Trying to play with WASD is AGONY! (DEBUNKED)

[Foebane72]

RjY said:

I think it's down to the motor skills baked into your brain during early years playing games. For example I find WASD unusable due to having both axes of movement on the same hand. I believe this is because I grew up with BBC Micro games that used one hand for left/right and the other for up/down.

Oh, MAN, can I attest to that! I played quite a few BBC Micro games back in the day, a lot of them in school, in fact, and we had to avoid Repton because the loud music from the speaker on the title screen (before we could shut it off) was a dead giveaway to the teacher! :D And yes, the control methods there seemed easier at the time.

[Maes]

Tsk...kids these days and their WASD... QAOP or ZXLP is where it's at. All the kool kids from the 80s know that!

[Voros]

The '80s called. They want their control methods back.

[Maes]

Y'all don't know what "hardcore" is until you tried playing Doom with a 9-pin Atari-style joystick ;-)

[Foebane72]

Maes said:

Tsk...kids these days and their WASD... QAOP or ZXLP is where it's at. All the kool kids from the 80s know that!

Those combos aren't so good for keyboard AND mouse, but it might be interesting to try them on Amiga emulation in place of a joystick.

[VGamingJunkie]

You haven't even SEEN hardcore until you've tried to play on an iPod wheel.

[Foebane72]

You want hardcore? Try THIS!
http://itrunsdoom.tumblr.com/post/99736267053/the-sandisk-sansa-clip-zip-yeah-it-runs-doom

I had one of these devices running Rockbox, so I speak from experience! It even had sound! Well, it should've, it was an MP3 player after all!

[Outrageous Videos]

Rathori said:

Only if you don't mind minimizing your game every time you try to hit Ctrl, because with ESDF you're gonna hit the Win key instead, which, contrary to what one would expect, is going to make you lose.

I actually had to pull that key out because I use left alt and left ctrl a lot and I kept hitting than and most old games if you hit that key it freezes up your computer
That key is a useless pain in the ass if you ask me
Also to contribute to the discussion
I spent my early years on the arrow keys and using shift to interact with thing and the 0 on the numpad for jump
But when I started encountering games that would display e as opposed to shift for interact I started using wads found no difference really if I can move and I don't require two hands on the keyboard I'm good

[Rathori]

Outrageous Videos said:

That key is a useless pain in the ass if you ask me

I already made a post here explaining why this key is useful to me, so I'll just leave this empty quote linking to that post here:

Rathori said:

...

...and I don't ever hit it by accident when I use WASD.

I have to say I never had any problem switching from arrow keys to WASD, even though I preferred numpad when I was a kid (because I could use 7 and 9 for "diagonal" movement in many games). I actually tried ESDF for some time (Quake 3, UT), but I like my crouches bound to Ctrl and it's a pain in the ass to rebind controls in every game I play. Also, modern games don't even need as many keys anyway, so there's no need to have those extra keys ESDF provides.

Speaking of PITA, try playing good ol' System Shock 1 with classic controls. The way I struggled to get used to it to play the game AND to get used to "normal" WASD controls after I finished it makes me think of how people struggle getting their "sea legs" and then getting their "land legs" back.

So, I guess, my point is that one could get used to any control scheme, if they wanted to.

Another example from my personal experience supporting that point would be how I broke my left arm when I was 16 and had to play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4(?) with only one hand, on Numpad. After some practice, I was able to pull off huge combos and beat the game using twelve keys with only five fingers, and boy does that game love chords!

[dew]

Foebane72 said:

You want hardcore? Try THIS!
http://itrunsdoom.tumblr.com/post/99736267053/the-sandisk-sansa-clip-zip-yeah-it-runs-doom

I had one of these devices running Rockbox, so I speak from experience! It even had sound! Well, it should've, it was an MP3 player after all!

I had both the first gen nano and the sansa clip zip and sansa was much more apt at doing stuff. Not just because it has much more powerful hardware, but the nano wheel is just complete bullshit and running doom on it was pure novelty factor that fizzled out after 20 seconds of trying to play the goddamn thing. At least with sansa you have some tactile feedback, the nano was just plain terrible for this.

[Bauul]

For terrible control schemes, nothings beats 1996's Realms of the Haunting.

Mouse to shoot and click on things (you had a floating cursor on screen, despite being first person). Arrow keys to walk and turn. Page Up and Page Down to look up and down. < and > to Strafe. Number keys for weapons. A and Z for jump and crouch. And L, R and U for inventory management.

You literally needed a hand on the left side of the keyboard, a hand on the right side of the keyboard, and a hand on the mouse to play!

[roadworx]

Bauul said:

For terrible control schemes, nothings beats 1996's Realms of the Haunting.

Mouse to shoot and click on things (you had a floating cursor on screen, despite being first person). Arrow keys to walk and turn. Page Up and Page Down to look up and down. < and > to Strafe. Number keys for weapons. A and Z for jump and crouch. And L, R and U for inventory management.

You literally needed a hand on the left side of the keyboard, a hand on the right side of the keyboard, and a hand on the mouse to play!

so, did anyone in development ever stop to think, "what the hell is this control scheme?" seriously, how could this ever get past any play-testers or quality control of any time?

actually, who would even think to make controls like that in the first place?

[Cynical]

roadworx said:

so, did anyone in development ever stop to think, "what the hell is this control scheme?" seriously, how could this ever get past any play-testers or quality control of any time?

actually, who would even think to make controls like that in the first place?

>Play-testers
>Quality control
>1996

[roadworx]

Cynical said:

>Play-testers
>Quality control
>1996

well, wouldn't you play your game after you finished it? or at least let someone else play it?

[Cynical]

Do you know how many releases from the old days are literally impossible to beat because of programming errors of various sorts?

Loads of games got released with no testing at all in those wild-west times.

[Maes]

Cynical said:

Do you know how many releases from the old days are literally impossible to beat because of programming errors of various sorts?

Loads of games got released with no testing at all in those wild-west times.

That might have been the 80s, and the home computer era. But in 1996 the game industry was already pretty mature and worth billions of $, and there were pretty solid reference points in the industry (for FPS, look no further than Doom). Not that this prevented some real crappers to be released. The mid 90s was unfortunately also a pretty fluid period, with concepts like "3D", "Multimedia", "Full motion video" , "Virtual Reality" etc. being thrown around randomly.

[Outrageous Videos]

Rathori said:

...and I don't ever hit it by accident when I use WASD.

Like I said my 2 most bound keys are left ctrl and alt and hitting that key will crash most games so no I don't hit it either with wasd
And I don't have a multi monitor setup and hiting windows+ typing the game you want is something I imagine might help but I'm not buying a new keyboard just to do that
So all in all I find it more beneficial to remove it

[Bauul]

roadworx said:

so, did anyone in development ever stop to think, "what the hell is this control scheme?" seriously, how could this ever get past any play-testers or quality control of any time?

actually, who would even think to make controls like that in the first place?

Quite! You couldn't change them either, naturally.

I played it with a friend. Literally, I took the mouse and right side of the keyboard, he took the left side. We were a pretty good team!

[Foebane72]

Maes said:

The mid 90s was unfortunately also a pretty fluid period, with concepts like "3D", "Multimedia", "Full motion video" , "Virtual Reality" etc. being thrown around randomly.

Those were great times for innovation, although looking back on Virtuality's 3D visuals compared to what we can do now with Oculus and FPS games now is, frankly, laughable.

I also remember FMV and the resulting PC game stuff, not to mention the pre-DVD format, Video CD - I saw Star Trek VI running on an Amiga CD32 with the FMV cartridge, and it looked OK, from what I saw.

As for looking for my first PC, the word "Multimedia" was EVERYWHERE in the buyers' magazines, it was NUTS.

[VGamingJunkie]

Maes said:

That might have been the 80s, and the home computer era. But in 1996 the game industry was already pretty mature and worth billions of $, and there were pretty solid reference points in the industry (for FPS, look no further than Doom). Not that this prevented some real crappers to be released. The mid 90s was unfortunately also a pretty fluid period, with concepts like "3D", "Multimedia", "Full motion video" , "Virtual Reality" etc. being thrown around randomly.

You will always have cheap hashed together games rushed out for a quick buck. Most notable are the good majority of licensed ip's from companies that could easily afford quality control.