Generally speaking, I would say that IR is worse across the board for controlling a camera and crosshair in TPS and FPS games than DualAnalog+Gyro is. Wii IR camera control is less quick, less precise, and less accurate. Sure, it's intuitive, and it feels good, but I think people continue to overstate its quality even now. Here's a collection of facts about Wii-style IR aiming that make it the clear lesser of the two motion control options for shooters in from my perspective:
- motion response times are noticibly less immediate than gyro
- Wii Remote IR sensors operate at at a 1280x720 resolution, which was fine when it was used for bounding-box style camera control systems in 480p FPS games, but less precise for controlling high-resolution games
- Wii Remote IR has a limited range - point too far up, down, or to the side (anything that makes it so that the Wiimote's IR camera loses view of the sensor bar) and you lose all control over your aim for a moment. And because of the nature of IR control, for control consistency, you must play in the same seat every time, for changing the angle or distance at which the Wii Remote is viewing the IR Sensor Bar will change the way the Wii Remote interprets that IR information. Gyro doesn't have these problems. One can make minuscule adjustments or extreme, 90 degree wrist twist style adjustments without worry. One can move to wherever they'd like in the room or stretch however they like and play, without having to compensate for differences in how the controller will interpret its own location from that position.
- When using IR to control a shooter, the on-screen location of your cursor
also determines your turning speed through a bounding box system, which makes it so that tracking moving targets becomes an exercise in juggling your camera facing and your crosshair position simultaneously.
- Due to the nature of the bounding box system, it is more difficult to quickly and accurately orient your camera than even with an analog stick, and the accuracy of being able to
point your crosshair at enemies... is offset by the fact that aiming your crosshair anywhere
besides the center of the screen will generally cause camera movement that necessitates further adjustment to aim.
I played all the great Wii shooters to death. I spent time on Youtube back in the day watching people play, among other games, Conduit 2 and MW Reflex on Wii to pick up playstyle tips. I've never seen anyone play so well with a Wii Remote so as to be convinced in retrospect that it remains the unchallenged best console control option for a shooter, or anything like the mouse-level FPS input device that it had been made out to be throughout the Wii's life. The caveats are too great.
You can do stuff like
this with DA+Gyro. Note how the player in this clip takes advantage of both their ability to make precise microadjustments to their aim, and their ability to make sweeping 180 shots with precision. This sort of play is more feasible with DA+Gyro because the player does not need to balance the on-screen location of the cursor against their active turning speed.
I've never had someone show me an example of Wii IR pointing being used with that degree of accuracy and speed in a shooter game. The best I've ever seen were vids posted by TCon2 players, who kind of tended to overstate their skill with IR because it's what drew them to the game and they wanted to extol its relative benefits over Duan Analog. Alongside them were some moderately impressive BLOPS 2 clips. And even those videos were kind of just not up to snuff. Those players were not aiming and turning with the kind of speed and precision I should expect to associate with the best available control scheme for the genre. Average play isn't elevated just because the player got a headshot or two that they might not have on an analog stick, but for those who actually presented evidence of their 'high level play' on Wii Remote + Chuk, it seemed like that's how they felt.
Like I said, Wii Remote + Chuk is an intuitive control scheme that feels good to use, though. That'll be enough for a lot of people, depending on how much they value comfort and an intuitive feel. However, I maintain that gyro + analog is the superior of the two options, because using gyro for micro movements and analog for macro movements enables pinpoint precision without sacrificing immediacy or any level of control. It probably doesn't help that, while I think BoTW has good gyro support (marred only by the fact that control stick sensitivity is not up to snuff at all), Fortnite has awful gyro support. The games that ultimately make the best case for gyro aim are games like Splatoon (where the gyro really IS that much better, as you might be able to tell by the video above) as well as all PC games which support it (any PC game that supports simultaneous mouse/gamepad input does).
I'm generally a big fan of gyro, as I believe it to be the way forward for comfortable and precise FPS and TPS control on console. Here's some posts I've made RE: gyro in the past, hopefully my description of gyro in these posts illuminates my reasoning for preferring it over pointer control, given the constraints I've highlighted above.
A joystick controls the velocity of the movement of your camera. The X and Y value of your joystick's physical position determines how fast your camera/crosshair can move, with an upper limit. The small, one inch range of motion afforded by most analog sticks favors extremes rather than accuracy and is the primary reason why stick aim is considered less precise than (1:1) mouse. That's relative.
A mouse controls the movement of your camera directly - without turn speed constraints or upper limits, instantaneously, 1:1 with your input. Translating the speed and distance of your physical movement directly into reliable and consistent onscreen movement. That's 1:1, or absolute.
Gyro controls the movement of your camera directly - without turn speed constraints or upper limits, instantaneously, 1:1 with your input. Translating the speed and distance of your physical movement directly into reliable and consistent onscreen movement. That's 1:1, or absolute.
Gyro doesn't replicate the nudging and moving of a stick - it, in fact, replicate's a mouse's ability to instantly translate your input 1:1 into onscreen camera movement, regardless of the velocity or distance of the physical movement. If it were replicating the nudging and moving of a stick, then it would be significantly less useful - something I've actually observed in practice, since you can map Dualshock 4/Steam Controller gyro to stick directly on Steam, and it's awful. Whereas it works exactly as intended, when you map Dualshock 4/Steam Controller gyro to mouselook, because they operate on the same principles.
With gyro, I can, without difficulty or any tradeoffs to speak of, display both finesse - keeping my crosshair squarely on a moving target while I'm moving, or snapping to an onscreen target's head just as I would with my mouse - and speed - turning on a dime thanks to high stick sensitivity. Gyro's effective range is limited by your wrists, so it's not so useful for macro camera control, but that's what the right stick is there for - and the right stick is limited in terms of accuracy, immediacy, and fine-point precision, but that's what gyro is there for. They compliment each other quite well.
Splatoon 2 is the only example I can forward for a console-exclusive shooter that supports motion control, but even then, it should be telling to you that motion control is favored as the competitive standard there, even despite the awkward constraints that came with its specific implementation. It's because it allows players something much closer to mouselike accuracy and immediacy than sticks alone do.
The gameplay in that footage is nearly indistinguishable from mouselook, and is visibly beyond the level of combined speed and precision that even skilled players exhibit using a an analog stick alone to manipulate a camera, even with the sort of mechanical assistance designed into nearly all dual-analog shooters as a direct concession to the well-known and well-understood constraints of the input method. Generally players are not going to be doing stuff like that with sticks alone. Generally, the limitations of DA as an input method are prohibitive to exhibiting that level of combined precision and speed with sticks alone - a similar kind of gulf that is generally understood to exist between analog camera control and mouselook.
That's why, as someone who's broken down and analyzed input methods for shooters in search of technical reasoning to describe each one's strengths and constraints in the past, I sometimes view disagreements relating to the nitty-gritty of how they work and where their limitations are, less as a matter of conflicting opinion, and more as a matter of fully acknowledging and understanding the capabilities and constraints and upper limits of dual analog control compared other available input methods. Like, it's a given that minute accuracy and precision is sacrificed for turning speed at high sensitivities with sticks alone, as sensitivity scales across the entire physical range of the stick - high sensitivity for a high max turn speed means the inner range of the stick is now much more sensitive too. While that can be mitigated somewhat with a skilled hand, the limited physical movement range of an analog stick means that that tradeoff will always exist.
Gyro allows you to retain a very high turning speed using your sticks, and adds a mouselook-like layer of precise aim control on top of that. 1:1 - or in other words, moving your controller a half-inch will turn your camera by a certain amount every single time, no matter how quickly or slowly you make that motion. The chief advantage of mouselook, shared by gyro - meaning that, if someone is 90 degrees to my side, I can reliably and -instantly- turn and fire upon them, and then -instantly- return to my original facing. Even using sticks at high sensitivities, it is far less viable to make such quick, accurate, and precise maneuvers, as aiming a camera with a stick isn't 1:1 - there's an upper limit to the speed at which you can turn and aim and orient yourself as a result of the nature of relative (stick) aiming, which functions by translating the x/y value of your stick's physical orientation into a velocity and direction at which your camera will turn over time with an upper ceiling, versus 1:1 (mouselook/gyro) aiming, which has no upper speed limit and which responds instantly in accordance to whatever movement you do make, extreme or slight.
Ergo, there are actions and modes/styles of play which are viable with gyro which are arguably not as viable with sticks alone, or which would demand more from a sticks-only player than from a sticks & gyro player - in the same vein as how there are things you can do with mouselook that you couldn't do with sticks, or which would demand far more from a sticks player than someone using a mouse. Imagine attempting a smooth, fast 360 degree spin with an analog stick while hitting four smallish targets spaced evenly around you, in a console shooter. Difficult to imagine without halting your spin to adjust your aim, even despite those aforementioned mechanical assists that exist in shooter games designed for controllers as a result of developers understanding and designing in accordance to that input method's constraints and limitations. That same challenge, however, is not a particularly hard ask with mouselook, or gyro assist.
(Gyro + dual analog is) the best of both worlds. It's better than dual analog alone because you can make precise adjustments to your aim on the fly, and it's better than traditional IR aiming because your camera turn speed isn't dependent on a bounding box and the on-screen position of your crosshair. You can use the analog stick at higher sensitivities than usual to orient your camera, while using gyro to place your crosshair with precision.
Best possible control scheme would be an IR + Dual Analog + Gyro combination. Dual analog for macro adjustments, gyro for microadjustments, IR for UI control and optional crosshair placement. Alongside a toggle button that, when pressed, returns the camera to forward facing (ala Splatoon 2), and when held, enables the user to place the on-screen crosshair anywhere on the screen (Wii-style).
