I remember my friend bringing over his Xbox and playing Halo for the first time. I was constantly looking down at the ground while he was pistol sniping me across the map. Figured it out eventually.
Gaming literacy is a real thing. Most people who didn’t grow up with 3D games don’t intuitively understand it. I’ve seen many boomers either stare at their feet or the ceiling & they have no clue how to solve their situation because they are disoriented. Same with young kids learning.
I’ve always wondered what’s specifically going on their minds when that happens. I remember getting into shooters and pretty much immediately understanding the two separate axes in Duke Nukem 3D at like age 7-8 (yeah I played violent games when I was young my parents only restricted movies). Maybe that’s why? My brain was just better able to learn at that age? Or is it that I am autistic? Is neurology a factor?
EDIT: Just realized, even younger, I played and beat Star Fox SNES, which only had 1 axis, where aiming and moving were bound together. Maybe it was the baby step of playing a simpler 3D shooter game.
You can try emulating how they feel by finding a game that lets you bind side to side movement on the mouse, and rotation to A and D. Some old shooters were set up that way I think.
My dad always played Doom and Heretic by MOVING with the mouse and aiming with the arrows on the keyboard. It was so weird watching him play. And despite him playing Wolfenstein and Doom and Heretic and Rise of the Triad, he quit once we got Quake. I still played Quake using nothing but the keyboard, like I did the other games mentioned. I didn’t start using the modern wasd and mouse setup until Tribes 2, since it was fairly close to the defaults (IIRC, it used asdf instead of wasd but I rebound them so it was more like the arrow keys; just one set of keys to the right of wasd. I used R to go forward).
I’ve seen this happen with 20 and 30 year olds.
Its an entire learned skill that a large segment of the population never learned.
… unfortunately, much like reading and writing, these days.
But yeah, the idea that… you can move your position in 3d, with wasd or a dpad or a stick… and also orient your view angle with a mouse or stick … at the same time?
This is utterly baffling and disorienting to a lot of people who’ve never played a first person perspective game before.
Its … part of why AAA games are more often than not third person, in the last decade.
Its easier to pickup for a noobie, because you have a constant point of reference, you can always see the avatar of the player, camera movements are less sensitive and less drastic because you have a wider FOV.
But… people live their whole lives in first person view?
Yeah, it’s just wild to me, that we went full-force ahead with the whole 3D thing, when you lock out so many potential players with it.
With 2D games, you can chuck someone a controller and even if they’re just haphazardly pressing buttons, they can still participate in the game. With 3D, no chance.And even those who do have practice still struggle with it. Think of a difficult 3D game and I bet it’s a valid joke that the true end boss is the camera.
It’s even a thing in our generation - my now ex was pretty stumped playing skyrim. 2d games were no issue.
My best friend still uses “Legacy” (goldeneye) controls and gets mad when games don’t have that option. He has even emailed developers about it. Half of them have no idea what he is talking about because they are not old enough to remember the before time.
We roast him for his special controls but he is better than all of us so I guess, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Did you know that GoldenEye actually has dualstick controls, you just had to use two controllers
That’s horrifying. Someone needs to tell the McElroy brothers. I bet they would have fun with that.
I remember Goldeneye but I played it on GameCube so have no idea how more traditional controllers handled input.
Goldeneye Rogue Agent is a very different game to 1997’s Goldeneye, tho.
N64 only has 1 joystick so games had to work around that. The joystick makes you walk forward/backwards and look left/right. There are also the C buttons that act as a D-pad for your right hand. Up/down is look and left/right is strafe. There were considered advanced movements that the majority of casual players could ignore.
I remember goldeneye. And yeah it would be annoying. You could probably plug the snipe commands onto the right thumbstick. But yeah trying to emulate 90s single stick controls onto double stick controllers is a pain. Almost as bad as trying to emulate a Wii lol.
Thats because he discovered the secret that we all eventually discover when playing with dual sticks:
You don’t actually aim with the right stick, you aim by strafing.
Think about it, when you’ve lined up the perfect shot in the distance but the enemy keeps moving, do you readjust your aim? Or do you duck walk in a little circle whilst prone until the crosshair lines up
No. I plug in my mouse
Youtube thumbnail: Bearded guy pointing backwards at a mouse, title: “The one hack gamers don’t wan’t you to know!”
At least there was a transition period. I remember configuring TimeSplitters 2 and the original Halo to let me use the good old tank controls I was used to from GoldenEye.
deleted by creator
On the contrary, I played GoldenEye for the first time last year and I was amazed at how well it controlled with that ridiculous controller!
I implore everybody to play the classic GoldenEye with dual controller setup in the menu so you can do twin stick shooting controls. If you use an emulator, you can bind two controllers to one controller and play GoldenEye in a way you’ve never played it before.
The combination of the animations and precision aiming with the twin stick shooting turns you into a demon. It’s so cinematic to quickly strafe a corner and then unload your gun just like into a horde of enemies and see them all fucking jump in different directions as they die as you spray your gun left and right standing still like you’re fucking Scarface it’s perfect.
deleted by creator
I do! I play shooters from every era. Using the d-pad for movement isn’t too dissimilar from WASD movement IMO, and the joystick for aiming is standard. I thought it worked quite well.
deleted by creator
I’ve played the OG Duke a little bit on modern PC, but otherwise I don’t have much experience with it.
The og is a side scroller
deleted by creator
My grandmother owned a PS1 which was the first console I ever played on as a kid.
But it was also the last console she ever owned and she said it was because of the move to thumbsticks made her gave up on gaming. Kinda sad…
I gave up on console gaming for the same reason (the last console I owned was a Super Nintendo) but that’s because mouse+keyboard is just so superior that using dual-joystick controllers feels like punishment rather than entertainment.
I remember a LOT of people giving up gaming entirely during the transition to 3D because of this. That was when a lot of the people who experienced the arcade era stopped keeping up.
I grew up on n64 and I don’t recall having any issue with jumping to dual joy sticks. Like it was so natural… I probably had a week of adjustment that I just don’t remember.
nahh i remember the struggle going from armored core with the shoulder buttons to the 2nd joystick. it was real, and the struggle wasn’t all the players. the devs really didn’t seem to get it.
nothing to do with the n64 other than i was there in the trenches with ya
Although I do miss interesting control schemes, everything is almost homogenous now and quite boring.
Too Human was an interesting case point. Though not a terribly successful game, they did try and make a control scheme to benefit their gamers.
The game is an ARPG which wasn’t common on consoles at the time, and more often played on PC with mouse and keyboard. The developers knew that players would spend hours on the game and needed a low impact way of playing that type of game with a controller.
They created a control scheme that relied almost entirely on just the two joysticks, moving and attacking and some special moves could all be handled with small movements, this made long gaming sessions comfortable, and far better than button mashing and getting RSI in your thumb joints 😅
Although I do miss interesting control schemes, everything is almost homogenous now and quite boring.
I don’t at all. And I cherish the fact that I can rebind old inputs at will with Steam Input + emulators.
I rebinded the controls of Armored Core 1 so it played with modern shooter controls. Made it so much better and intuitive and now I wonder if the only reason I sucked at the game back in the day was because of its archaic control scheme.
You might be interested in the way brothers: a tale of two sons uses their controls. Each stick controls one of the two characters. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it certainly is different.
that’s just the nostalgia talking, play EYE and you’ll go “oh, yeah…that’s why we went towards standard control scheme”
I think you misunderstand my point.
I’m not saying I want to have bad impractical controls.
I’m saying I enjoy it when devs take risks and put in more specific control schemes. A lot of Nintendo games try this for example and it works really well.
I’m a big tinkerer on Steam Input and will often change control schemes to help make it more comfortable and immersive.
For along time I preferred the Goldeneye control scheme and I learned it so well that I still revert back sometimes (left stick to forward/back and rotate and right stick [c buttons] to pitch snd strafe). Most games don’t offer this at all anymore, but it was seriously good for peeking around corners. Modern left-strafe/right-look inverts it.
I still need flightstick pitch for looking (inverted-Y camera)
I too only play with inverted viewing. My friends hate it lol
Yes, the y-axis must be inverted. Otherwise I spend the whole game staring at my feet or the sky.
Oddly, growing up my younger brother was the opposite. It was annoying to take turns playing games with him, because we have to adjust the settings between handoffs.
I’ve been trying to play it on switch and it’s basically impossible with 2 sticks. Also it’s really jarring after a few hundred hours in breath of the wild.
I grew up on D-pad and mouse so any of my controll skills fly out the window when given a c-stick.
Love gyro aim though lol. More akin to a mouse.
First game I ever played that had that had an arena where you’re running around fighting enemies and the emcee bad guy was like the dude from The Running Man, and he would yell “TOTAL CARNAGE! IIIIIIIII LOVE IT!!!” damn what was that game called? SMASH TV!
“Good luck! You’ll need it!”
I’d buy that for a dollar!
I’m looking forward to using emulators to force older games into something like modern dual analog. Megaman Legends works pretty okay like that so far. Armored Core works pretty amazingly for it as well.
I need to try it with Fur Fighters, which I always felt had a lot of potential as a platforming third person shooter. But it only has one built in dual analog control scheme that works backwards - right stick is movement, and left stick is aiming. Now I can switch it!
Ship of Harkinian is a PC port for Ocarina of Time that includes a bunch of quality of life improvements. You can set it to use right stick for camera controls, makes the whole game a much better experience.
I might try that someday, but I’m probably not going to do another OoT playthrough unless it’s a modded version with a lot of new content or something.
I love these decomp projects though. Really looking forward to the SotN one being finished. A lot of great romhacks and stuff are already coming out of it.
Back in my day we played Doom without any analog inputs, and strafing required a key combination so the sideway arrow keys would strafe instead of turn.
That said I did enjoy Doom the Dark Ages with my mouse earlier today, haha.
arrow keys, alt to strafe, ctrl to fire, space to interact. we made it work.
Yup, one of my first experiences with this was during a splitscreen multiplayer match of TimeSplitters 2 with a friend who was already clearly well-practiced and highly competitive. Sink or swim they say.
Y’all laugh but I spent a lot of years not gaming such that this is very recent. I grew up playing pong and Atari, then grew away. When I had kids, the Wii was perfect. Then my kids became teens and it wasn’t enough. Suddenly everything was Xbox, then pc gaming.
Suddenly if I wanted to interact with them I had to figure out this alien contraption with too many buttons and joysticks. After about five years (playing every 2-4 weeks because who has time), I’m ok technically. But there’s no way I can do fighting or any twitch moves, and I still sometimes blank on which button does what - it’s not engrained enough to just do it and I’ll never play frequently enough for that to become true
And Microsoft’s terminology doesn’t help - wtf do “bumper” and “trigger” mean? I still remember those buttons as “opposite of bottom”and “opposite of top”
Bumper is the smaller top one, because it acts and feels kinda like a car bumper. Trigger is the larger bottom one, because it acts like the trigger of a gun.
I, for one, prefer the quiet dignity of controlling Leon Kennedy like a runaway semi with a gun.
