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PS3 Counter-Strike To Support Keyboard and Mouse
RogueyWon writes "Eurogamer reports some encouraging news for console-bound fans of online shooters. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the new stand-alone version of the wildly successful Half-Life mod recently announced by Valve, will support mouse and keyboard controls on the PlayStation 3. This isn't entirely unprecedented; 2007's Unreal Tournament 3 had a similar feature, but the idea has never gained momentum. If the idea of allowing PC-style controls on a console does catch on, could this help remove some of the stigma associated with first-person shooters on consoles?"
Players of the Xbox 360 version will still be required to use controllers, and they won't be able to participate in cross-platform play. Valve boss Gabe Newell has had a hard time convincing Microsoft to open up Xbox Live enough to integrate services like Steamworks.
Why does that not surprise me?
This is what the industry needs.
speaking of what the industry needs... Where's my episode 3 Gabe!?
And Quake III for the Dreamcast allowed for a mouse and keyboard too. Wake me up when this becomes universal.
Prepare to see the superiority of mouse and keyboard controls demonstrated definitively.
Of course, we don't really need to see that because it's been done before. Quake 3 on the Dreamcast supported keyboard and mouse controls, and they made a huge difference. Network games between K&M players and gamepad players are totally one sided.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The console makers go to such lengths to fit powerful computers into tiny boxes, with USB ports. Game studios can spend millions to make a new title. Yet somehow, most games give you a few input options at best, and don't take mice or keyboards. This is something that should take one man one day to implement. If only game makers cared to...
The ratio of customer satisfaction to programmer time investment should make this the default choice.
Counter-Strike is about the most serious that games get. Playing against even a moderately-good CS player, while on a gamepad, is a fantastic way to get your ass kicked up and down. Keyboard and mouse is the only way they have a hope of being a challenge. There's just no way on a console to turn rapidly but precisely. You can turn quickly, but imperfectly - or slowly but precisely. You can't fling the mouse across your desk and stop at the right spot.
So this is kind of a given for there to be any meaningful cross-platform play.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
If you are going to use the traditional PC controllers, why not just play it on the PC where you can get many times the performance and beauty? It's not like the "stigma" you mention is about anything other than the controllers already!
Not trolling, I just fail to see the point in insisting on using consoles for FPS games.
"Cross-platform play between PC/Mac and PlayStation 3, as seen with Portal 2, is also confirmed."
So what does this mean for hosting your own server with custom maps/mods????
Any word if the multiplayer aspect is severly limited like in Left 4 Dead, BF: Bad Company 2, etc.??
It seems like theres a growing trend in shrinking the mod community... :-(
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Honestly, the USB ports can support a keyboard and mouse. WTF is wrong with them?
if the FPS games sold on the Xbox platform supported Keyboard and mouse they would entice all the PC games to come on over.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's about time that the mouse was introduced to living room gaming. Today's wireless laser mice have the makings of an excellent controller not just for games, but also for living room media interfaces. And seriously, where are the downsides?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gearbox, who ported the original Half-Life to the PlayStation 2, also made sure to include mouse and keyboard controls.
With the release of the Xbox 360, Microsoft became much more controlling over the hosting of multiplayer services. As a developer, you are not allowed to run your own third-party servers. Any multiplayer experiences must be run by Microsoft. They seem to do this for a few reasons.
1) It allows their Xbox subscription charges to cover all multiplayer games. So Xbox owners don't need to pay subscription fees to other providers.
2) MS has full control of the servers. With some studios giving up on the multiplayer servers of games just a year or 2 after release, this seems to allow MS to keep the servers online longer.
I may be wrong on this, but from what I've seen, this seems to be the reasoning behing microsoft's multiplayer control.
Its not what it is, its something else.
I'm not much of a gamer, but the whole console experience is for me to be sitting on the couch (or standing like a dumbass in case of the Wii/Kinect stuff) and play the game. To be using a keyboard I would have to be at a desk or table, which really would make it inconvenient. If I have to do that, then I might as well play the PC (or Mac, hahahahaha) version.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Prepare to be poon'd, consoles
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
I'd love to play games like C&C on my XBox since I don't have a comparable Windows system. I'll be damned if I'm going to use a controller for a RTS. Why not just sell a USB splitter that is designed to bring a keyboard and mouse together as a single controller so I can play these games?
The whole point of console gaming is the closer to level playing field - you shouldn't have much more of an advantage because of your gaming rig. Microsoft has already tried the PC vs. Console, and guess what, console players get creamed. Mouse and keyboard are too big of an advantage - and so all this will do is make for a very bad experience for those using the standard console controller.
I've played fps's, including the Unreal Tournament series, for years using a keyboard and mouse. I love the responsiveness of the aiming and the ability to put the crosshair exactly wherever I need to and as quickly as I need to. I gave this a try using a keyboard and mouse for UT3 on the PS3 and was greatly disappointed. The mouse was not nearly responsive enough. There seemed to be many frames of lag between moving the mouse and seeing the result on screen. It was like aiming with a wet noodle. I've tried a few different mice and settings to no avail. At least with the PC there was usually some work around for this situation, such as turning down max pre-rendered frames to 1 or 0. Unless this issue is fixed I would honestly rather use a gamepad for FPS's on the PS3. I believe this is part of the reason the keyboard + mouse controls never caught on for the PS3.
I had a thought. Dangerous, I know. But I wonder why Microsoft continues to fight having a keyboard/mouse hooked up to the 360.
It occurs to me that Microsoft is primarily in the business of selling Windows and desktop software. If someone hooks up a keyboard and a mouse to their console, they might actually want to start using the 360 as a full featured computer. I bet that the misguided souls at Microsoft are trying to "protect" sales of Windows by not allowing the 360 to be a "real computer". Their reasoning may be that if you don't let them use the 360 as a "real computer", you have to buy another copy of a Microsoft product (i.e. Windows 7) so you can do "real computing" on another device.
I also suspect, as was mentioned at least once already, that Microsoft wants nothing to do with having Windows Live interact with a service that is a direct competitor (i.e. Steam) for whatever reason. It may be another misguided attempt to corral all of their customers into buying just from Microsoft. It may also be a concerted effort to conceal something within the Live framework such as an incompatibility, significant performance problems, hacking vulnerabilities no one has found yet, or even patent infringements. One could speculate endlessly about such things but there is no way of really knowing for sure.
About three years ago I wrote a post on the Sony forums where I tried to offer up some suggestions for how I felt they could improve on the PS3 firmware with a minimum of effort. One of those suggestions was to "Encourage mouse support in games". I'll spoil the first two answers I got:
and
and just as a bonus, another one...
... and so on and so worth for a page or two. That's where I gave up trying to communicate with Sony.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Nothing stops your from sitting on a couch with a keyboard/ mouse combo and playing games.
Except the fact that one to three other people in your house also want to play, and they didn't bring their own PS3, TV, and copy of the game. I've never seen any practical setup for split-screen gaming with a mouse and keyboard.
I don't want to have to set up a table with a keyboard and mouse
I have a folding table that I've used for frozen dinners, a laptop, or a mouse and keyboard for the HTPC. Let me guess: in your household, nobody's allowed to eat outside the dining room.
It's not the game makers as much as the console makers. How about the console maker threatening to withhold approval (and the digital signature required to run on retail consoles) if a game other than an MMORPG uses the keyboard for anything but text entry? I've read that's Microsoft's policy on Xbox 360. I've said it before: the solution is for Acer and Dell to market their small form factor PCs (Aspire X1 and Inspiron Zino) as the fourth console.
dedicated game machines hooked up to much larger screens with more spacious seating arrangements
The big advantage of "more spacious seating arrangements" that I can see is when more than one person is in the room. Does Counter-Strike for PLAYSTATION 3 support two mice and two keyboards on two TV trays for split-screen team play, or does it require a separate PS3, TV, and copy of the game for each player?
If you are going to use the traditional PC controllers, why not just play it on the PC
Because the PC that you already own has an Intel graphics processor. According to this chart at Tom's, Intel graphics is comparable to the original Xbox's GeForce 3 or to the Wii's Hollywood GPU, whose fill rate matches that of a Radeon 9000. Lately I've been recommending buying PCs with AMD CPUs just to make sure that people get either AMD or NVIDIA graphics, not Intel GMA (nicknamed "Graphics My Arse").
The downside is you just added the cost of a mouse and keyboard to the cost of the game on consoles.
And how much did the instruments add to Guitar Hero or Rock Band, or the Wii Speak microphone add to Animal Crossing 3? I imagine that most PS3 gamers already have a PC with a USB mouse and keyboard, even if they don't game on it. So it's more like adding a USB hub and cable to the price of the game and possibly including a flyer for NewEgg.
Why not just sell a USB splitter that is designed to bring a keyboard and mouse together as a single controller so I can play these games?
USB splitter, $10 incl. shipping. Once you know, you NewEgg.
They don't want to associate "complicated" inputs with a living room device, or give the impression their system is harder to use then using a controller. If they wanted that they would of delivered a real PC gaming platform.
"Valve boss Gabe Newell has had a hard time convincing Microsoft to open up Xbox Live enough to integrate services like Steamworks."... uh yeah, it's called competition
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The fact that you have a simplistic joypad with 8 buttons to worry about rather than a full keyboard and mouse?
More options is always good. The funny thing is, this isn't really new news. Playstation hardware has had occasional keyboard and/or mouse support for PC ports, even on the PSone with the PSone mouse. As was pointed out, several FPS's on the PS2 have keyboard and mouse support, even Dirge of Cerberus has it. (none of those have internet multiplayer though)
While personally you can take my analog stick movement from me only when you pry it from my cold dead hands (I dislike WASD immensely), I like mouse aiming and was quite disappointed when HL2/Portal on the PS3 didn't support it, considering that HL on the PS2 DOES. I'm not a competitive shooter fan, preferring single player games mostly adventure/RPG so Counter-Strike isn't my sort of game.
You can buy peripherals for the PS3 and 360 (and others) that allow M+K on games that support the controller only. There is even a PS3 controller emulator that you can use on a Linux PC that allows you to use your PC's M+K on the PS3 via bluetooth.
Twinstiq, game news
And, I say this as a guy still playing Battlefield 2 almost daily.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
This is a great start, but I'd like to see them backport the KB/Mouse to their older games as well.
I've always been a PC gamer, but this is step in the right direction. They could port it to Portal 2 with a Software patch, and I'd be a happy guy.
If more companies did this, the PS3 would be an obvious buy for me..
I also like the openness Sony's had with their PSN, and I like that I can buy Portal 2 for PS3, and get a Steam version for free.
Sony is a bunch of asshats in lots of areas, but they're doing OK on this part.
Colin Davis
There's something kind of sad about it too, though. In days of old, there was a clear line between
totally-crippled personal computers, and uncrippled personal computers. About a decade ago we saw a few
attempts to blur it, with locked-down machines that had web browsers, but none of them were really
successful.
Then Apple showed everyone how to do it successfully, with the iPhone. It had good capabilities
but with software distribution modelled after videogame consoles. And now videogame consoles
are going to get less crippled too, but like the iPhone they won't go all the way. Would it really be all
that surprising if the Playstation or XBox ended up being able to run "cloud" word processors 'n' stuff
like that? People say these machine are all GPU with lame CPUs but do't kid yourself about how much CPU
most people really need for most applications. Lack of non-game-oriented input devices is really all
that keeps these machines from being generally useful hardware.
These things are in a great many homes. With an Apple-like chokepoint on the software market,
a lot of people could end up being "guided." (Using that word is the nice way to put it.)
It's what the "industry" needs but it ain't what technological progress needs. Those are two different things.
Did MichealLOLKristopeit just make a legitimate comment? Something that might not be downmodded instantly?
Surely a sign of the endtimes.
BTW, congrats on having 500 different /. accounts... surely one of the most dedicated trolls to grace this site.
As a former CS player I say it's really nice! Maybe soon enough you will be able to install your own applications and maybe even your own OS into those consoles and hook up extra hardware like network and video cards! Maybe they will even let you change the CPU for better performance! Oh wait....
It's hard to see how supporting both control schemes could ever be made to work well in terms of equalizing aiming difficulty, which is kind of a requirement for multiplayer.
PC gamers bitch and moan about nooby aim assist in console FPS. Well, it's necessary. Not only because of the limited range of motion of the controller sticks, but because the sticks directly control rotational speed rather than position (as with a mouse). That makes them extremely sensitive by default, so to compensate we end up with more reticle magnetism (on the target), more smoothing (off the target) and bigger hitboxes in console FPS. There's no getting around that, and there's only so much you can leave in the hands of the player - sensitivity and smoothing should be adjustable whereas modification of reticle magnetism or hitbox size would be a no go for obvious reasons.
To make both schemes viable the developer could attempt to reduce the assistance by a fixed amount if you're using a mouse + keyboard, but that would likely be hard to balance and you'd have endless complaining about how the controller noobs are getting an unfair advantage. This looks like a problem with no good solution.
I've been waiting for this moment... GET a FREAKING PC and be done with it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Really looking forward to see how it holds up as a game. Recently, made a list of Top 10 Best Selling PS3 Games maybe it will crack it.
http://www.numeroten.com/top10/games/files/top-10-best-selling-playstation-3-games-of-all-time-PS3.html