yahbut
there’s a whole lineage of From dungeon crawlers that seems a much more influential parent
Though that does unlock a narrative for how From’s staid, poorly-controlling dungeon series suddenly jumped to top of the heap in combat systems
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I think Tim once told a story on the IC podcast about how Demon’s Souls early in development controlled just as sluggish as the King’s Fields but a producer came in and kept requesting for them to speed it up by several multiples over and over. I never bothered to actually fact-check it though which would probably be the wise choice
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This story feels right, even if it is complete bullshit. A very modern story.
tl;dr some players with disabilities use third party devices to play on consoles, but blizzard/overwatch fans are precious about their competitive balance and want a blanket ban.
how about if you want to be a competitive overwatch player you fire up that 6 year old pc you got lying in the corner of your room and plug the mouse and keyboard back in. “oh but I like controllers better.” yeah, players like nuckledu in street fighter like controllers better too, the difference is they win with them.
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Deliberate mischaracterization of an argument in order to build a false moral high ground? On SELECT BUTTON?! No! It can’t be!
nedgepost
I am taking the word of the guy from the disability gaming nonprofit, but I don’t see how I’m mischaracterizing it? Either way they want the devices banned so they can control who’s matched against whom.
pretty sure they didn’t mean you
Nothin’ moral about git gud, idk.
You mischaracterized it by claiming people want disabled players to be unable to play.
What they want is for NON-disabled players to be unable to use unlicensed third-party hardware to circumvent the PS4 and Xbone’s deliberate disabling of KB+M controls – against both Blizzard’s publicly stated policy and against the TOS of both console manufacturers – to gain an unfair advantage over other players.
Context is a real thing and you aren’t doing anyone any favors by trying to remove it.
Kaplan’s “all or nothing” argument seems to be, as others are saying, missing the point and also disingenuous since the PS4 lets you do this already (FF14 and Paragon, the latter being a competitive MOBA, notably support controller and KBM on console and crossplay with PC) and this is ignoring the fact that they’ve already made several console-unique balance changes because people have to (“have to”) play on sticks.
What Sony and MS should be doing is seeking to legitimize disabled gamer options officially
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People (here “Overwatch fans”) in the linked thread expressed a desire to ban the devices despite the OP in the thread describing why players with disabilities need them, which I found objectionable. I did not say that they directly want them to be unable to play. I suppose I could have mentioned the “cheating” explicitly.
I dunno, I feel like opening it up so everyone can use whatever control scheme they want or need is a much better way of handling it than… well, basically any other option.
Overwatch on consoles has bad aim-assist. The aim-assist works fine if you are standing still, but it actively works against you if you’re trying to aim while strafing, which makes heroes like Tracer or Widowmaker infuriating to play. This was previously acknowledged by the development team, and they said they would eventually try to fix it. (To my knowledge, this still hasn’t happened.)
Their “temporary” workaround has been to add sliders that can reduce or disable aim-assist altogether. Neither option is a good substitute for good aim-assist on a controller, but keyboard/mouse players were massively buffed by this because using a keyboard/mouse adapter with aim-assist disabled is effectively the closest you will get to PC-like handling.
I don’t think keyboard/mouse adapters need to be banned from the game altogether, but if Blizzard is serious about not wanting keyboard/mouse to be used on consoles, maybe fixing their broken aim-assist and removing the option to disable it again would be a better solution. At least then the burden of having to adapt would be on the keyboard/mouse players and not on the controller players. (Yes, this would nerf disabled players to some degree, but at least it would be consistent with most other FPSes on the platform.)
Microsoft has been making real good progress with this, supporting key mapping at an OS level and supposedly allowing multiple controllers to map to one player’s input in the next update. Another one of those broad forward-thinking moves a lone producer can sometimes push through and why Microsoft was so great for console games in mid-2000s.
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I mean, ideally, controllers designed for disabled players wouldn’t need adapters, and would just be recognized by the console as a legitimate controller.
If madcatz’s awful garbage controllers can work without adapters, why not something actually good?
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I don’t think there’s any difficulty if you can match the input types expected, i.e. [0-1] for each analog stick axis, True/False for each button.
Mice give an entirely different form of input though (x delta, y delta) so it needs logic to map to a joystick.
If KB/M were natively supported I still don’t think matching by control type is kind to the players with disabilities.
I would think Overwatch would have enough players to sort by performance through normal matchmaking.
I think this is probably the best solution.
The real problem Blizzard has one of perception; just like hackers on PC, once a belief is spread that it’s possible, players will believe it’s prevalent when it’s convenient to believe so. I don’t know how bad this complaint had gotten but by stepping in it Blizzard indicates they view it as a real problem, which I would think lends credence to continued complaints of KB/M when up against better players.
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