http://shadowrun.com/behindthescenes/articles/ControllerBalancing.htm said:
Controller Balancing
Sage Merrill: Game Designer
Console Vs PC in a Shooter?!? How are you going to balance that?!
That is exactly what the design team for Shadowrun was thinking when we realized we wanted to have cross-platform play between the Xbox 360 and Vista PC players. In this article I’ll walk you through the process we went through and some of our general design philosophy.
So how do you balance a shooter where console and PC players can play against each other? Controller vs. Mouse & Keyboard, which is better? It’s a question that has been on gamers minds ever since shooters started appearing on consoles. Obviously the mouse is superior, right? I mean the mouse is designed as a hyper-sensitive pointing device and has been refined over the years specifically for that purpose. We all know that the most important element in any shooter game is the ability to quickly get your crosshair over the enemy and pull the trigger. So given that, it’s obvious that the mouse will win every time in a fire fight, regardless of the game, right? Wrong. Don’t misunderstand me, that is exactly what every single member of the design team thought, including me, until we actually tried it. So, what actually happened when we played our first cross-platform game? The controller players trounced the mouse/keyboard players. It wasn’t even close; the mouse players got stomped on. Over and over. So what happened? Did the mouse players just suck? Or was the controller actually a superior aiming device? Short answer: the mouse is better at aiming, but the controller is better at gaming. Long answer: read on.
If you’re even bothering to read this, then you’re probably a gamer of some kind. Being a gamer, you know that good controls are essential to any game. As designers, we want the controls to feel like they are an extension of the player. If the player is blaming the controls for their failures, then we have done something wrong. Additionally, mapping precise aiming control to the sticks on a controller is not a simple problem. There are very few console shooter games that do this well, and even fewer that manage to make it feel like an extension of your will. The design team knew good console controls were going to take some serious time and effort to get right, so we set out to do that first. Lucky for us some of the team members worked on the original Halo, so we had that going for us from the start. I’ll spare you the technical details, but it basically breaks down like this:
The 360 controller is awesome; it is probably the best console controller to date (Ignoring its D-pad, which sucks). The resolution on each stick axis is something like 64K, plenty of resolution to give precise aiming on the screen. Unfortunately the throw distance on the sticks (Throw distance = distance from neutral to pegged) is so small that most humans simply don’t have the motor skills to utilize it. To help alleviate this, and make the controls feel “right”, we do a bunch of tricks to essentially enlarge the stick throw area. What exactly do we do? We map the sticks to a curve so that most of the area is used for micro movement and only the very edge is used for large turns. We also bend the weapon ray a bit within the crosshair (auto-aim). There are a few other proprietary tricks we do, but I can’t tell you the specifics. The point is that we do a bunch of extra work, and tuning to make the controls feel good with a 360 controller. So we did all that work. I spent months tuning and refining the 360 controls, until the team was happy with the results.
So now that we have console controls that we’re happy with we start implementing the mouse/keyboard controls. At this point we are still paranoid that the mouse is going to “own”, so we put in all kinds of extra code to help us balance the game play. Meaning that we remove all the controller assistance, and auto-aiming stuff. We also add the concept of accuracy “blow out” from quick turning. Let me explain. In our game we use an accuracy model on the weapons, meaning that if you hold down the trigger or run or jump while firing a weapon you will be less accurate. This is similar to any of the Clancy games, or CS. So for the mouse we also added the idea that if you spin around 180 very quickly your weapon will be less accurate than if you stood still and fired. We take a guess at some values and go into the lab to see how it plays.
To everyone’s surprise, the mouse players get owned. Ok, so we overdid the numbers, no big deal. We make some tweaks and try it again. Same result. This cycle continues until we have everything (auto-aim, targeting assistance, and accuracy) turned back on for the mouse. It’s a lot closer, but the mouse players are still losing. WTF? Do the mouse players just suck? No, some of our testers play semi-professional gaming, so we know they don’t totally suck (In fact they recently dominated in a shooter tournament at PAX). Is it because our game plays so much differently than a standard shooter? Partially, but we also found a bug. The mouse players were getting slightly more recoil when shot, this caused them to lose most of their fire fights. So we fixed that, and the mouse players finally started to win. So now we know we are close to having a balanced game.
Again, we turn off all the targeting assistance stuff for the mouse, and test. It’s pretty even. The mouse players are a little better at long range combat, but the controller players are better close in.
So what is it about our game that makes it possible for controller players to hold their own? Two things: 1 – we do some things to assist targeting with the controller so you don’t have to be pixel precise. 2 - Easy access to all the other abilities and powers. No one is disputing the fact that the mouse is a superior aiming device for the standard shooter, but in our game its not all about how fast can you get your crosshair on the head of your opponent. That’s been done, and frankly is not all that exciting anymore. Shadowrun is a tactical shooter, it’s all about the situation and whether or not you are setup to take advantage of it. If you find yourself in combat where you don’t have the advantage, perhaps you should consider some counter move or quick retreat. Its always better to live to fight another day. The controller is designed to give players quick and fluid access to all the games controls. It also gives players analog control of movement speed. This means that they are able to maneuver around the map much more effectively than the mouse players. Therefore, they are better at close combat.
So, in the end the mouse is better at aiming and the controller is better at gaming. No big surprise since that’s exactly what they were designed to do. Some will say that the work we do to make the controller aiming feel good is basically cheating, and that its not true “skill” that helps them win. From one perspective that might be true, but you have to look at our goal. We want to level the playing field between PC and console. Players of equal skill should be able to play how ever they want to, and enjoy the experience. In the end, its not about which control scheme is better, it’s about player preference. What is more comfortable for you, and do you play better with the controller or the mouse/keyboard?
-Sage
if mouse and key control was added to newer console fps, id have enjoyed gamed like red faction2, black, area51, moh series much more. as it stands if not been able to complete em due to controls.
It would feel great, Or what about GOW with the Wii: Remote? Gotta say I've only played GOW momentarily, And found it fun to play, Does anyone agree it would be fun with something similar to the Wii: remote?
