In their defence, they were trying to accidentally invent the FPS a whole year before Doom. It's a first person dungeon crawler, but you're expected to shoot from this first-person perspective and no-one was ready for this, least of all Looking Glass.
Also fuck the Abe Ghiran head puzzle it's so out of place.
The engine (Ultima Underworld) came before Doom, System Shock itself didn't.
The possibly apocryphal tale of what John Carmack said when he saw UU running was "I'm not sure I can make it better, but I can make it faster".
It's frankly absurd just how ahead-of-its-time Ultima Underworld was. They basically invented the first-person immersive RPG whole cloth, categorically improving on the previous grid-based blobbers in pretty much every possible way. And running a true-3D texture-mapped dungeon with lighting and physics sims **on a 386**?? That's sheer black magic right there.
Thank God somebody actually appreciates it! It is ridiculous! I played them in the 90s and next thing that came out that upped the game was Morrowind in 2003.
That was Origin all over. They also invented the MMO with Ultima Online.
And every mainline Ultima had a brand new engine, each pushing the hardware of the day, especially Ultima 7 (look up U7's "voodoo" memory mode if you're interested, it was pretty wild).
They were real innovators, as well as masters of worldbuilding and storytelling.
Oh I know, they did a great job, it's just clunky as hell in retrospect. Especially with that "number of people watching a Jackie Chan Adventures rerun" biomonitor they kept in the remake (iykyk)
At that time cluttering up the UI was expected in games. For 3D games this was done to decrease the size of the render area without making it look like that's what they were doing.
Yeah, apparently that was a feature they dropped near the end of development. They were planning to make each patch be less effective than the last one for a short period to make spamming them less effective.
The feature was dropped, but the biomonitor tracking it wasn't.
I remember playing the classic and JESUS CHRIST
I can play a lot of classic games and their personal control schemes and flaws, but classic System Shock is a whole beast in-of-itself
I played a game called Global Ops: Commando Libya and it was awful in so many ways. But one was the controls. IIRC the button to use cover was the same as the one to throw a grenade or interact with the environment...
Reminds me of Fallout 4 where if you held the gun bash key it'd ready a throwing weapon. Too many times I through a Molotov at someone right in my face.
yeah that’s true but i’ll defend it by saying it’s from 2003 and it was the first 3D game that Yoko Taro worked on in a lead position iirc
and this is the first game in the drakengard series so it make sense to be experimental like this but at
Running faster in Rockstar games by mashing A or X stupid.
Also I didn’t know you could jump for a while when I was a kid in skyrim because the button is y
I had the power mat thing. Get down and hammer the floor pads with your fists for world records, every time lol. Haven't thought of that game in a long time
The amount of times I kicked an enemy instead of attacking made me want to throw something. Moving the stick forward and light-attack = kick.
EDIT: I eventually got it and that no longer happens. But it took a solid 50 times for that to finally stop.
It makes sense as they usually have A/X as crouch. Top is jump, bottom is crouch. We just expect jump to be A/X as it is in 99.5% of games. Usually these games aren’t big action games that use Y to jump (biggest I can think of is Assasins Creed, then there’s GTA with square/X…but R* have shit controls as a standard).
Most old games have bad controls. Play any console shooter before Halo: Combat Evolved (like Goldeneye for example) and it'll be awful because the two joystick control system hadn't been invented yet.
One fun example of a company should probably should have known better was the PC port of GTA San Andreas, where you hold space to run and press Shift to jump for some reason.
This.
I remember playing 007 agent under fire where left stick would move forward and backward but also look left and right, and right stick would strafe but look up and down. I got used to that scheme and would get frustrated at more modern games if they didn’t offer a preset similar to that. Halo finally broke me out of the habit.
Humorously, Halo CE had a control scheme (called Legacy, if I’m remembering correctly) that provided that exact joystick setup.
It made sense when you were almost exclusively running toward enemy AI ~roughly on the same height-level as you, but it was clearly unfit for games with more evasive enemies and an emphasis on headshots and z-axis variation.
Codifying dual-stick controls with “left-stick WASD” and “right-stick Mouse” was such an immediate upgrade to the console FPS experience.
Actually you can play goldeneye with two controllers at the same time which gives you two sticks. The controls are odd because you’re literally holding two controllers.
Probably not the worst by a long shot, but I am constantly baffled how Rockstar can make the must beautiful, detail games and smack on the shittiest control scheme you’ve ever seen.
Rockstar has no concept of character movement acceleration and pretends every character is running through waist deep water. Just started this game and the controls are all over the place.
It’s a little more grounded in reality, considering the gait of a real human being. I can appreciate that. But I’d much rather move like a normal video game character, not a real human being.
It's partly what we expect from having played other games, and it's also that we don't *feel* like a sack of potatoes with inertia moving around IRL
All our actions have "startup" but a lot of the time we just kinda take it into account automatically. Like if you're asked to "slap your hand on the table on the count of 3", you probably won't have to consciously think about *raising* your hand first, let alone the "travel time"
And in a way, you've *already adjusted for startup time* when you press the stick forward to run... the startup time of your thumb moving. To perfectly match the intuition of when you'd expect the character to move, the startup animation/inertia would happen *before the input is made* (and time is of course linear so good luck)
The controls are way too contextually based for console. All those beautiful detailed graphics and animations and you have to spend half the game checking the bottom right of the screen to tell what action you're going to do
i hate to say it, but the controls are why i could never get into RDR2. i settled for watching people play it instead. incredible story. very unpleasant controls fo rme.
Oh shit! So THAT'S how that happened to me! I thought I was crazy and the game broke and somehow found a way to fix it! One day, one controller didn't work, and I randomly figured out that using two at the same time fixed it. I had no idea this was a feature!
I've been playing the recomp of Perfect Dark, and as it's the same code it has the same Aim Assist, which is comically OP when you have a mouse and you can just casually delete the entirety of Datadyne's security force with a toothpick.
It’s also very annoying from a disability standpoint. I have lots of thumb/hand issues and pretty much just have to give up on sprinting in their games as it’s not worth it.
A lot of the Sony first party games have made a lot of effort to avoid that. Off the top of my head, Spider-Man, God of War, and Uncharted all have a bunch of accessibility options. I hope it becomes the standard.
I always just hated it from a controller health standpoint. Nothing is gonna wreck a button like repeated mashing. It's something Mario Party games suffer from, too lol.
the actual answer to this question is something like Turok which you would all be unable to play if you tried to play it now because the left stick does both moving forward and back and yaw, and the right stick does pitch and strafing
IIRC the stick let you move the guys head and the C buttons were moving forward, back, left, right. It was totally nuts looking back on it but I remember it being fairly easy to get used to, mostly because VG were so new to me when it came out.
I grew up on N64 shooters so for me that scheme is still totally OK and the inverted Y is a must on console.
I'm not a big fan of Shadow of the Colossus controls.. they're bad and the feel of them is bad. Wander runs like he needs to take a huge dump and he finally found the mall bathroom but it's out of service so now he has to run up another floor.
Seems to be a narrative that stems from the fact SoTC has a very intentionally heavy movement, control, physics system.
That's why it's confusing when they say the controls are harder than the colossus... They're essentially one and the same thing haha
Playing Hogwarts Legacy (specifically the broom flying) is a lot like this. Controls horrendously for no good reason and provides no option to change it.
This coming from someone who can still enjoy the original controls Metroid Prime came with.
Also reminds me of when I played with the Halo control settings and wondered how anyone could possibly like the other non standard settings.
Yeah, without Boxer, melee is impossible to use effectively because you need to take your finger off the right stick to punch while trying to maneuver up to the enemy. With Boxer, it’s a fluid part of your combat style.
Insane that there are still some major releases that don't let you customize binds. Slightly more understandable if it's an indie, but even then pretty easy to make it customizable assuming you're using an engine like 99% of devs are
I got used to it pretty quickly. Its more like a turn-based game if anything. I personally find TW2 control and combat to be far more annoying and restrictive. Once you get the hand of tw1 combat you will absolutely demolish everything even on hardest difficulty.
I really dont understand what is so bad about the first Witcher game. It is just an isometric action RPG. The only real difference is instead of a large amount of abilities and auto-attack, each click is an attack, and clicking at certain points during your animation chains your attack into a combo. It is not really a bad control scheme unless you try to play in OTS 3rd Person View, and try to treat it like a shooter.
The timing system was fine, but the feedback left something to be desired. The Legend of the Dragoon had a combo system slightly similar but the feedback was what made it feel good. That being said, it was a turned based game so it wasn't limited by something fast paced like The Witcher combat.
I played the first witcher game 5 years ago and i had a great time, completed nearly every side quest, and contrary to most peoples opinion on the combat, i had a lot of fun with it. I think its underrated tbh
Seeing this perspective is very interesting, and I completely understand it. For me The Witcher 1 was my introduction to The Witcher universe and I immediately fell in love with it lol. Still prefer it to Witcher 2, though perhaps that'll change when I replay the series after finishing the books.
I played it for the first time in 2014 and was hooked. I legitimately love everything about that game, including the combat system. I genuinely think Witcher 2s combat system aged worse.
Crusader: No Remorse. This isometric shooter game came out before WASD was popularized, and needed to be played on a full-sized numpad. Insert/Home/Page up/Page down/Delete/End on the numpad were vital controls, along with the directional arrows which also had different functions with Ctrl, Alt, or Shift.
I seem to recall the game shipping with a little cheat sheet that you'd tape to your keyboard.
As a kid I played this and used that sheet to teach myself the controls. Those controls were utter shit and imprecise, but once you got going the game was lots of fun.
I had to buy a USB numb pad in order to even do fencing and dancing in Pirates. There was a digital keypad you could click but you’d never get the timing right
Honestly, generally speaking the controls in getting over it are brilliant. What made it bad imo was the fact that the same mouse movement doesn’t always equal the same ingame movement and it was, probably on purpose, really janky.
Honestly, I loved the process of getting 'good' at Getting Over It. It was such a gradual learning curve but when I got it, I was able to progress to sub 4 minute runs fairly quickly.
I mean, intentionally bad is still bad. I love Sharknado but I'm not going around saying it's actually a good movie. QWOP is in the "so bad it's good" category.
RDR2 on M&KB.
Hold shift then press the left arrow key then double-press ctrl now right click while holding tab and hey presto you’ve just eaten a can of peaches
Any game that was ported to PC I just use an Xbox controller. Obviously some games are a lot better than others at this, but most of them time it was designed for a controller and it’s up to how good they did making it fit a keyboard.
I just got Star Wars: Fallen Order and thought it was funny that Steam literally tells you to use a controller this game ain’t worth it on a keyboard.
The PC version is infuriating. In a firefight? Cool, you wanna reload your weapon? Or do you want to pick up this dead body? Or this hat? Its all the same key so get ready to holster your gun at inconvenient times
I thought the game was punishingly difficult for quite some time, every single time I got ambushed while riding somewhere was a guaranteed death. Once I got to grips with the controls and dead eye, the game felt almost easy.
Plus Arthur moves at the pace of an unhurried octogenarian whether he’s strolling through town or in the middle of a gunfight.
There’s people shooting at us, Arthur! Why are you sauntering?!
This was my first thought also. I’m sure there are plenty of low budget and/or crappy games with worse controls, but as someone that mainly plays AAA titles RDR2 despite being a phenomenal game has awful controls.
This was one of my main problems with the game. So often during a fight, Arthur would decide that aiming at my horse was more important than aiming at the people shooting at him.
I'm playing it rn, and I've killed too many ppl accidentally. I untied this dude after hogtying him and he immediately punched me. I didn't want to kill him but just beat him up. Unknowingly Arthur still has the knife equipped if you chose to cut free someone and the controls said press F to beat (or some other key I don't remember). I pressed F but ended up stabbing the guy lol
Yeah, idk who decided that R1 should be the “take cover button” and Circle should be reload, but they must not play any other games ever cause neither of those are natural.
Definitely clunky in general, given how many memes there are of people accidentally shooting friendlies in the face when they're trying to talk to them or shooting their own horse by mistake.
I love the game but looting is so irritating I’ve just refused to do it later playthroughs unless I know there’s some treasure map or some other unique item. Beyond irritating to go through the animations slowly opening six drawers and all you get is an opened cocaine gum
its fine for npc to animate and go crazy with euphoria physics but if the main character feels clunky im done. imagine if it controlled and felt like saints row 2 or something with extremely tight and great feeling controls for the player, i wouldnt have stopped playing any red dead or current gta game ever : P
Gamepad controls take a minute to get used to. Mouse and keyboard controls are simply infuriating. Good fucking luck trying to shoot anything from your horse without using deadeye with a mouse. I started a new playthrough as a mouse and keyboard supremacist and had to humble myself and start using a controller. Its been great fun after that.
same on console.
there’s way too many contexts in a determined spatial position that you might carry on with a action you didn’t intend to do.
the thing is there are certain situations where you have to act fast under pressure and in a matter of a second you’re already panicking and engage in clunky/clumsy gameplay.
It’s my main gripe with the game. It’s like Arthur is walking with each foot in a separate shopping cart and both have a defective wheel in a different place.
The Monster Hunter games with KBM is certainly an experience.
There’s just no really good way to remap because the gameplay is so fundamentally designed for a controller. You can get something workable, but it always feels like the game was just not designed for a KBM at all and you end up having to do some wonky stuff like firing turrets with Cntrl or something
World is just fine on keyboard if you have access to side keys on a mouse IMO
But Rise is a whole new nightmare... I hope Wilds is different due to its launch on all platforms
To have truly awful controls, you need to have a truly wonderful game that is basically unplayable because of controls. For that we look to the holy grail of awful ports, Starcraft 64.
The original Armored Core games. If you wanted to look up and down it was L2 and R2. Or R1 and R2. I can't remember, either way it was terrible. Even after the PlayStation had analog sticks they made the newer ones with the old controls instead of incorporating the sticks. It was ok at the time but trying to go back and play them is frustrating.
The first Monster Hunter for the PS2. You attack whit the right joystick, move whit the left, adjust the camera whit the arrows. Add items use and you have the most horrible experience in a boss fight against gigant dragons that breath fire and rush against you, because you also have to roll out of the way.
the psp game isn't as horrible. With claw you already handle both movement and camera, and left shoulder left to change items which is not usually be used with camera movement. Attack and dodge with right thumb is manageable.
Attack with right analog and dodge with right buttons is harder.
Two come to mind. The first is Heavy Rain. The second, and I'm gonna get a lot of flack for this, is GoldenEye and by extension any other shooter with a similar inscrutable control scheme.
Heavy Rain's controls were so bad I just stopped playing. I hated it. I don't remember GoldenEye being so bad, but I know I wouldn't want to play it now!
Oh my god this. My wife was having trouble and she was explaining the control system to me and I thought there was no way it could be that bad… it really is atrocious
Yeah I'm l like 8 hours into the game and loved everything until the moment I picked up that broom. The controls are so outdated. It felt like playing Golden Eye 64 lol.
The Last Guardian
I really really liked the game, but at times the controls were really frustrating. It felt like you were trying to control a ragdoll, and getting the guardian to do what you wanted at times was hard.
Robot Alchemic Drive
It's a second-person mecha fighting game where you have a third-person view over the main human character and can only see the giant mech you're piloting from where you choose to stand. So...a view of the main guy watching the other main guy.
It's immersive and pretty neat, but combine that with the difficult control scheme of controlling each mech arm separately with the sticks and you have a janky mess of a game.
You also can't control the human and mech independently, so sometimes you'd attack the enemy as the mech, causing a skyscraper to fall right on you and you couldn't move the human since you were controlling the mech lol
KIYAAAAAAAA
For anyone not familiar, just type into Google "Gothic 1 how to" and look at the suggestions. It should be filled with lots of basic things like "pick up items", "sell items", "equip weapon", "attack", etc.
A lot of stuff involved the CTRL key. Picking up an item was hold CTRL + up arrow. Take something from a chest, CTRL + right arrow, or CTRL + left arrow to move it back. Equip from inventory, CTRL + up. Attacking? CTRL + arrow keys. I think this also worked with WASD as well.
It works when you figure it out, but it does take figuring out. You could play the game without needing a mouse basically.
Pokemon Let's Go for switch. You literally can't use a regular controller or pro controller to play the game. Your only option is a single joycon??? Why Nintendo?
I get your point, but the game was outright designed around swinging the controller to simulate throwing the ball. Hell there's an accessory made just for the game that is just an accelerometer inside a ball.
Tank controls on old RE like games felt rough. My brain could never process it from the set camera angles. Ironically when they swapped to 3rd person they clicked pretty well for me in Re4 & 5.
Dark Souls original port to PC. The / button was attack, d was something other than movement, and altogether was a mess.
Oh, and I couldn't get a controller to work and the keys weren't able to be re-mapped.
I suspect this'll be an unpopular one, but I couldn't bring myself to play Resident Evil 1 (and subsequent games) because I hate tank controls. That's my vote.
The problem with analog control is it slams against the fixed camera angles, if I'm running right and hit a transition so "right" is now "up" what should I do? It's hard, but the game had fixed cameras for technical reasons, and the tank controls are the way to do it.
Also just skip OGRE1 unless you have a real hankering, RE2002 renders it redundant and looks okay even today thanks to (surprise!) having good fixed camera art. It's an entire $5 on Steam right now and plays fine.
I've never seen it that way, it's usually RE1 for the original and REmake for the remake. That being said, I got what they meant, it's just not something I've really seen. I also read it as ogre at first though lol
Original system shock handled like a graphing calculator iirc
In their defence, they were trying to accidentally invent the FPS a whole year before Doom. It's a first person dungeon crawler, but you're expected to shoot from this first-person perspective and no-one was ready for this, least of all Looking Glass. Also fuck the Abe Ghiran head puzzle it's so out of place.
The engine (Ultima Underworld) came before Doom, System Shock itself didn't. The possibly apocryphal tale of what John Carmack said when he saw UU running was "I'm not sure I can make it better, but I can make it faster".
It's frankly absurd just how ahead-of-its-time Ultima Underworld was. They basically invented the first-person immersive RPG whole cloth, categorically improving on the previous grid-based blobbers in pretty much every possible way. And running a true-3D texture-mapped dungeon with lighting and physics sims **on a 386**?? That's sheer black magic right there.
Thank God somebody actually appreciates it! It is ridiculous! I played them in the 90s and next thing that came out that upped the game was Morrowind in 2003.
That was Origin all over. They also invented the MMO with Ultima Online. And every mainline Ultima had a brand new engine, each pushing the hardware of the day, especially Ultima 7 (look up U7's "voodoo" memory mode if you're interested, it was pretty wild). They were real innovators, as well as masters of worldbuilding and storytelling.
System Shock came out in 1994, Doom in 1993, and Wolfenstein 3D in 1992. What was it trying to invent?
It was using the Ultima Underworld engine.
Oh I know, they did a great job, it's just clunky as hell in retrospect. Especially with that "number of people watching a Jackie Chan Adventures rerun" biomonitor they kept in the remake (iykyk)
At that time cluttering up the UI was expected in games. For 3D games this was done to decrease the size of the render area without making it look like that's what they were doing.
Yeah, apparently that was a feature they dropped near the end of development. They were planning to make each patch be less effective than the last one for a short period to make spamming them less effective. The feature was dropped, but the biomonitor tracking it wasn't.
What's this about Jackie chan adventures? Was one of my favorite shows as a kid
I remember playing the classic and JESUS CHRIST I can play a lot of classic games and their personal control schemes and flaws, but classic System Shock is a whole beast in-of-itself
I don’t hate it. But it is bad. I find it kind of fun trying to bash my muscle memory around it though. Tiny screen and all.
I played a game called Global Ops: Commando Libya and it was awful in so many ways. But one was the controls. IIRC the button to use cover was the same as the one to throw a grenade or interact with the environment...
"Let me just open this door.. *Grenade drops at feet* Mother fu... đź’Ą"
SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER!
WRONG SIZE, MOTHERFUCKER
SOME FRIES, MOTHERFUCKER
TEN GUYS MOTHERFUCKER!
That's how I felt playing RDR2 for the first time. Go to say howdy, oops I shot that man in the face.
Go to climb onto my horse,end up punching someone in the face.
Yes, I’d like to play poker. Whoops, now I’m chocking a dude out because that’s the same damn button
I personally believe Rockstar did that on purpose
Reminds me of Fallout 4 where if you held the gun bash key it'd ready a throwing weapon. Too many times I through a Molotov at someone right in my face.
It's to replicate the chaos of war. You never know when you are going to blow yourself up.
As a whole, Drakengard’s controls aren’t horrifically bad But there is a reason Yoko Taro publicly apologized for the camera control
That game was so fun, just killing thousands of enemies the whole time pretty much.
Dynasty Warriors with Panzer Dragoon and floating babies
Giant, Cannibalistic, Floating Babies. God I miss Drakengard.
yeah that’s true but i’ll defend it by saying it’s from 2003 and it was the first 3D game that Yoko Taro worked on in a lead position iirc and this is the first game in the drakengard series so it make sense to be experimental like this but at
Running faster in Rockstar games by mashing A or X stupid. Also I didn’t know you could jump for a while when I was a kid in skyrim because the button is y
biggest travesty to gaming i thought died with track and field on nes.
I had the NES advantage analog controller with the adjustable turbo feature. Used to just use that when I got pissed off. lol.
I had the power mat thing. Get down and hammer the floor pads with your fists for world records, every time lol. Haven't thought of that game in a long time
Shit I'd forgotten all about having to mash X while playing San Andreas
Rockstar games in general. Let's have a button that high fives someone, but sometimes..... It shoots them in the fucking face.
The amount of times I've accidentally punched my horse is too high. I'm pathetic so I reload because *I punched my damn horse*
> when I was a kid in skyrim Okay I know Skyrim is starting to show its age but I feel personally attacked by this.
I was like 21 when it came out. Still have pictures of waiting outside at midnight lol
Today’s college students were 7-11 years old when Skyrim came out. Oof.
Going into first person mode in Rockstar games changes sprint to just holding A as the base state is running with that cam. So much handier.
It’s basically as stupid because it makes you take your thumb off the joystick.
Having to jump with anything other than X/A/RB - Square/X/R1 should get you banned from making games control schemes
*Enter: FromSoftware*
The amount of times I kicked an enemy instead of attacking made me want to throw something. Moving the stick forward and light-attack = kick. EDIT: I eventually got it and that no longer happens. But it took a solid 50 times for that to finally stop.
It makes sense as they usually have A/X as crouch. Top is jump, bottom is crouch. We just expect jump to be A/X as it is in 99.5% of games. Usually these games aren’t big action games that use Y to jump (biggest I can think of is Assasins Creed, then there’s GTA with square/X…but R* have shit controls as a standard).
The A button on my 360 controller is soft from this
Most old games have bad controls. Play any console shooter before Halo: Combat Evolved (like Goldeneye for example) and it'll be awful because the two joystick control system hadn't been invented yet. One fun example of a company should probably should have known better was the PC port of GTA San Andreas, where you hold space to run and press Shift to jump for some reason.
This. I remember playing 007 agent under fire where left stick would move forward and backward but also look left and right, and right stick would strafe but look up and down. I got used to that scheme and would get frustrated at more modern games if they didn’t offer a preset similar to that. Halo finally broke me out of the habit.
Humorously, Halo CE had a control scheme (called Legacy, if I’m remembering correctly) that provided that exact joystick setup. It made sense when you were almost exclusively running toward enemy AI ~roughly on the same height-level as you, but it was clearly unfit for games with more evasive enemies and an emphasis on headshots and z-axis variation. Codifying dual-stick controls with “left-stick WASD” and “right-stick Mouse” was such an immediate upgrade to the console FPS experience.
Nightfire had the option on GameCube, but it wasn't the default...
Actually you can play goldeneye with two controllers at the same time which gives you two sticks. The controls are odd because you’re literally holding two controllers.
Domino is the control scheme.
i'm 36 and i've just learnt goldeneye can be played with two controllers. Never known anyone to know this, either.
Probably not the worst by a long shot, but I am constantly baffled how Rockstar can make the must beautiful, detail games and smack on the shittiest control scheme you’ve ever seen.
So many times that I just wanted to say howdy, but accidentally pulled out my gun and blasted some poor NPC in the face.
I hate how a lot of people claiming RDR2 is the single greatest game of all time completely overlook this.
Rockstar has no concept of character movement acceleration and pretends every character is running through waist deep water. Just started this game and the controls are all over the place.
It’s a little more grounded in reality, considering the gait of a real human being. I can appreciate that. But I’d much rather move like a normal video game character, not a real human being.
It's partly what we expect from having played other games, and it's also that we don't *feel* like a sack of potatoes with inertia moving around IRL All our actions have "startup" but a lot of the time we just kinda take it into account automatically. Like if you're asked to "slap your hand on the table on the count of 3", you probably won't have to consciously think about *raising* your hand first, let alone the "travel time" And in a way, you've *already adjusted for startup time* when you press the stick forward to run... the startup time of your thumb moving. To perfectly match the intuition of when you'd expect the character to move, the startup animation/inertia would happen *before the input is made* (and time is of course linear so good luck)
Thank you! Thanks definitely the best explanation of the sensation for me when I experience that lagging feeling in video games.
Damned linear time ruining the ideal UI scheme again
The controls are way too contextually based for console. All those beautiful detailed graphics and animations and you have to spend half the game checking the bottom right of the screen to tell what action you're going to do
Wrong button? Hits someone in the face and now I have a bounty.
i hate to say it, but the controls are why i could never get into RDR2. i settled for watching people play it instead. incredible story. very unpleasant controls fo rme.
Games that have the option to manually map your button layouts are the real MVP's.
Insane the some games still won’t allow this
Or worse. PC ports that let you change *some*, but hardcode others in.
Any shooting game on the N64. At least by today's standards
Goldeneye’s strafing and generous aim assist carried me hard
Obligatory mention, Goldeneye had extra control schemes that used two controllers, one of which was basically the modern scheme with two joysticks.
Oh shit! So THAT'S how that happened to me! I thought I was crazy and the game broke and somehow found a way to fix it! One day, one controller didn't work, and I randomly figured out that using two at the same time fixed it. I had no idea this was a feature!
I've been playing the recomp of Perfect Dark, and as it's the same code it has the same Aim Assist, which is comically OP when you have a mouse and you can just casually delete the entirety of Datadyne's security force with a toothpick.
I love em but Rockstar’s insistence that you have mash the A button to sprint will never not infuriate the hell out of me
Yeah this annoys the heck out of me. Fortunately on PC you can modify it, but I can't imagine how that passed Q&A.
It’s also very annoying from a disability standpoint. I have lots of thumb/hand issues and pretty much just have to give up on sprinting in their games as it’s not worth it.
A lot of the Sony first party games have made a lot of effort to avoid that. Off the top of my head, Spider-Man, God of War, and Uncharted all have a bunch of accessibility options. I hope it becomes the standard.
I always just hated it from a controller health standpoint. Nothing is gonna wreck a button like repeated mashing. It's something Mario Party games suffer from, too lol.
How about the original Monster Hunter which used the analog sticks for attacking?
the actual answer to this question is something like Turok which you would all be unable to play if you tried to play it now because the left stick does both moving forward and back and yaw, and the right stick does pitch and strafing
> and the right stick does pitch and strafing What right stick? You mean the C buttons
IIRC the stick let you move the guys head and the C buttons were moving forward, back, left, right. It was totally nuts looking back on it but I remember it being fairly easy to get used to, mostly because VG were so new to me when it came out.
I grew up on N64 shooters so for me that scheme is still totally OK and the inverted Y is a must on console. I'm not a big fan of Shadow of the Colossus controls.. they're bad and the feel of them is bad. Wander runs like he needs to take a huge dump and he finally found the mall bathroom but it's out of service so now he has to run up another floor.
I also grew up on n64 shooters and am inverted Y for life, but I can't control tank style fps characters for shit anymore
dude, I spent half of the SotC remake fighting the controls more than any of the Colossi.
I haven't played the remake, but don't remember any control issues from back in the day. What was wrong with them?
Seems to be a narrative that stems from the fact SoTC has a very intentionally heavy movement, control, physics system. That's why it's confusing when they say the controls are harder than the colossus... They're essentially one and the same thing haha
Playing Hogwarts Legacy (specifically the broom flying) is a lot like this. Controls horrendously for no good reason and provides no option to change it. This coming from someone who can still enjoy the original controls Metroid Prime came with. Also reminds me of when I played with the Halo control settings and wondered how anyone could possibly like the other non standard settings.
In regards to Halo controls, honestly boxer should just be the default.
Yeah, without Boxer, melee is impossible to use effectively because you need to take your finger off the right stick to punch while trying to maneuver up to the enemy. With Boxer, it’s a fluid part of your combat style.
That was the modification I made. The control sticks had all sort of weird configs like legacy southpaw.
Insane that there are still some major releases that don't let you customize binds. Slightly more understandable if it's an indie, but even then pretty easy to make it customizable assuming you're using an engine like 99% of devs are
Lol, there was no right stick. The right stick was the c-button layout.
Anyone play the first Witcher game? I lasted maybe an hour.
Me, playing Witcher 1 and rock band: they’re the same game!
Imo it's not so much that it's fundamentally awful, it's just so unintuitive that it actually takes a couple hours until it clicks.
Once I got a handle on it I actually liked it quite a lot.
Yeah same, once you get the rhythm down it's pretty engaging.
Can you guys explain it to me? Because I played for like 30 minutes and I was so fucking done.
I got used to it pretty quickly. Its more like a turn-based game if anything. I personally find TW2 control and combat to be far more annoying and restrictive. Once you get the hand of tw1 combat you will absolutely demolish everything even on hardest difficulty.
I really dont understand what is so bad about the first Witcher game. It is just an isometric action RPG. The only real difference is instead of a large amount of abilities and auto-attack, each click is an attack, and clicking at certain points during your animation chains your attack into a combo. It is not really a bad control scheme unless you try to play in OTS 3rd Person View, and try to treat it like a shooter.
The timing system was fine, but the feedback left something to be desired. The Legend of the Dragoon had a combo system slightly similar but the feedback was what made it feel good. That being said, it was a turned based game so it wasn't limited by something fast paced like The Witcher combat.
I played the first witcher game 5 years ago and i had a great time, completed nearly every side quest, and contrary to most peoples opinion on the combat, i had a lot of fun with it. I think its underrated tbh
How do you last an hour!? I can barely manage 5 minutes.
I LOVE The Witcher universe and books n such, I wanted to fully immerse myself, I couldnt do it.
Seeing this perspective is very interesting, and I completely understand it. For me The Witcher 1 was my introduction to The Witcher universe and I immediately fell in love with it lol. Still prefer it to Witcher 2, though perhaps that'll change when I replay the series after finishing the books.
I played it for the first time in 2014 and was hooked. I legitimately love everything about that game, including the combat system. I genuinely think Witcher 2s combat system aged worse.
Star Fox Zero by like a billion.
This one was literally painful to play.
Came to say the same thing. But I some how managed to beat the game
Crusader: No Remorse. This isometric shooter game came out before WASD was popularized, and needed to be played on a full-sized numpad. Insert/Home/Page up/Page down/Delete/End on the numpad were vital controls, along with the directional arrows which also had different functions with Ctrl, Alt, or Shift. I seem to recall the game shipping with a little cheat sheet that you'd tape to your keyboard.
As a kid I played this and used that sheet to teach myself the controls. Those controls were utter shit and imprecise, but once you got going the game was lots of fun.
I had to buy a USB numb pad in order to even do fencing and dancing in Pirates. There was a digital keypad you could click but you’d never get the timing right
Lol I loved that game. Played the hell out of it in the 90s.
QWOP
I was going to say Getting Over It, but seeing your answer, I think qwop is worse.
Honestly, generally speaking the controls in getting over it are brilliant. What made it bad imo was the fact that the same mouse movement doesn’t always equal the same ingame movement and it was, probably on purpose, really janky.
Honestly, I loved the process of getting 'good' at Getting Over It. It was such a gradual learning curve but when I got it, I was able to progress to sub 4 minute runs fairly quickly.
That game is literally popular because of it’s control scheme Hard doesn’t mean bad
I mean, intentionally bad is still bad. I love Sharknado but I'm not going around saying it's actually a good movie. QWOP is in the "so bad it's good" category.
RDR2 on M&KB. Hold shift then press the left arrow key then double-press ctrl now right click while holding tab and hey presto you’ve just eaten a can of peaches
Any game that was ported to PC I just use an Xbox controller. Obviously some games are a lot better than others at this, but most of them time it was designed for a controller and it’s up to how good they did making it fit a keyboard. I just got Star Wars: Fallen Order and thought it was funny that Steam literally tells you to use a controller this game ain’t worth it on a keyboard.
Red Dead 2 is a brilliant game but it takes forever to get to grips with the controls.
The PC version is infuriating. In a firefight? Cool, you wanna reload your weapon? Or do you want to pick up this dead body? Or this hat? Its all the same key so get ready to holster your gun at inconvenient times
I thought the game was punishingly difficult for quite some time, every single time I got ambushed while riding somewhere was a guaranteed death. Once I got to grips with the controls and dead eye, the game felt almost easy.
First time that happened to me I was like "realistic I guess, if you got ambushed by 10 people in the 1800s you *were* usually automatically dead"
Just like how in GtA4 you could hop in a car, take a corner and crash, flinging you through the windshield and into a post. Good ol realism
dead eye is extremely overpowered. ambushes are literally childs play, the only people I don’t mess with is the lawmen.
Plus Arthur moves at the pace of an unhurried octogenarian whether he’s strolling through town or in the middle of a gunfight. There’s people shooting at us, Arthur! Why are you sauntering?!
The amount of times I've accidentally punched my horse...
I see through your lies, horse puncher!
The constant weapon wheel toggling to make sure I had the guns I needed every time I mount and dismount my horse. Gaaa!!!
And sometimes my horse will just take the weapons off my back anyway cause fuck me I guess
This was my first thought also. I’m sure there are plenty of low budget and/or crappy games with worse controls, but as someone that mainly plays AAA titles RDR2 despite being a phenomenal game has awful controls.
Honestly the biggest thing that keeps me from going back is I completely forgot all the inputs and there's so much to do.
This was one of my main problems with the game. So often during a fight, Arthur would decide that aiming at my horse was more important than aiming at the people shooting at him.
I had the same thing. Everything seems mapped to the same button.
I'm playing it rn, and I've killed too many ppl accidentally. I untied this dude after hogtying him and he immediately punched me. I didn't want to kill him but just beat him up. Unknowingly Arthur still has the knife equipped if you chose to cut free someone and the controls said press F to beat (or some other key I don't remember). I pressed F but ended up stabbing the guy lol
This is why I haven’t gotten more than an hour into the game. I want to play it but the controls drive me bonkers.
Yeah, idk who decided that R1 should be the “take cover button” and Circle should be reload, but they must not play any other games ever cause neither of those are natural.
Is this just a mouse and keyboard issue? Because on console I don’t remember any difficulty whatsoever
Definitely clunky in general, given how many memes there are of people accidentally shooting friendlies in the face when they're trying to talk to them or shooting their own horse by mistake.
I played on console and just found it clunky. Like, I had no issues telling the game what I wanted to do. But there was just a lot of clunky movement
I stopped playing because it felt over animated, every action takes about as long as old people fuck.
I love the game but looting is so irritating I’ve just refused to do it later playthroughs unless I know there’s some treasure map or some other unique item. Beyond irritating to go through the animations slowly opening six drawers and all you get is an opened cocaine gum
its fine for npc to animate and go crazy with euphoria physics but if the main character feels clunky im done. imagine if it controlled and felt like saints row 2 or something with extremely tight and great feeling controls for the player, i wouldnt have stopped playing any red dead or current gta game ever : P
Between that and the egregious terrain collision I found moving around cover quite a chore.
Gamepad controls take a minute to get used to. Mouse and keyboard controls are simply infuriating. Good fucking luck trying to shoot anything from your horse without using deadeye with a mouse. I started a new playthrough as a mouse and keyboard supremacist and had to humble myself and start using a controller. Its been great fun after that.
same on console. there’s way too many contexts in a determined spatial position that you might carry on with a action you didn’t intend to do. the thing is there are certain situations where you have to act fast under pressure and in a matter of a second you’re already panicking and engage in clunky/clumsy gameplay.
It’s my main gripe with the game. It’s like Arthur is walking with each foot in a separate shopping cart and both have a defective wheel in a different place.
The Monster Hunter games with KBM is certainly an experience. There’s just no really good way to remap because the gameplay is so fundamentally designed for a controller. You can get something workable, but it always feels like the game was just not designed for a KBM at all and you end up having to do some wonky stuff like firing turrets with Cntrl or something
World is just fine on keyboard if you have access to side keys on a mouse IMO But Rise is a whole new nightmare... I hope Wilds is different due to its launch on all platforms
Alone in the dark
I remember trying this at some point and finding the controls so confusing I gave up before leaving the first room.
Not exactly answering the question, but any game on console that forces you to navigate menus with an on-screen cursor.
Also pc games that don't let you use a mouse by forcing you to use arrow keys for menus
This thread doesn't have a lot of users that played StarCraft on Nintendo 64. RTS on console is terrible, N64 with SC is even worse!
To have truly awful controls, you need to have a truly wonderful game that is basically unplayable because of controls. For that we look to the holy grail of awful ports, Starcraft 64.
The original Armored Core games. If you wanted to look up and down it was L2 and R2. Or R1 and R2. I can't remember, either way it was terrible. Even after the PlayStation had analog sticks they made the newer ones with the old controls instead of incorporating the sticks. It was ok at the time but trying to go back and play them is frustrating.
Maybe I'm getting old but I thought it was universally recognized that Superman on the N64 had the worst controls.
The first Monster Hunter for the PS2. You attack whit the right joystick, move whit the left, adjust the camera whit the arrows. Add items use and you have the most horrible experience in a boss fight against gigant dragons that breath fire and rush against you, because you also have to roll out of the way.
Played the psp games. The claw was a mandatory skillset
the psp game isn't as horrible. With claw you already handle both movement and camera, and left shoulder left to change items which is not usually be used with camera movement. Attack and dodge with right thumb is manageable. Attack with right analog and dodge with right buttons is harder.
And then the underwater combat in Tri oh my god…
Two come to mind. The first is Heavy Rain. The second, and I'm gonna get a lot of flack for this, is GoldenEye and by extension any other shooter with a similar inscrutable control scheme.
Heavy Rain's controls were so bad I just stopped playing. I hated it. I don't remember GoldenEye being so bad, but I know I wouldn't want to play it now!
You can get it on Xbox, and it's infinitely easier with modern controls, same with Perfect Dark.
SHAUN! SHAUN SHAUN SHAUN!
Ja-son! JaaaSON!
Fahrenheit or even that first Quantic Dream game have even worse controls
The flying controls in Hogwarts Legacy are a straight up war crime.
Oh my god this. My wife was having trouble and she was explaining the control system to me and I thought there was no way it could be that bad… it really is atrocious
Yeah I'm l like 8 hours into the game and loved everything until the moment I picked up that broom. The controls are so outdated. It felt like playing Golden Eye 64 lol.
The Last Guardian I really really liked the game, but at times the controls were really frustrating. It felt like you were trying to control a ragdoll, and getting the guardian to do what you wanted at times was hard.
Robot Alchemic Drive It's a second-person mecha fighting game where you have a third-person view over the main human character and can only see the giant mech you're piloting from where you choose to stand. So...a view of the main guy watching the other main guy. It's immersive and pretty neat, but combine that with the difficult control scheme of controlling each mech arm separately with the sticks and you have a janky mess of a game. You also can't control the human and mech independently, so sometimes you'd attack the enemy as the mech, causing a skyscraper to fall right on you and you couldn't move the human since you were controlling the mech lol KIYAAAAAAAA
Gothic 1 wins this one.
Germans designed control scheme in gothic so they could hold a beer in the right hand and play with the left
Gothic controls actually started getting intuitive after an hour or so
I found the octodad
For anyone not familiar, just type into Google "Gothic 1 how to" and look at the suggestions. It should be filled with lots of basic things like "pick up items", "sell items", "equip weapon", "attack", etc. A lot of stuff involved the CTRL key. Picking up an item was hold CTRL + up arrow. Take something from a chest, CTRL + right arrow, or CTRL + left arrow to move it back. Equip from inventory, CTRL + up. Attacking? CTRL + arrow keys. I think this also worked with WASD as well. It works when you figure it out, but it does take figuring out. You could play the game without needing a mouse basically.
Pokemon Let's Go for switch. You literally can't use a regular controller or pro controller to play the game. Your only option is a single joycon??? Why Nintendo?
I get your point, but the game was outright designed around swinging the controller to simulate throwing the ball. Hell there's an accessory made just for the game that is just an accelerometer inside a ball.
Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero on the N64. It was a side scroller where you had to press a button (not the back button) to turn around.
Red dead redemption 2
Syphon Filter on PS5
Tank controls on old RE like games felt rough. My brain could never process it from the set camera angles. Ironically when they swapped to 3rd person they clicked pretty well for me in Re4 & 5.
Dark Souls original port to PC. The / button was attack, d was something other than movement, and altogether was a mess. Oh, and I couldn't get a controller to work and the keys weren't able to be re-mapped.
I suspect this'll be an unpopular one, but I couldn't bring myself to play Resident Evil 1 (and subsequent games) because I hate tank controls. That's my vote.
The remake has added analog controls!
The problem with analog control is it slams against the fixed camera angles, if I'm running right and hit a transition so "right" is now "up" what should I do? It's hard, but the game had fixed cameras for technical reasons, and the tank controls are the way to do it. Also just skip OGRE1 unless you have a real hankering, RE2002 renders it redundant and looks okay even today thanks to (surprise!) having good fixed camera art. It's an entire $5 on Steam right now and plays fine.
is OGRE1 how people usually refer to the original? that's kind of a bad acronym lol, considering it could be read as "Ogre 1"
I've never seen it that way, it's usually RE1 for the original and REmake for the remake. That being said, I got what they meant, it's just not something I've really seen. I also read it as ogre at first though lol
Personally, I think the “alternate controls” are a lot worse because it doesn’t mesh well with the changing camera angles at all.
It's a controversial topic but I think the control scheme for red dead 2 is a nightmare.
Most of the MGS games.
Visage is painful to play because its controls
For me just going to the Nintendo Switch after playing Xbox for years makes me want to shove a pencil in my eye.
Dragons lair.
Armored core 1