Capcom producer Morgan Gray said that he believes motion controls don’t work well for flight games that include a lot of shooting in it.
His reasoning: Players tend to move their bodies a little when they’re making tight turns in flying games — or even a racing games. If you map motion control to your flight game, then the controller will read those accidental body leans as inputs from the player. The result will be even more movement of the flying character or craft, a “false positive” input from a player who didn’t intend that. That’s bad news in a game that requires you to shoot while flying, he argued. It’s even worse, he said, if you’re being shot at while flying. A little flinching could ruin everything.
I pointed out to grey that the PlayStation 3 game Flower did just fine with mapping its flight controls to the motion controls of the Sixaxis. But shooting wasn’t required in that game.
Some players would surely like to have options, but as I watched Gray fly Dark Void’s hero through canyons, precisely shooting at building struts and the joints of robots, I could see his point.
Deadlydorito
October 21, 2009 at 10:28 AM
did… did you enjoy lair?
Report PermalinkRibs
October 21, 2009 at 12:13 PM
I’m with you there man, lair = fail.
I’m embarresed to admit – I was actually looking forward to that game.
Report PermalinkBen
October 21, 2009 at 11:12 AM
Lair’s flight worked fine for me, it was the dash/180 motions that didn’t work. Update allowed it to map to buttons thought.
Warhawk is a better example though. It works really good, but your way more likely to accidentally crash into a mountain.
Report PermalinkBrutus
October 21, 2009 at 12:01 PM
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“That’s bad news in a game that requires you to shoot while flying, he argued. It’s even worse, he said, if you’re being shot at while flying. A little flinching could ruin everything.”
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Could ruin everything? WTF do you think happens to in real life? You ‘flinch’ in a plane at 880km/ph your going to know about it…or in car race a slight ‘flinch’ could cause you to crash.
I don’t see why you would want to take that out. Unless you wanted to dumb your game down and make it easier; ultimately requiring less skill to become good at it.
Where do people come up with these stupid ideas. I am surprised you didn’t explore the option of taking anything that may scare a person or casue them to flinch out of the game altogether. Such as fast flash of visual stimulation i.e. being shot in the face. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about flinches at all.
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“Some players would surely like to have options, but as I watched Gray fly Dark Void’s hero through canyons, precisely shooting at building struts and the joints of robots, I could see his point.”
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Yeah…sounds very challenging…a lot like shooting off nose hairs on a tank in L4D with noclip on. If you turn on noclip it completely stops the jerky movement and flinches players generally experience when swarmed by 100′s of infected and a tank with a chip on his shoulder.
hodlum
October 21, 2009 at 1:03 PM
I smell fanboyism.
Lets be serious, motion controls are nowhere near real world responsiveness. Thats the real reason no one wants to use them.
Morgan just used the example of flinching to illustrate the point without saying Sony’s motion controls aren’t sensitive enough.
You can do well enough using motion controls in games without the need for twitch reflexs, like Flower. Try any game where reflexes are necessary, where split second, ACCURATE responses are needed like F1 championship or even Motorstorm and you will see why no one uses motion controls.
Report PermalinkAnonymous
October 21, 2009 at 1:27 PM
No, let’s get SERIOUS. If the problem was motion control was not fine grained enough, he would have said so. If anything he said that because of the twitch response they are TOO finely tuned.
But I call bullsh** on that, too.
Report PermalinkTim
October 21, 2009 at 4:01 PM
no, what he actually said was normal player reactions get unintentionally turned into inputs. In a game that requires precision control on a defined set of inputs, if you then threw in an input response where the player isnt expecting it, they are just goign to get pissed off and stop playing. its not that hard to grasp.
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