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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

> Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room?

> If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input.

This excites me. Valve's bread-and-butter, as a gamedev company and not a game reseller, uses a pointing device. FPS games and Dota are both genres that do far better with a mouse.

Obviously, supporting gamepads will get the vast ocean of console-like games into the living room just fine. But for games originally designed for a mouse, a gamepad is a pretty sub-par experience. Do they have some new control device planned? Please? Pretty-please?

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Did nobody else read the Beta Terms of Agreement?

1. Valve Corporation ("Valve", "We", "Us" or "Our") has developed and produced prototypes of entertainment system hardware and software, including a set-top box running custom software and a game controller

A game controller...

Yes, but that may be simply a Valve-owned clone of the XBox360 pad that has become standard in PC gaming. Or it may be the exciting modular device they patented:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/2/2840932/exclusive-valve-ste...

Or it may be something to do with Gabe Newell's interest in biometrics.

I simply answered the question, which was 'Is there a new controller going to be included?'.

The possibilities are exciting.

>FPS games and Dota are both genres that do far better with a mouse.

Toupée fallacy. I'd argue that games built for a gamepad -- Halo and Gears of War come to mind -- feel much better on a gamepad than they do on a keyboard and mouse.

I've never been able to play halo on a console, it feels far too inaccurate to me, now that I'm used to playing with a mouse.

And I've never been able to play Super Mario Bros. with a keyboard. It goes both ways.

Wait, that doesn't make sense. Super Mario Bros. uses digital inputs, not an analog stick, so it's essentially the same as a keyboard...Are you saying keys are somehow different than controller buttons?

Well, yes. There is a different feel to using a d-pad and using four distinct keys, and it throws me off when I'm playing a 2D platformer. In SMB, the inertia feels totally wrong using the arrow keys or WASD.

I agree, but I think it's because a d-pad does two things: 1) it lets you press two directions at once with a single finger (all four diagonals are actually two presses, e.g. up+left); 2) it stops you from pressing two opposing directions at the same time like you can on a keyboard, e.g. up+down.

Once you get used to these limitations or find a game where diagonal movement isn't required (not sure about SMB), it's really quite tolerable to play a 2D platformer with WASD or arrow keys. But you're still right it doesn't quite have that magical kinesthetic quality that a d-pad does, and I'll always choose a gamepad myself.

Not easy to play on a keyboard using only two thumbs.

Really? I first played it on the console but have no trouble using a keyboard.

Are people using a mouse and keyboard going to play against people using a controller? The results will be hilarious (in that anyone using a controller wont stand a chance). Everyone will be forced to use a mouse.

There have been games that have released with this allowance. They achieve balance by offering powerful aim-assist to the gamepad players.

In any other context that would be the foulest cheating... but in the context of game-design for vastly different interfaces, it's a perfectly reasonable handicap.

It also works reasonably well for cooperative games. I beat Portal 2 with a friend this way.

You wouldn't be able to (and can't) do this on competitive PC/Steambox games though because you can just fake it on PC, so gamepad players would never be able to compete.

Games designed for the gamepad do work nicely on a gamepad, but they achieve this by slowing down the FPS gameplay so thoroughly that they functionally exist within their own genre, as well as providing substantial auto-aim. The PC-style of FPS gaming, which is substantially faster-paced than the console-style, is dependent on having a pointing-device for aiming.

Experiments in allowing gamepad and mouse players to compete directly have proven absurd to balance, since you either give the joystick players aim-bots or let them be crippled. Joysticks are meant to provide you with good control over a vector - you can comfortably select and gradually alter the velocity of something with a joystick.

Pointing devices are meant to control a position, not a vector. "facing", from a user perspective, is best expressed as a position. The player is thinking "I want to face this way" not "I want to turn this fast".

The main reason Halo and GoW feel bad on mouse+keyboard is that they feel glacially, frustratingly slow on a system where the conventions tend to be far faster-paced (because the interface allows for it) and because the games used heavy auto-aim to compensate for the difficulty in making precise movements on a gamepad.

Which is fine, I'm no snob. But at this point you've created a substantially different game with a substantially different experience.

edit: to take it further, notice the huge difference in the DOTA and RTS genres between PCs and consoles - places where auto-aim won't really fix the game. The interface has to be so fundamentally altered that they're a whole new genre.

Interesting point, but I think you don't mean to say vector, but something more like 'velocity', 'momentum', or better yet, joysticks are meant to control a rate of change.

Velocity is a vector.

Sorry, busy today and didn't see this. Velocity is a vector, but so is position, and direction, and a whole bunch of things. Anything you can express as a fixed length, ordered, group of numbers is a vector (I guess they don't even have to be numbers). The point is that the distinguishing thing here is not the vectoral nature, but the fact that the mouse directly modifies the absolute 'direction vector' while a joystick directly modifies the rate of change of that 'direction vector'.

Oh, OK, I take your point. Fair enough!

You can argue that, but that doesn't make his statement a fallacy. Many people will argue that you are wrong.

I always liked Halo a lot more on PC, so that's pretty subjective.

I'd say that Genres built for a gamepad, such as platformers, feel much better on a gamepad, but shooters still feel best with a more precise and fast device. Sure you can design around it to make it suck less, but in the end you still need to add in aim assist to make it an enjoyable experience (as pretty much all console shooters do).

I'd be open to something new if it serves the purpose but I wouldn't mind getting a mouse and keyboard in my living room if that happens to be the best way to play a game. But that's probably just me.

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