I don’t feel comfortable using a mouse and I have no interest in working on my mouse skills. I play all of my games with either a controller or a keyboard, and I’m looking for 3rd-person shooters I can play with a controller.
I’m mainly interested in action games. I’m OK with a world with gated areas a la metroidvanias/soulslikes, but I’m not interested in full-on open world or narrative-driven games.
Examples of 3rd-person shooters I enjoyed playing with a controller: Gungrave, Vanquish, and Evil West.
Examples of 3rd-person shooters I don’t enjoy and have no interest in: Uncharted, The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption, Dead Space, Control/Alan Wake, or GTA.
I mainly play on PC, Steam in particular, but I’ll boot up emulators if the game is worth it.
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OK with emulation? Then start with the first Ratchet and Clank game and play through all of them in order up to the most recent one on Steam.
I’m sorry, it’s not a game suggestion, but consider getting a legacy steam controller, or getting the new one in February
I don’t feel comfortable using a mouse
I mainly play on PC
You sir, are definitely one in a million
Nerds need to grow up and stop this nonsense. Millinials are pushing 40 and you still don’t understand that non casuals are the minority. Even on steam you get something like 20% of users in controller.
Not by a long shot. There’s a reason Steam has an entire section of the library page that shows controller compatibility. Not to mention Big Picture mode and all the living room gamers. Keyboard sand mouse on a couch is terrible, no matter what hardware you have or how you try to convince yourself it’s not.
I personally use a controller 99% of the time. In both casual and competitive games.
Huge difference between not feeling comfortable at all with using a mouse and preferring to use a controller depending on context
That’s not even close to true.
15% of Steam sessions are using a controller on a PC
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/4142827237888316812
Please explain how people sometimes using controllers on PC means that there exists a considerable amount of PC gamers who are uncomfortable with using a mouse.
Yeah, these days I play everything with a controller - because I’d rather sit on the couch than in a desk chair.
I wish I wasn’t if true, but I already put all of my skill points in keyboard and controller, and I don’t have enough reasons to work on my mouse skills.
Wait keyboard and controller? At the same time??
Keyboard for fighting games and shmups, and controller for anything else.
There was an era, very early on, when PC first-person shooters were generally played with the keyboard. Wolfenstein 3D. I remember people who specifically wanted to play Doom with the keyboard rather than the mouse.
Doom 1-2 was for the keyboard the same way as Wolf3d.
I’m pretty sure that Wolfenstein 3D had mouse support, unless it was added later, and I’m sure that (original) Doom did.
checks
https://soulsphere.org/apocrypha/keyboard/
Debunking the Myth that Doom was Keyboard-only
It also mentions Wolfenstein 3D:
I don’t know if I used the mouse with Wolfenstein 3D when it first came out. But I recall playing the Mac port later with a mouse, and that it didn’t feel great there.
Doom could be played with a mouse, but it was made for the keyboard. Because of the only horizontal freedom of turning, the mouse was just uncomfortable.
I suppose it depends on perspective, but I feel like if John Romero says it was made with mouse controls intended as the default, he’s probably right, as he would be one of the few people to know what they had in mind when making it.
Are you sure you’re not talking about Quake? Because Quake, while perfectly playable with the keyboard only, can get some nice usability nuances from the mouse.
Remnant from the ashes 1 and 2,
Gunfire reborn also
I don’t feel comfortable using a mouse
You might also consider, if you’ve never tried one, using a trackball. Might be a benefit outside of just games, too, if you’re using a PC. There are some people who really strongly prefer them and dislike mice for various reasons (including some people who find mice to be more-problematic for some sort of repetitive stress injury they have).
I prefer a mouse as pointing device, but one can’t really use one if lying on a couch or in bed or something, and I keep a trackball around that I sometimes use in those cases.
Trackballs aren’t as common these days as a mouse alternative, given that laptops with trackpads have become more-prevalent, but I’m more accurate with one than with a trackpad, and if I couldn’t use a mouse, I’d probably spend a lot more trackball time.
We do have a trackball community here: [email protected]
As someone who has spent far more hours with a trackball, and has been using them for over 2 decades. They are fantastic. Great for avoiding RSI. Best mouse you can use outside of a standard desk environment including standing, or at a couch.
But they aren’t good for FPS games.
I just use a controller and I don’t play competitively.
Feel like you’d have a better time buying a console IF you ONLY wanted a controller AND you wanted to only play competitive PVP games. Neither trackball nor controller can compete without some kind of aim assist.
Maybe you need a controller with motion / tilt support?
I think that it’s the other way around — he’s fine with using a controller, is unhappy with the mouse.
Though if someone does want to play first-person shooters on a gamepad, I understand — I’ve never done it myself, that the preferred route by people really serious about the gamepad is the gyro-using flick stick. I understand that Steam Input plus appropriate configuration can provide support for it to games that don’t natively support it, and the WP article says that there’s some kind of direct support that went into Steam Input a few years back that I hadn’t been aware of.
My line of thinking is that games optimized for controllers will usually have sticky aim or aim assist, whereas those that maybe lack controller support won’t necessarily have those features.
Gyro adds that last little bit of precision that could potentially bridge the gap
Steam list of third-person shooters sorted by user rating for which controllers are preferred or full controller support is present.
FYI, the filters are AND, not OR, making this list really small. Kinda weird for Steam to have it like this even for controller filters.
You might like the Max Payne series.
Third-person action shooters with bullet time.
I tried all 3, the aiming cursor is too small. I remember looking into the options, and I couldn’t find any way to make it larger. Maybe I missed the option or there’s a mod for this?
If you’re playing PC games on a TV from a couch — I’m just guessing here, but if you’re (a) using a gaming controller and (b) having difficulty seeing the aiming cursor, I’m wondering if that might be the case — one other issue you might run into with PC games is FOV.
It’s pretty normal for FPSes (I haven’t looked at third-person shooters, though I assume that the same is true) to have something of a fisheye lens effect, because the monitor actually represents only a small portion of your visual arc, yet you want to let the player see something comparable to what the character would. Even more true for a TV (bigger, but also usually so much further away that it is a smaller portion of the visual arc) than a monitor.
https://expertbeacon.com/do-humans-have-120-fov/
Research shows the average person sees about 135 degrees horizontally per eye. Stitch our binocular vision together, and we get approximately 114 degrees of FOV.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Field_of_view_(FOV)
- PC games should be designed with a high FOV of around 85-110 because players normally sit closer to their display.
- Console games should be designed with a lower FOV of around 55-75 because their players usually sit further from a display; normally the distance between a couch and a TV.
Usually there’s still going to be some fisheye lens effect (the FOV setting is higher than the actual portion of our visual arc that the display takes up), but it’s not so dramatic as to make people nauseous or look weirdly distorted.
You can typically fiddle with the FOV setting in PC games, but games are also gonna be balanced for one FOV, so if you crank your FOV in a PC game down, it may make the thing more-difficult than the game designers intended.
