Proposing a new console FPS control system

I’m a PC guy at heart, and my favorite genre is probably the FPS.  The consoles have a ton of interesting FPSes that I basically can’t play – I just find it impossible to use the standard dual-analogue (SDA) control system.

I know a lot of people are perfectly happy with SDA – many will tell you they can be as accurate as they could be with mouse+keyboard, and most will tell you it’s less accurate but acceptable.  Me, I have a massive black spot in my head for it – I just hate it.

These things are preference, but I can come up with one slightly dodgy “objective” reason why I think the SDA system is bad.  When trying to aim quickly, you want to control the position of your crosshairs.  The left analogue stick, however, controls the velocity of them.  Why am I being asked to convert between the two, mentally, when trying to shoot someone before he shoots me?

I’d like to see if I can come up with something better.

Here’s my proposed dual-analogue FPS control system, Dual Analogue Absolute (DAA).  The left stick controls the crosshair’s position on the screen (think Goldeneye with R held down).  Move the left stick to the top right, and the crosshair will be at the top-right of the screen.  The space of the left stick is basically mapped to the screen, so if you see an enemy and he’s there on the screen, you understand instinctively (after a bit of practice) that you need to move the left stick here.  To actually rotate your view, you simply hold down the left stick’s bumper and move it.

If anyone knows of a game which has this control system, comment it as I’d love to give it a go.  If I’m bored today I might throw a demo together for the PC using the 360 pad.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 10:45 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Proposing a new console FPS control system”

1. Shivoa:

   § June 6th, 2009 at 2:23 pm

   I don’t think you’ll ever find a system like that due to fidelity. Take a standard 1280×720 image and break it up by the analogue axis accuracy, how many positions can you hold on the pad? You can’t get anywhere near a pixel accuracy, not to mention the corners of the screen you can’t get to due to the circular nature of the pad constraints.

   The use of a modifier to just look around isn’t going to be intuitive for most players. There are some games that have a ‘deadzone’ near the centre of the screen so you can move the crosshair without turning in a central area of the screen but that is still a velocity based input from the stick.

2. Ian:

   § June 6th, 2009 at 2:25 pm

   It worked fine for Goldeneye – of course, that wasn’t HD, but I’m not actually convinced this is a problem… as far as a modifier goes, you could change that – it could be a click to change modes for instance.

3. Xeno:

   § June 7th, 2009 at 4:16 pm

   Hmm, I’ll have to agree with Shivoa on this. It doesn’t seem very plausible.

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