closely than instantly zeroing in on your opponents head.
The fact that you have to train yourself to be able to make small muscle movements and miniscule adjustments makes playing on a controller far more enjoyable to me since you can visibly see an aiming improvement as you play more. Ironically due to the ease of aiming in pc shooters, it's not the aiming that becomes better as a player gets more experienced but a knowledge of how to exploite a map. |
What you've described applies to any input, K&M included. Also, no matter how much you skill up with a gamepad you'll lag the accuracy of a K&M, which is exactly why it is argued to be a better input device.
Sqully's just arguing for fun. Technically a K&M is a better input for the act of aiming - there's no arguement in that it's a measuable fact.
As I said myself though that doesn't equate to gameplay. The main difference I find is that on console's everything is just slower due to the way games seem to be tuned. Unreal Tournamet 3 felt faster than most on a console, but was still slower than PC.
One other difference I note is that on console's the gamepad seems to steer everything to a pretty flat plane - there is very limited use of vertical space, particularly extreme angles for shooting, compared to the best FPS prior to the explosion of FPS on consoles. Of course this may be more design that function - but it's seems odd to me how artificially flat pretty much every console FPS I've played is.
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Technically its a more accurate and faster method of input. What im challenging you is to prove that the greater accuracy and speed makes the input better. I don't dispute that the interface is faster at aiming at all.
You can easily argue that the gameplay is more fun with a mouse to you because you enjoy the interface better, but can you argue that the interface is better in a blanket statement? 
Btw all the levels in Halo 3 and Gears of War are on multiple different levels. In Halo 3 you're forced to use all the angles all the time because of people flying at you with Wraiths. So maybe you're just admiting to a carnal desire to also own an Xbox 360! 
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Ah, but I don't have to prove that.
Whether accuracy is better or not is going to be an opinion and down to personal preference. If you like speed and unreal accuracy to have most fun then clearly it is, if you want something more real world where you can miss more easily then you won't. Therefore any discussion around that is more or less redundant to the point - i.e. it depends on the individual. You could consider what the majority would say a decider but really you'd need everyone to give each an equal try first so they're not simply voting on what they know vs what they feel is better comparitively.
However, what I can say without fear of arguement is K&M is more accurate input device than gamepad. As this means gamepad has a lower ceiling for how far it can support those who want supreme accuracy, and as you can esaily tune a game to ensure that K&M delivers an experience in line with a gamepad (average developers have being doing that inadvertenly for years!), then K&M is arguable better as it can be used to support a greater spectrum of options, some of which are simply beyond the gamepad due to inherent limitations in the device.
See?
Also the angles in Halo 3, Gears, etc. are mostly much less extreme than on previous PC FPS titles. But as I said this is getting better so hopefully it was more a failure of level designers to think more vertically than anything else.
My main gripe with K&M would be movement speed and control - for something like Oblivion or Fallout 3 I think gamepad has the edge due to the control of movement and creeping around vs K&M (although I'd note you can match it with K&M, the best way I've seen being to control you're movement speed with the rotating wheel input, but this is less intuitive).
Now I could go all PC FPS elitist (where's Shio when you need him?) and take the 'let's duel, you with your level of accuracy and me with mine' route, but that would of course be unfair!
