It has an engine that permits recording and “rewinding” gameplay, with a lot of interesting quirks, like elements that don’t rewind. Puzzle platformer based on that.
It was a fascinating thing technically, and the creator did a lot with that capability. But IMHO it’s not otherwise exceptional, like graphically or such.
One button, a lot of resistance to push on the stick.
After that, an elderly Logitech gamepad from the 1990s that had a D-pad that rolled diagonal way too easily. IIRC it had a screw-in mini-joystick that could attach to the center of the D-pad. Don’t remember the model. White case, attached directly to a joystick/MIDI port.
After that, I think the NES controller. I have no idea why people like those or actually buy recreations. Yes, nostalgia, but the ergonomics on it were terrible. Hard buttons, sharper corners on the D-pad than is the norm today, and a squared-off controller made the thing downright uncomfortable to use for long periods of time.
I was pretty happy with my most-recent Logitech gamepad – I think an F310 – but I had another from the 1990s that was terrible, had a D-pad that rolled to diagonal movement far too easily.
Your age 30 is fine. Age is always an excuse, but mostly not true.
It’s fine for single-player shooters, which are less demanding, but speaking as someone who has packed on some decades, your reaction time definitely becomes a noticeable factor over the years for competitive multiplayer games. I definitely can’t play competitive twitch shooters nearly as well as when I was 18, which is about when your reaction time is at its best.
That being said, there are shooters where twitch time is less-critical or roles or play-styles that focus less on it.
And I don’t see how someone couldn’t learn to play with a dual-stick or trackpad (or trackball, for that matter), which is what I think OP is talking about. I haven’t had any problems picking up new input methods…that just takes time. Took time to learn when I was 18, too.
I mean, twin stick gamepad or to lesser extent touchpad just isn’t going to be as good as a mouse for an FPS. A good mouse player will beat a good touchpad or gamepad player.
And the problem with the Deck is that it has a PC game library, and a lot of those are designed with a mouse in mind. Console FPSes usually adjust the game difficulty so that playing with twin sticks are practical. Enemies give you more time to slowly turn around without inflicting enormous amounts of damage. Auto-aim assist is common. Ranges are shorter. Stuff like that.
If this is a single-player game – which it sounds like you’re playing – you can reduce the difficulty to compensate for the input mechanism.
There’s an input mechanism that some people developed for twin-stick gyro controllers called Flick Stick, which someone else mentioned; Steam Input supports this. The mouse is still going to win, but it’s an improvement over traditional pure-stick input.
There’s also some input mechanism which I think was different from the “Flick Stick” approach – though maybe I’m wrong and misremembering, didn’t have an interest in exploring it – that IIRC someone put together using Steam Input. The way it worked, as I recall, was that one could tap the thumbstick in a direction and it’d immediately do a 90 degree turn. The idea was to provide for a rapid turn while keeping sensitivity low enough to still permit for accurate aiming. But I’m not able to find the thing with Kagi in a few searches, and it’s not impossible that I’m misremembering…this was only a single video that I’m thinking of.
I don’t think that there’s any trick to learning this, just playing games and picking it up over time. I mean, I was atrocious at using a keyboard+mouse when I first started doing it, and ditto with twin-stick FPSes.
You could also attach a keyboard and mouse, though I think that that kind of eliminates the point of the Deck, at least as long as one also has a PC to play on – it might make sense for someone who just uses a Deck and a phone.
is there an easy FPS game where I don’t have to move or shoot too fast
Play games that are designed for consoles or which have a gamepad mode, rather than a keyboard+mouse PC game. They’ll be tuned for controller limitations. Like, can you play Halo comfortably with the Deck? That was designed for a gamepad originally, and it’s available on Steam (though I’d note that it requires a Microsoft account, which you may-or-may-not be willing to do).
This also talks about some limitations of thumbstick aiming (if you’re using thumbsticks and not trackpads). It might be possible to tweak some of these, like sensitivity or dead zone, but I’d assume that for a given game, the developers have already chosen pretty reasonable defaults.
For those who haven’t played the series, VATS is an alternate aiming mode where one can pause (or in later games in the 3d series, greatly slow) the game, select a certain number of targets depending upon available action points, and then have all those shots taken in rapid succession, with the game aiming.
I’d say that VATS is kind of a “path” than a purely alternate input method in those games; you need to make a VATS-oriented build, though it’s true that it makes it possible to play the game with minimal FPS elements. Like, in Fallout: New Vegas, VATS provides major benefits close-up. While VATS is active, there’s enormous damage reduction applied to your character, IIRC 90%, so for short periods of time, they have enormous damage output and little risk. They can also turn rapidly and target multiple enemies, probably better than a player manually-playing could. At close ranges, VATS is just superior.
But VATS suffers severe accuracy penalties at range. Whether-or-not a target is moving doesn’t affect VATS accuracy, but range does a lot, whereas with manual aiming, whether-or-not a target is moving makes a big difference and range doesn’t matter much. As a result, VATS isn’t great for sniping, which is also an aspect of the game. You can do it (especially, oddly-enough, with pistols, in Fallout 4, where the Concentrated Fire perk lets later shots in a flurry of pistol shots at range be very accurate.
In Fallout 76, VATS provides such dramatic damage benefits that I’d say that it’s impractical to play a non-VATS build – VATS is required to get damage up to a reasonable level later in the game.
EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
I think I’d have a category for both.
You can’t call an SNES cartridge a service, but similarly, you can’t call, oh, an online strip poker service a good.
I suspect that most good-games have at least some characteristics of a service (like patches) and most service-games have at least some characteristics of a good (like software that could be frozen in place).
I think that the actual problem is vendors unnecessarily converting good-games into service-games, as that gives them a route to get leverage relative to the consumer. Like, I can sell a game and then down the line start data-mining players or something. I think that whatever policy countries ultimately adopt should be aimed at discouraging that.
I’m with you on wanting the big, upholstered chair, but also liking the desk.
I kind of wish that easy chairs at desks were more of a thing. As it is, a typical desk doesn’t really fit them: you have “office chairs” and “living room chairs”, and the two don’t meet much. Couple problems:
A big and top-heavy chair is gonna tip more easily, so you have to extend the base and casters.
A big chair isn’t gonna roll as easily, so you can’t push back from a desk.
For years, I’ve been thinking about switching to a table or workbench with a higher top or something.
I think that the answer probably has several elements.
Maybe the desk can just…go away. Desks are important for paperwork, were important for supporting heavy CRTs, but I rarely actually need one now.
Monitor goes on an table/desk/floor-mounted arm. I’ve been diong that, and I’m happy with it, but still have the “cubbyhole” desk from the CRT era. Maybe just swing the thing into place every time you sit down.
Keyboard and mouse need to be attached to the floor or chair, not the desk. This is a bit harder. There are keyboard and mouse trays, but if one reclines in a chair, they also tilt the tray, which I don’t want – the mouse surface has to remain horizontal. If you can live with a trackball or trackpad, that might be tolerable. It might be possible to have some kind of leveling attachment that fits over the arms, or have a free-standing keyboard/mouse tray that fits over the chair, pole on each side of it. Something like this. If reclining adjusts the required height of the keyboard/mouse and the mount is freestanding, then it has to be trivial to adjust the height.
Linux PC. Almost entirely on a desktop, though I’ve got a few games (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Caves of Qud) that I’ll play on a laptop.
Very limited use of Android, if I’m away from a computer, for the mobility.
I’ve owned a few consoles, but the experience has consistently disappointed me.
Loading times are worse (well, maybe this has improved, but historically was a pain)
I can’t as trivially flip over to a wiki in a web browser. I smack a button, I’m on another workspace on my PC.
For some reason, a lot of “deep” games that one spends a lot of time learning, like strategy and milsims, don’t have much of a presence on consoles. I like a lot of entrants in those genres.
Games cost more than the PC. I mean, sure, the console vendor loses money on the hardware, has to make their money back on the games, but that especially makes consoles a bad buy if you’re going to get a lot of games.
The PC has more potential to be upgraded (though I’ll concede that consoles have generally improved here).
I’m not constrained by what the game developer wanted me to do; I can drop in with a memory editor and cheat in a game, can add mods to the game, have control over save state, etc.
The drawbacks of a PC are things that don’t really bother me:
You’ve got setup and configuration, which I’m gonna do anyway.
You’re more-likely to hit driver or hardware compatibility issues than on a console.
As for mobile…
I would be potentially willing to pay a lot more for mobile games than I do, but the entire commercial game infrastructure on Android is tied to getting a Google account, and I refuse to do that; I don’t want Google logging and data-mining what I do. So I almost-exclusively use open-source software on Android. And most good mobile games have made it to the PC.
Honestly, I was kind of unexpectedly disappointed with Android gaming (and this is even based on what I see in the Google Play Store).
Okay, the touchscreen isn’t a fantastic input medium for a lot of game genres, but I thought that stuff like multiple-choice choose-your-own-adventure games and gamebook-type games would see a huge renaissance, but some of the main games in that line have been…not that great; Choice of Games has a lot of titles, and some of the writing is good, but the gameplay mechanics are kinda disappointing.
Turn-based strategy games seemed like a good fit for the touchscreen, but as with the console, deep strategy games also haven’t been hugely in evidence. As best I can tell, there’s a strong focus on games that you can drop into for a few minutes while waiting in a line or something and then drop out of…which is fine, but really constrains the experience. I guess deckbuilders are okay, but the PC does fine there too.
A lot of Android games aren’t super-considerate of the battery. Some games that I like on the PC, like real time sim games (Oxygen Not Included or Dwarf Fortress) require constant load and just wouldn’t be a great match for a phone running on battery, even if they were present.
I’m not really into games that leverage location, which is one thing that a phone can do that other platforms can’t. I could maybe believe that there could be games that could leverage multi-touch support to do things that PCs can’t and really get a lot of good out of it, but I haven’t seen that.
The screen has major limitations in that few Android devices have a large screen (so they can’t expect to control a large portion of your visual arc) and on a touchscreen, your hands are going to be obscuring part of the screen, making things even more difficult for the developer.
Touchscreens have gotten better, but they just don’t have reliable, rapid response to input the way that the mouse-and-keyboard (which a PC is guaranteed to have) or a gamepad (which a console is guaranteed to have) have.
Android phones can take external peripherals, but it’s hard for a game to expect that they be present, especially since not everyone wants to haul a lot of hardware around with their phone. So you can get game controllers, earphones, a keyboard, or even an external projector, but it’s hard for a game to expect that you have them available.
The Outer Worlds is in the same bucket as Starfield, but with fewer space-specific elements. Starfield has light space flight combat, though it’s not very sophisticated, more of a minigame. And Starfield has zero-G FPS bits. Oh, yeah, and you mention The Outer Worlds having fixed gravity – Starfield does have variable gravity. But if you removed that, you could make either Starfield or The Outer Worlds not set in space and it’d basically play the same way. Maybe you’d have to come up with some alternate explanation for alien animals and flora, like bioengineering or something, but lots of games have done that.
Whatever the merits or flaws of Star Citizen as an individual game, I do think that the sheer amount of cash dumped into the thing by backers does demonstrate that there’s legitimately demand out there for a game in the space flight combat genre.
I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.
Atmospheric flight combat sims, and I haven’t played either much, but maybe Il-2: Sturmovik: Great Battles or DCS? Those kind of fit the “slap a lot of money on the counter, and we give you a hard sim with a lot of levers” bill.
I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS
I have a HOTAS setup too, along with pedals. And I’m kinda with you on wishing that there were good space flight combat HOTAS games. But…I’m skeptical that it’s gonna happen.
You need to have enough people running around with a dedicated throttle and flightstick to get sales up enough to make it worthwhile to focus a game on it.
I feel like the decline in flightsticks may have been a factor in moving away from the combat flight genre (both space and air-breathing), that the late '90s/early 2000s may be permanently the heyday.
My guess is that there are a number of factors:
Gamepads got analog thumbsticks and analog triggers. They aren’t ideal for flight sims, but that’s enough analog inputs that most people who aren’t absolutely devoted to the genre are going to just live with a gamepad rather than buying a bunch of extra input hardware that can only be used with that game.
During the 1990s, joysticks such as the CH Products Flightstick, Gravis Phoenix, Microsoft SideWinder, Logitech WingMan, and Thrustmaster FCS were in demand with PC gamers. They were considered a prerequisite for flight simulators such as F-16 Fighting Falcon and LHX Attack Chopper. Joysticks became especially popular with the mainstream success of space flight simulator games like X-Wing and Wing Commander, as well as the “Six degrees of freedom” 3D shooter Descent.[27][28][29][30][31] VirPil Controls’ MongoosT-50 joystick was designed to mimic the style of Russian aircraft (including the Sukhoi Su-35 and Sukhoi Su-57), unlike most flight joysticks.[32]
However, since the beginning of the 21st century, these types of games have waned in popularity and are now considered a “dead” genre, and with that, gaming joysticks have been reduced to niche products.[27][28][29][30][31]
The XBox gamepad became very common as a convention on the PC, whereas up until that point, it was more-common to have all kinds of oddball inputs, and it was expected that a player would set up the controls on a per-game basis. I think that not having to do input configuration made gamepad-on-the-PC more approachable, but it also made it harder to sell people on games that require actual input. HOTASes are still in the “setup required” family (and it’s good that they have the flexibility, as you can’t have a one-size-fits-all HOTAS setup). Maybe you could have Internet-distributed profiles for different hardware, choose something reasonable out of box, kinda like how Steam Input works.
Ubiquitous Internet access has made multiplayer more common than it was around 2000. If a game supports competitive multiplayer, then having configurable input (and macros and such) may be undesirable, because you want a level playing field. Game developers may not want to permit for a variety of inputs if it doesn’t make for a level playing ground and they’re doing multiplayer. There’s some game that I recall (Star Citizen?) where I remember players being extremely unhappy about changes being made that favored mouse-and-keyboard players over flightstick players.
Newer combat aircraft are fly-by-wire. There’s no mechanism to let one “feel” resistance, and so not much reason for flight sim games to do so either. For a while, there were force-feedback joysticks (we typically use “force feedback” today to refer to rumble motors, but strictly-speaking, it should refer to joysticks that push back against you). That was never a huge chunk of the market, but it was a reason to get dedicated hardware.
I assume that modern aircraft don’t need trim adjustment; having trim controls is another thing that you can add inputs for on-controller.
For space combat games, manipulating the throttle doesn’t have the significance that it does with an air-based combat flight sim. Like, you aren’t constantly storing and releasing kinetic energy as you ascend and descend. You don’t have much to crash into. Stalling isn’t a problem. Exceeding aircraft speed maximums isn’t a problem. A lot of space combat flight sims aren’t “hard sims”, so you don’t need to worry about things like engine overheating the way you might in Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946 (though I suppose that one could introduce dynamics for that; Starfield has a “peak maneuverability” speed, so there’s an incentive to reduce speed to do a turn before speeding back up).
Many space combat sims aren’t simulating existing hardware; developers are only going to introduce mechanics if it significantly adds to the gameplay. In Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946, I have a ton of controls that are there because they reflect real-world mechanical systems. Armored cowlings over air intakesthat can be set to variable levels of openness. Prop pitch. Fuel mixture. The only real analog I can think of in space flight combat sims are maybe “system energy levels”.
HOTAS is really limited to PC gaming. It’s not incredibly friendly to other video game hardware. With a console, you need to have the input hardware mounted somewhere, something that a living room couch isn’t as amenable to as a desk. With a mobile phone, you want to have the hardware with you, and so size is at a premium; I think that few people are going to want to lug around a throttle and flightstick with their phone, even if the hardware can technically handle it.
Some games are doing VR (e.g. Elite Dangerous) and in VR, I think that if the world does go heavily down the VR route – which it has not yet – that it’ll be likely that there will just be virtual controls using VR controllers rather than dedicated HOTAS input devices. The concept of only seeing the ship kinda isn’t an ideal match for the physical controls. Yeah, you don’t get tactile feedback, but it gives you a lot of flexibility in ship control layout. Now, yes, there’s a VR+HOTAS crowd like you; going all the way with inputs and outputs. But I don’t know how many people are willing to put the money down for a top-of-the-light flight sim rig, and video games have fixed costs and variable revenue, so they benefit from scale, getting a lot of people pitching in money. You really don’t want to target just a small market if you can avoid it.
I think that the best bet for broader HOTAS support down the line is one of the two:
Go low-budget. Yeah, a lot of flight sims are AAA…but I’m not sold that they absolutely need to be. I’ve played some untextured polygon games that are pretty good (like Carrier Command 2). I understand that BattleBit Remastered is considered pretty highly too. That’s a big whopping chunk of assets that just don’t exist. And if you do that, you can target a much smaller audience and still make a reasonable return. Just focus on flight mechanics or something. Maybe down the line, if there’s enough uptake, sell some kind of DLC with fancy assets.
Push HOTAS support out to some kind of game-agnostic software package. Like, say there were enough people who really wanted to play HOTAS games. Have an open-source “HOTAS app” that provides most of the functionality: distributing input profiles, linking together collections of devices, setting indicator LEDs, etc. The game just links up with that app, and doesn’t attempt to handle every device out there. It exposes a bunch of input values that can be twiddled, and some outputs. There’s some precedent for that kind of software; Steam Input, or (not input-specific) VoIP apps with game integration, like Teamspeak. Buttplug.io basically fills that “third-party open-source middleware” role for outputs for adult video games and sex toys.
Either way – push HOTAS out to a separate cross-input-device, cross-game software package, or going lower-budget, reduces the need to be mass-market, which – in 2024 – HOTAS isn’t.
There’s also a few “fleet command” games. These aren’t really “combat flight sims” like the above, because the player isn’t experiencing a flight sim from the ship, but like the “space RTS” genre, the third dimension really alters the dynamics. Maybe they’re somewhat-analogous to a naval fleet combat sim.
The only example of this genre that I’ve played would be Nebulous: Fleet Command, but I understand that there are a few more out there.
One thing that I think that they did right in Freelancer was to cheap out on the not-in-ship content.
X4 put a lot of work into building up an out-of-the-ship environment that lets you walk around space stations, and I just don’t feel that it added a lot of the environment. There are a lot of things that I’d rather have had done relative to X3.