Elite Dangerous and other miscellaneous. (Gaming)

by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Tuesday, February 27, 2018, 09:04 (2251 days ago) @ Phoenix_9286

Downside (which you may mitigate by not having played for long): The adjustment period. I played with a controller for, well, ever, so while the stick made sense, I basically still had to learn to fly all over again from scratch. I actually still am. I got it for Christmas and it's only been inside of maybe the last month that I finally started feeling comfortable enough doing precision maneuvers to dock manually again. You'll also need to leave your controller plugged in if you want feedback, nevermind want to talk to anyone.

This is all really for CheapLEY:

FWIW, you'll probably have a similar experience getting used to a wheel/pedal setup in Forza. I didn't remap everything, but I did have to adjust the steering angle/ratio to get something that made sense. The defaults have you spinning the wheel hand-over-hand to get from full lock to full lock, and it just isn't right for track driving. I also had to play around with the brake pedal boundaries a lot, because mine has a rubber damper at the bottom of its travel which is supposed to simulate brake pedal resistance. It works, but a little too well. The force required to push the pedal to its true bottom is ridiculous - if you had the pedals just sitting on carpet you'd be pushing them around all over the place. So you have to adjust the bottom limit to how far you'll actually push the pedal down.

Then there's actually getting used to the feel. A good wheel can provide some feedback, but it's DIFFERENT feedback than you're used to on a controller. For example, the XBone controller has vibration motors for the triggers, and Forza uses these to great effect when you're using the triggers for accel/brake, to communicate wheelspin (and even axle tramp) from acceleration, as well as braking lockup and near-lockup. Whereas the wheel only communicates front wheel feedback for the most part. So you get good braking feedback, but almost nothing for wheelspin (there is a bit for front-drive cars). And while you as a thinking human can say "OK, I just need to listen for sound and watch the motion of the car on screen to be aware of rear wheelspin," training your reflexes to do that when your muscle memory is used to very different inputs takes time. Then there's the fact that the game actually treats different control systems differently - the steering inputs are damped or filtered somehow on a controller to make it possible to steer smoothly with that little analog stick, but there's nothing like that going on with the wheel. This,combined with the lack of the feedback you're used to, can make things feel VERY twitchy and unpredictable for the first little while. I think it took me a couple of weeks to really get a feel for it.

I used to be fast with a controller. Not to talk myself up or anything, but I could typically get into the top 3% or so on leaderboards if I really tried, and that was without using the "right" cars (if you've ever looked through the boards, you know that all the top times typically are in 1 or 2 specific vehicles). At one time, I had a top-100 time on the Nurburgring for D class. So I mean, I wasn't a noob. I've been driving with my wheel since Forza 7 came out (I had it before that, but I never used it in Forza 6 because it didn't feel right), and I've felt like a noob for much of that time. I'm only now getting to the point where I feel fairly competent on track, like I can maintain momentum decently. But I suspect I'm still not as fast as I was with the controller. I don't know for sure because I haven't done the leaderboards at all in Forza 7, or even looked at them. But my friend that I race with the most, who I used to trade wins with about 50/50, I have maybe beaten him twice in Forza 7. Point is, there is a long period of readjustment. :)

It is worthwhile, though, IMO.