Bring on the First-Person Space Shooters!

Disconnected ramblings follow.

Having recently moved to a totally new environment and being without transportation I've spent my time replaying old computer games and downloading freeware off the interweb (when I can). While playing Cube, an open-source first person shooter, I fell into the water on one of the levels, and just swimming around there I had a flashback to one of my first gaming experiences: playing an old copy Wing Commander II on a dusty 486 more than a decade ago, in 1994.

The thought put a damper over the rest of the evening.

Nobody has been able to make an original space shooter of any note for the last half-decade. I'm not talking about independent simulations like Starshatter (as worthy as they are of mention), or space trading games that owe more to Elite and financial spreadsheet simulations, or whatever it is that Derek Smart makes these days. I want action, barrel-rolls, white-knuckled combat I can leap into, and the more I play first-person shooters, the more evident it becomes my ambitions are too mighty to be confined to the ground. I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels this way.

Here's a thought: why not bring the FPS into space?

I'll say it: Freelancer. A step in the right direction, but obviously not enough. I'll admit Digital Anvil pulled off mouse control better than I'd expected, but overall the execution was far more conservative than it needed to be. The whole guns-on-gimbals gidget robbed the game right away of a lot of challenge (and forced DA to give the AI superhuman evasive maneuvers just to keep things balanced!) and all around the board there seemed to be a conscious dumbing down of gameplay elements - infinite weapons power, all ships given the same speed, even simple things like the ability to roll! I was modding Freelancer almost from the day I bought it, and even though there's been a lot of progress made the fundamental game dynamic is simply broken.

All this just because Microsoft was scared to sell a space shooter that used a mouse!

Sure, the golden age of joysticks is past. We're probably never going to see computer companies throwing in a joystick as part of their packages ever again. That doesn't mean either that

(A the space shooter is dead
(B a new space shooter must shun joysticks

If Freelancer had simply been a space shooter sans joystick, it could have been a great game. It was more than possible! Babylon 5: I've Found Her played great with a mouse. Hell, I went through Wing Commander II using a mouse, and I'm no l33t g4m3r with m4d sk1llz, or whatever the kids call themselves. At its core, the space shooter is no more complex than a "traditional" FPS*; picture the following setup:

You use the mouse to point and shoot. Left fires guns, right fires missiles.

WASD is the same as always, except W= throttles up, S= throttles down (or reverse throttles, if this is a newtonian game), A and D roll left and right.

Take that, throw in a simple deathmatch mode, and you've got a fun little game right there. Anyone with a mouse and keyboard (or gamepad!) could play it, and using this as a base, one could revitalize the entire genre. It amazes me, with so many people doing amazing things in freeware and open source, nobody else has apparently thought of this concept.

tl;dr GIMME QUAKE IN SPACE

GIMME MONEY FIRST.

Have you ever played through Unreal Tournament 2004? There's a ton of starfighter assault maps out there, and the air only onslaught maps are really fun if you downloaded the latest patch and free update which gives access to the two person bomber with ball turret and flares. It's not quite a full space FPS, but with the massive mod and mapper community you would get your money's worth long before you get bored.

What kind of idiot uses a mouse to....oh.

Update: I've found her.

No, the game, I've Found Her. I just played the skirmish mode in the patch and it is bee-yoo-ti-ful. It brought back memories - good ones, too! - of playing space sims at both ends of the '90s. Now I know what made the old sprite-based games so great. If you pay close attention to the first Wing Commander games, you'll notice there's a slight inertia to the way ships maneuver, and changing direction isn't as simple as it would be in later games (the X-Wing series is the only one I can think of that avoided falling into this trap up to the end).

I can just see people complaining about the physics. It doesn't have to be this way! IFH's gameplay is great, but I'd love a version where the ship compensates for change in direction instead of having to do it manually. It prevents games from turning into high-speed drive-bys where the action takes a second and it takes thirty to get back into firing position.

This game vindicates everything I've said about mice. They *do* work as controllers! If you can shoot with them, you can fly with them, especially without any terrain to crash into.

>>5

The biggest disadvantage of the mouse as a controller is the implicitly limited playing field.  I find they work awesomely in FPS games because you've got very precise control and your up/down movement is never large enough to leave the field of movement for the mouse (unless sensitivity is waaaay low).  And you rarely spin in circles in an FPS, so there's usually an opportunity to adjust the left/right mouse position while running and strafing.

Joysticks on an FPS suck, on the other hand, because the precision isn't there when it comes to fine mov't (aiming) and variable-speed mov't (turning quickly vs turning slowly).

Those same factors are reversed for me in a space shooter like good ol' Tie Fighter.  Spinning in circles is quite common in a dogfight (along with fine throttle adjustments which are conveniently located on-stick with a reasonable joystick) so the mouse needs frequent lifting.  Similarly, it's quite easy to go out-of-range with a mouse in the y-direction as well as the x-direction.  More lifting.  Now, the precision is still convenient, but ammo in space shooters has traditionally been much less limited than in FPS games, and many (x-wing et al) classic space shooters provide significant aiming aids, such as a lighting-up HUD or the like.  I find joysticks much more appropriate to the genre.

To each their own, though.  This is a situation where there's really no "right" answer.

The original Wing Commander provided an alterrnative mode that required no lifting and is much closer stylistically to a joystick. In this, your ship followed an on-screen cursor (move the cursor left, your ship starts moving left until you return the cursor to center, etc.) This worked awesomely in the sprite-based games, where combat was comparitively slow-paced and took place at extremely close ranges, but I'm not sure how it fared in the later games after the move to a 3D engine - never tried it. Says something, I guess.

Freelancer used a very similar mode of control, except for the whole turreted guns part, and thare were other weird over-sensitivity issues that kept the game from being joystick-playable (even a trackball had issues8. A game which used this control scheme but focused on making it playable with a fixed crosshair would be great.

Obviously, joysticks are the preferable means of control (if mostly due to tradition and the “right feel”), but the simple reality  is that nobody is going to back a game where a joystick gives the player a distinct advantage, especially with multiplayer that a modern game *needs* to be commercially viable. The challenge, then, is to build a control scheme where mice and joysticks (and to an extent, gamepads) are all viable means. Again, Freelancer failed here by bastardizing the control to the point where the game was simply unplayable with a stick, which after going through the hacks necessary to get it to work, was quite bitter.  I'm not saying this was Freelancer's biggest problem - there were a lot of questionable development decisions that kept it from achieving real greatness - but this was certainly notable among them.

Still, Freelancer was at heart an “offline MMORPG”, so it probably wouldn't have saved the genre no matter what happened. Control is just one part of the equation - the other is gameplay. What most of us think of as the modern “space sim” owes more to Wing Commander than to Elite - mission-based gameplay, as opposed to trading and RPG elements. FPSes used to be like this, too - “kill all enemies”, “find the blue key”, but then Half-Life and Team Fortress showed how great a compelling story and team-based multiplayer could be.

everyone who thinks space shooters with mouse control suck should play freelancer just ONCE!!!!
just ONCE!!!

space cowboy uses mouse control

but I didn't play it with mouse, saitek magic mouse on an analogue stick thanks, not sure how it was playing with a mouse, but it pretty much sucked to shit on a gamepad, even after boosting sensitivity up to compensate for the fact that your ship wouldn't turn immediately in the direction on the stick you pushed, only the direction the cursor was pointed.

Wouldn't the simple answer be to include both control schemes, classic instant movement on direction change stick, and modern mainstream focused moue cursor defined directional, based on what the user chooses or maybe what you can find out about the hardware plugged in through the software.

I don't think I've ever played mouse space sim, er well I think I played x-wingvtie with a mouse once, but I'm pretty sure two seconds later I went and got a stick (this being before I got a gamepad with two mini ones on it).

bump

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