On the Subject of the Keyboard & Mouse

Bettie Ballhaus

Not so long ago a friend-of-a-friend suggested that as a console gamer with relatively strong gamepad skills, he thought he would be able to beat most keyboard/mouse FPS gamers.
The fact is the KB/M combination is a much more natural and responsive control method in FPS games. No one really contests that claim. Arguments tend to revolve around whether that means you need to be more "skillful" to play on a gamepad than with a KB/M.
But it's not as simple as that. In trying to achieve an acceptable balance between speed and accuracy, most console-based FPS games tend to have a much slower pace than native PC games. As a long-time (but admittedly not highly-skilled) KB/M player, those console shooters I have played have always felt like being not so much underwater as in a vat of syrup, with everything happening in slow-motion. Naturally the gameplay itself has to be tuned to this reduced pace and that was especially evident to me in Bioshock where there tends to be an appreciable pause between a new enemy appearing, and that enemy commencing it's attack on you. These pauses would no doubt be necessary if you're playing on a console or else you'd be dead before you even turned around, but there's no reason for it from a purely AI programming point of view. Similarly Halo always seemed to be playing at about 20% speed compared with high-octane PC shooters like Unreal Tournament.
The alternative to slowing down the action is to artificially assist the player's aiming accuracy to allow for the natural deficiencies of the controller. In my opinion that's a worse solution than slowing down the game since it's positive hand-holding rather than a simple compensation.
So it's not simply a case of comparing gamepads with KB/M because the games themselves are balanced to the controller they're designed for, not to each other. You might consider yourself to be an exceptional player with a gamepad who could probably beat most mouse players, but that would require you to have the same aim assists and other gameplay aids that you were familiar with on the consoles, but which aren't as common and in fact are usually considered "hacks" in PC games. In other words, you'd be cheating.
Neither is it simply a case of claiming that the KB/M is easier to play. Anyone who's played online knows that there's an enormous amount of skill required to be a high-level PC player, just as with console games. Not everyone can do the snap 180-degree headshots that competition-quality players pull off routinely.
In my opinion the controller should be as transparent as possible. It should offer enough control and dexterity that it doesn't get in the way or handicap you or create added, artificial difficulty which is nothing to do with the game itself. This is why I personally detest gamepads as FPS controllers. A KB/M combo lets you move and react essentially as quickly as your brain can process the movements and reactions. A gamepad is just a barrier, forcing you to wait while your virtual avatar processes your instructions to turn around or look up or down. In the first person especially that is a huge cost to the immersion of the game. To suggest that this added difficulty is somehow a positive strength of gamepads, that it's actually preferable to the "easy" KB/M combo is simply wrong.
Gamepads obviously have their strengths, and are far superior to the KB/M in many situations such as driving games or arcade shooters. But some console gamers seem to feel the need to pretend that they're on the same level as PC FPS gamers despite the fact they're playing very different games. The fact is console gamers who have grown up with nothing but console-based FPS games have much different gameplay expectations than those of us who have been playing PC shooters since the likes of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, and it's why FPS games ported to the PC from consoles are often poorly-received by gamers who don't appreciate having their games neutered just to compensate for players using an inferior input method.