A friend of mine mentioned Homefront: The Revolution in passing the other day and I thought I'd download it and remind myself of that game. Disappointingly, I found myself met with some of the worst camera controls in a shooter that I have ever experienced.
There is a tremendous input delay, seemingly caused by a mixture of a large deadzone, and a literal input delay where the game takes a moment to respond. On top of that, the menu only features a 'sensitivity' slider, so both aim down sights and regular aiming are at the same sensitivity, making it very difficult to get any sense of precision in the game. Irrespective of everything else in the game, for me this is enough to fundamentally ruin the experience, every fight feels like a struggle with the controls, and I find myself adapting my gameplay around that rather than playing the game in a way that feels natural. For instance, instead of trying to aim at enemies, I'll let them walk into my sightline then shoot, which leads to a more passive and unenjoyable style of play.
Homefront: The Revolution is just one of many games that I've played recently which have fundamentally terrible controls, and control options. And I wanted to make a thread to dedicate towards some of those games for a moment, and hopefully maybe discuss what makes a game control well.
What I really don't understand with this issue that keeps cropping up is that you're willing to spend $20-50 million on development of these often triple A titles, and then you're willing to undermine everyone's development efforts by shipping a game that fundamentally feels difficult to control. Everything you place into your game, fantastic narrative, interesting set pieces, cool gameplay options, are subservient to how your game controls because those core controls are what gets the player from each of those moments to another.
They Feel Fine to Me
I wanted to dedicate a section of this post for the folks that will come here and discredit others experiences with the idea that there's nothing wrong with the controls, because they feel fine to them. Whenever I try and talk about the controls of a particular game, this group of people always exist, and some of them will even tell you that adapting to the awful controls is a matter of 'getting good' at the game, or that the 'stiff controls' are just 'weighty' because that's the 'design intent'.
As someone that's worked in game development across a large number of titles. I have never spoken to a developer that has expressed that they are making their controls unresponsive because they want their game to have a certain (awful) feel to it. The vast, vast majority of these incidences are the result of the development staff either
Control Gone Wrong
Quake Remake
I very recently picked this up for something like £10 on PSN. This game has awful aim acceleration, and there's no means in which you can turn this off in the menus. On the PC version I hear you can make things a bit better by using the console commands, but anyone on console is out of luck.
Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint
I want to like Ghost Recon games because they provide big open world sandboxes, but there's just so much input lag that the game feels pretty unresponsive.
This is a perfect example of a very-triple A game coming from a team with all the right tools to make it feel good to play, messing things up. I didn't have these issues with Advanced Warfighter or even Future Soldier, so if I were to hazard a guess I imagine the input latency comes as a result of the open world and tech changes between those games.
Doom Eternal
This one isn't so bad once you turn off 'aim smoothing' which basically adjusts your aim to make it look smoother, but less accurate to what you tried to do. Why is a feature that is literally designed to make the game less responsive, enabled by default? I imagine a lot of players played the game with aim smoothing enabled, wondering why the controls felt a bit stiff at times. The options to make adjustments to the controls are... okay, but still lacking when it comes to things like deadzone options and response curves that could make the game feel a lot snappier than it does.
Rust (Console)
Good god where do I begin. This is one of the worst controlling games I have ever played, and the settings are really the icing on the cake. Why does the default control mapping have vertical sensitivity greater than horizontal? Why, no matter what I do in the settings, can I not fix this? While there seems to be a robust set of settings options, it seems as though irrespective of how you adjust them, there's no means to get things just right. I don't know if the settings don't work or what but the controls alone made the game miserable for me. Perhaps they've addressed some of these issues in a patch, but I'm long gone.
Homefront: The Revolution
I mentioned this one at the top, but it comes down to poor settings and high aim acceleration and deadzone issues.
Pay Day 2
Large deadzones, very responsive controls with aim acceleration that seemingly can't be reduced. If I recall correctly there's also no means of adjusting the ads and regular sensitivity independently. I used to have a friend that worked at Overkill and he claimed that the console controls were something of an afterthought, unsurprising given the end result.
Far Cry 3 Remake
Crazy deadzone makes the game almost unplayable. No patch for this yet? There are some deadzone issues in the original too, but that doesn't justify somehow making them worse in the remake. Ubisoft seem to be a common culpret when it comes to these issues.
Paladins
This game has a fair set of options but irrespective of what you do it's difficult or near impossible to get things just right because there are only three response curve options and each of them are quite 'odd'. Paladins also happily matches you with it's PC player base online, who obviously have far fewer concerns with the games controls.
Here's a good reddit post that goes into the issues with more detail than I could, because I haven't played this game in some time.
www.reddit.com
They also spontaneously changed the aim feel via a patch a few years back, without giving players the option to make their own adjustment forward. A lot of folks liked how it felt before. In general, this is bad practice unless you want to push a lot of players away from your game. If you fix your controls, do it the Uncharted 3 / Killzone 2 way where you provide them with an additional setting that they can enable at their will. If you're worried that players won't notice it, advertise it in-game when these players return.
Uncharted 3
Uncharted 3 somewhat famously shipped it's multiplayer component with awful controls, and Naughtydog had to get members of the community in to come and explain the problem to them before offering a resolution. The baffling thing was that the controls in the multiplayer component of the game were just fine...
This one is especially odd to me because there's clearly a guy at Naughtydog (or there was at the time) that knew what the controls should feel like, because that person ensured the the multiplayer component of the game felt good. What's odd is that that person didn't play the singleplayer and inform the rest of the design team that the controls felt different. Different from the multiplayer, and different from Uncharted 2 and it's multiplayer.
www.eurogamer.net
I'm not going to mention Killzone 2 here, but that game was in a similar position to Uncharted 3 too, with unresponsive controls out of the gate that ended up being improved via a patch.
Splatoon 1 and 2
Regardless of how you feel about Splatoons implementation of gyro controls (I'm a fan of them personally), the gyro controls in part shine because the regular configuration is really quite poor. There's no option to adjust the games deadzone, and only a basic sensitivity slider is present in the game. So if you don't like how it feels out of the gate you're out of luck.
Control Done Right
There are a lot of games which I think have 'acceptable' controls. Games like Far Cry 5, Destiny 2, The Division and Destiny all have control schemes which I think for me personally, are good enough for the game to be enjoyable. However, these games still tend to lack options to make adjustments, so there are likely still players who feel that the game doesn't feel right for them.
So when it comes to the games that get their controls right, I think it comes down to three crucial factors...
Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends
I've bundled these together because by and large, they feel the same and offer the same control options. Both of these games feature a good, and very controllable default configuration. Furthermore, they do a fantastic job in letting players customise the feel of the controls to their own liking, through multi-layered options on the games controls.
At the top level we have a fairly basic sensitivity option for both regular aim, and aim down sights, as well as some basic response curve and deadzone adjustments which affect how responsive the controls feel.
But the game also features an advanced set of options, so that players can tweak the controls to their liking.
This means that anyone playing the game has the option to easily make quick adjustments without delving into a complex set of settings and feeling overwhelmed, but those that want a particular feel to the controls have the option to adjust until they are content. Furthermore, the game features a 'firing range' practice space wherein players can practice and tweak their settings in a pressure free environment.
Battlefield V
Similar to Apex and Titanfall 2, Battlefield hits most of the right notes. It has a robust set of options for players to fiddle with, with both advanced and regular look settings that players can make adjustments to. It's perhaps lacking the degree of control over response curves that Apex has, but it does have a neat option to normalise your sensitivity across ads and non-ads camera movement which is likely valuable to some players. Furthermore, there's a firing range style practice space for players to get comfortable and tweak their settings without pressure.
Unlike some other games in this list, battlefield also has a tonne of different aiming conditions to consider. Is the player in a tank? A turret? A plane? And so forth. So it's great that the options allow the player to get into the detail of all of that. Some of the language used in the settings is a little obtuse though, with terms like 'uniform soldier aiming' as a setting, as well as a 'coefficient slider' but these do come with pretty good descriptions.
Call of Duty Cold War
Like the games listed above, this game features a good set of default options and an advanced set of control options. It's definitely lacking more of the advanced options than Apex and Battlefield, which leaves it a little behind, but it does have the essential settings such as deadzone adjustment and also features some options that the other titles don't, such as allowing players to adjust their style of aim assist.
And unfortunately, that's about it. I was going to include Overwatch in the list of games that do it right because on paper I think it fits the part, but the response curve options always feel 'off' to me and I think the settings they offer are a little intuitive, with terms like 'dual zone' and 'exponential ramp' flying around.
Giving Controllers a Bad Name
I think there's a common perception that controls will be bad, or even should be bad because of the very fact, that you're using a controller. The sentiment that 'Controllers are bad for shooters, so what did you expect?' seems common. I think in some cases, this even leads to developers dismissing the idea that they can achieve good results with the how the game feels to play on a controller.
However, irrespective of how you feel about playing games on a controller, what we absolutely do know is that they can be a whole lot better to play with the right configuration and settings. Developers should be taking the time to get this right, and it's pretty sad to see something as central to how the game feels undermine a $20 million
dollar game.
Why is this happening?
I'm not completely clueless as to why this type of thing is happening and I do have a number of suggestions that can be the cause, so I'll go ahead and discuss some of these below.
Talking Points
I just wanted to vent about this really because it's incredibly frustrating to pick up a game and find it controls poorly, especially when the solution to many of those issues feels plainly obvious. So thanks for hearing me out, and here are some talking points to help guide discussion...
There is a tremendous input delay, seemingly caused by a mixture of a large deadzone, and a literal input delay where the game takes a moment to respond. On top of that, the menu only features a 'sensitivity' slider, so both aim down sights and regular aiming are at the same sensitivity, making it very difficult to get any sense of precision in the game. Irrespective of everything else in the game, for me this is enough to fundamentally ruin the experience, every fight feels like a struggle with the controls, and I find myself adapting my gameplay around that rather than playing the game in a way that feels natural. For instance, instead of trying to aim at enemies, I'll let them walk into my sightline then shoot, which leads to a more passive and unenjoyable style of play.
Homefront: The Revolution is just one of many games that I've played recently which have fundamentally terrible controls, and control options. And I wanted to make a thread to dedicate towards some of those games for a moment, and hopefully maybe discuss what makes a game control well.
What I really don't understand with this issue that keeps cropping up is that you're willing to spend $20-50 million on development of these often triple A titles, and then you're willing to undermine everyone's development efforts by shipping a game that fundamentally feels difficult to control. Everything you place into your game, fantastic narrative, interesting set pieces, cool gameplay options, are subservient to how your game controls because those core controls are what gets the player from each of those moments to another.
They Feel Fine to Me
I wanted to dedicate a section of this post for the folks that will come here and discredit others experiences with the idea that there's nothing wrong with the controls, because they feel fine to them. Whenever I try and talk about the controls of a particular game, this group of people always exist, and some of them will even tell you that adapting to the awful controls is a matter of 'getting good' at the game, or that the 'stiff controls' are just 'weighty' because that's the 'design intent'.
As someone that's worked in game development across a large number of titles. I have never spoken to a developer that has expressed that they are making their controls unresponsive because they want their game to have a certain (awful) feel to it. The vast, vast majority of these incidences are the result of the development staff either
- Not knowing what 'good controls' are (their staff don't have the experience in this particular area)
- Not taking enough time and consideration towards making a game control well
Control Gone Wrong
Quake Remake
I very recently picked this up for something like £10 on PSN. This game has awful aim acceleration, and there's no means in which you can turn this off in the menus. On the PC version I hear you can make things a bit better by using the console commands, but anyone on console is out of luck.
Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint
I want to like Ghost Recon games because they provide big open world sandboxes, but there's just so much input lag that the game feels pretty unresponsive.
This is a perfect example of a very-triple A game coming from a team with all the right tools to make it feel good to play, messing things up. I didn't have these issues with Advanced Warfighter or even Future Soldier, so if I were to hazard a guess I imagine the input latency comes as a result of the open world and tech changes between those games.
Doom Eternal
This one isn't so bad once you turn off 'aim smoothing' which basically adjusts your aim to make it look smoother, but less accurate to what you tried to do. Why is a feature that is literally designed to make the game less responsive, enabled by default? I imagine a lot of players played the game with aim smoothing enabled, wondering why the controls felt a bit stiff at times. The options to make adjustments to the controls are... okay, but still lacking when it comes to things like deadzone options and response curves that could make the game feel a lot snappier than it does.
Rust (Console)
Good god where do I begin. This is one of the worst controlling games I have ever played, and the settings are really the icing on the cake. Why does the default control mapping have vertical sensitivity greater than horizontal? Why, no matter what I do in the settings, can I not fix this? While there seems to be a robust set of settings options, it seems as though irrespective of how you adjust them, there's no means to get things just right. I don't know if the settings don't work or what but the controls alone made the game miserable for me. Perhaps they've addressed some of these issues in a patch, but I'm long gone.
Homefront: The Revolution
I mentioned this one at the top, but it comes down to poor settings and high aim acceleration and deadzone issues.
Pay Day 2
Large deadzones, very responsive controls with aim acceleration that seemingly can't be reduced. If I recall correctly there's also no means of adjusting the ads and regular sensitivity independently. I used to have a friend that worked at Overkill and he claimed that the console controls were something of an afterthought, unsurprising given the end result.
Far Cry 3 Remake
Crazy deadzone makes the game almost unplayable. No patch for this yet? There are some deadzone issues in the original too, but that doesn't justify somehow making them worse in the remake. Ubisoft seem to be a common culpret when it comes to these issues.
Paladins
This game has a fair set of options but irrespective of what you do it's difficult or near impossible to get things just right because there are only three response curve options and each of them are quite 'odd'. Paladins also happily matches you with it's PC player base online, who obviously have far fewer concerns with the games controls.
Here's a good reddit post that goes into the issues with more detail than I could, because I haven't played this game in some time.
Reddit - Dive into anything
www.reddit.com
They also spontaneously changed the aim feel via a patch a few years back, without giving players the option to make their own adjustment forward. A lot of folks liked how it felt before. In general, this is bad practice unless you want to push a lot of players away from your game. If you fix your controls, do it the Uncharted 3 / Killzone 2 way where you provide them with an additional setting that they can enable at their will. If you're worried that players won't notice it, advertise it in-game when these players return.
Uncharted 3
Uncharted 3 somewhat famously shipped it's multiplayer component with awful controls, and Naughtydog had to get members of the community in to come and explain the problem to them before offering a resolution. The baffling thing was that the controls in the multiplayer component of the game were just fine...
This one is especially odd to me because there's clearly a guy at Naughtydog (or there was at the time) that knew what the controls should feel like, because that person ensured the the multiplayer component of the game felt good. What's odd is that that person didn't play the singleplayer and inform the rest of the design team that the controls felt different. Different from the multiplayer, and different from Uncharted 2 and it's multiplayer.
Uncharted 3 aiming controls to be patched
An upcoming Uncharted 3 patch will offer a fix for those unhappy with the game's refined aiming controls. According to …
www.eurogamer.net
I'm not going to mention Killzone 2 here, but that game was in a similar position to Uncharted 3 too, with unresponsive controls out of the gate that ended up being improved via a patch.
Splatoon 1 and 2
Regardless of how you feel about Splatoons implementation of gyro controls (I'm a fan of them personally), the gyro controls in part shine because the regular configuration is really quite poor. There's no option to adjust the games deadzone, and only a basic sensitivity slider is present in the game. So if you don't like how it feels out of the gate you're out of luck.
Control Done Right
There are a lot of games which I think have 'acceptable' controls. Games like Far Cry 5, Destiny 2, The Division and Destiny all have control schemes which I think for me personally, are good enough for the game to be enjoyable. However, these games still tend to lack options to make adjustments, so there are likely still players who feel that the game doesn't feel right for them.
So when it comes to the games that get their controls right, I think it comes down to three crucial factors...
- The game needs to feel responsive out of the gate. At first touch I believe the game should have a low deadzone, controllable aim acceleration (or none), and a relatively low sensitivity so that all players feel as though they are in control right away.
- Robust and effective settings for players to make adjustments to the controls. Whatever default control configuration you decide upon, there will always be a large group of players that have preferences elsewhere, therefore it's important to offer as robust a set of options as possible so that players can get to something that they like, and ultimately, so that they can get to a point where they feel in control of the game. As well as robust, these settings need to be effective too, as I've seen many devs who include options which are either poorly described, or do not do what they claim.
- A space for people to configure the controls without pressure. If you don't want folks to quit your game immediately, don't throw them into a multiplayer match before they've had an opportunity to make adjustments to their controls.
Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends
I've bundled these together because by and large, they feel the same and offer the same control options. Both of these games feature a good, and very controllable default configuration. Furthermore, they do a fantastic job in letting players customise the feel of the controls to their own liking, through multi-layered options on the games controls.
At the top level we have a fairly basic sensitivity option for both regular aim, and aim down sights, as well as some basic response curve and deadzone adjustments which affect how responsive the controls feel.
But the game also features an advanced set of options, so that players can tweak the controls to their liking.
This means that anyone playing the game has the option to easily make quick adjustments without delving into a complex set of settings and feeling overwhelmed, but those that want a particular feel to the controls have the option to adjust until they are content. Furthermore, the game features a 'firing range' practice space wherein players can practice and tweak their settings in a pressure free environment.
Battlefield V
Similar to Apex and Titanfall 2, Battlefield hits most of the right notes. It has a robust set of options for players to fiddle with, with both advanced and regular look settings that players can make adjustments to. It's perhaps lacking the degree of control over response curves that Apex has, but it does have a neat option to normalise your sensitivity across ads and non-ads camera movement which is likely valuable to some players. Furthermore, there's a firing range style practice space for players to get comfortable and tweak their settings without pressure.
Unlike some other games in this list, battlefield also has a tonne of different aiming conditions to consider. Is the player in a tank? A turret? A plane? And so forth. So it's great that the options allow the player to get into the detail of all of that. Some of the language used in the settings is a little obtuse though, with terms like 'uniform soldier aiming' as a setting, as well as a 'coefficient slider' but these do come with pretty good descriptions.
Call of Duty Cold War
Like the games listed above, this game features a good set of default options and an advanced set of control options. It's definitely lacking more of the advanced options than Apex and Battlefield, which leaves it a little behind, but it does have the essential settings such as deadzone adjustment and also features some options that the other titles don't, such as allowing players to adjust their style of aim assist.
And unfortunately, that's about it. I was going to include Overwatch in the list of games that do it right because on paper I think it fits the part, but the response curve options always feel 'off' to me and I think the settings they offer are a little intuitive, with terms like 'dual zone' and 'exponential ramp' flying around.
Giving Controllers a Bad Name
I think there's a common perception that controls will be bad, or even should be bad because of the very fact, that you're using a controller. The sentiment that 'Controllers are bad for shooters, so what did you expect?' seems common. I think in some cases, this even leads to developers dismissing the idea that they can achieve good results with the how the game feels to play on a controller.
However, irrespective of how you feel about playing games on a controller, what we absolutely do know is that they can be a whole lot better to play with the right configuration and settings. Developers should be taking the time to get this right, and it's pretty sad to see something as central to how the game feels undermine a $20 million
dollar game.
Why is this happening?
I'm not completely clueless as to why this type of thing is happening and I do have a number of suggestions that can be the cause, so I'll go ahead and discuss some of these below.
- Often, sorting out the controls for controller falls onto one person. In many cases a studio will only allocate one, or sometimes two members of staff for how the game feels. In theory this is okay, because if that person does a good job in that role, then that's going to have a good end-result. But in reality, that puts a lot of risk on a very small number of people. What if the controller guy doesn't actually know what a game on controller should feel like? What if they aren't altogether familiar with many of the latest releases, how they control, and what options they have for controller adjustment?
- Often the games feel and controls aren't assigned as a central objective for playtesting. I've seen this first hand in games that control poorly, it's often simply an assumption that the games controls are 'good' and that that area of the game doesn't need to be the focus of inquiry for user testing. Additionally, players in user tests are somewhat accepting of the games unfinished state, so it's likely that they don't expect to be able to do things like customise the controls or for the controls to feel quite right at that early stage.
- A lot of people don't 'feel it'. Likely due to the level of familiarity they have and expectations set by other games, only some people seem to notice when the controls have a high deadzone or input lag (hey Stadia advocates). Additionally, it's rare that anyone on a development team has any type of disability that would warrant an advanced level of customisation of the controls. With that said, just because people don't feel something or know how to describe their experiences with that thing, doesn't mean it doesn't affect them. For instance my partner noted that The Witcher 3 was pretty hard, and found it difficult to get Geralt to do what she wanted to at times. I showed her the 'alternative movement controls' in the menu, and her experience was improved. She couldn't put her finger on the issue and only described the symptom (increased difficulty as a result of finding it difficult to move Geralt where she wanted to in combat). It's also not altogether common that people in game dev necessarily play a lot of other games, with a lot of folks finding that they want to get away from their work. For instance a friend of mine works at Codemasters and therefore he gave me a copy of Dirt 5, I asked him to play it with me, and he did for an hour or two, but after which he asked if we could please play anything but racing games because that's all he sees all day at work.
Talking Points
I just wanted to vent about this really because it's incredibly frustrating to pick up a game and find it controls poorly, especially when the solution to many of those issues feels plainly obvious. So thanks for hearing me out, and here are some talking points to help guide discussion...
- Feel free to share similar experiences with games wherein the camera controls have undermined the experience, particularly when using a controller.
- Other than that, feel free to talk over any of the issues I've raised in this thread. Let me know if you agree or disagree with my view on any of these games and what you think the issues are.
