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Bring gamepad support in GW2
braveheartm
Member Posts: 15
Hi guys,
Playing MMO's is a time consuming activity and sitting in front of my PC is quite exhausting for me , especially since I spend 8-9 hours at work (IT activities) and arrive at home with more than half of my energy drained. Therefore I would prefer playing a MMO by lying in my couch with a wireless gamepad in my hands, a cold beer next to me and using my Plasma TV as the display (output from my PC) .
So, are there any others of you that want this kind of comfort when playing a MMO? I hope we could convince the GW2 dev team to bring gamepad support to their game. If I get enough votes in this thread, I may start a petition to get even more votes which would be useful for the dev team to justify the costs of the efforts required to implement gamepad support.
P.S. : From what I know till now, the following games will offer gamepad support: Final Fantasy XIV, Black Prophecy & Jumpgate Evolution.
P.S.2 : If any moderator is watching this post, please correct my grammar error in the Poll title (Would instead of Wold & Gamepad instead of Gamead) 
Comments
awesome idea! That would be a nice feature. For example I prefer playing assassin's creed 2 with my gamepad over keyboard+mouse. It much simpler, and with such a fierce battle system like in gw2 warrior, gamepad would increase our potentials ^^
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I think it's a great idea considering the 10 skill limit vs other MMOs that are more trouble to use gamepads with due to having like 40-80 hotkeys mapped by endgame.
Ive used a gamepad myself in games liek CoH and PSU and found it much better for thos egames than keyboard / mouse, especially PSU with its limited hotkeys/skills.
I'm a point-and-click man. Designing a game to support a controller most often means a simplification of the game mechanics to accomodate the limited functionality of the pad. Take a look at Champions Online and Age of Conan to see what these trade-offs look like. I like to be alert and engaged when playing an MMORPG, so no couch lounging for me, thank you very much. I'm hoping for a deeper experience from Guild Wars 2 rather than mashing a handful of buttons repeatedly.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
Age of Conan isn't designed for gamepad , try to play it with a gamepad ... believe me it's impossible to have a good gameplay in Age of Conan with a gamepad. However Age of Conan combat mechanics is quite good compared to most current MMO's , I don't understand why u pointing to AOC as a ugly gameplay.
I don't believe that the experience of a MMO will be ruined if gamepad support is added, expecially for GW2 that was designed from start with max 10 actions on the action bar, which adds a tactical gameplay feature from my point of view since you have to wisely choose the active skills. Also a limit of 10 skills will let you concentrate more on the battle and environment than on buttons and icons representing the skills from a wow-like game where over 50 active actions can be set.
Regardless of whether you can successfully play Age of Conan with a gamepad or not, the game's basic design was to be played on the XBox 360, unlike GW2 which is being developed specifically for the PC. The console focus helped to almost destroy AoC and Funcom finally canned the whole idea. Still, the thing plays a lot like a console game. There's a reason why Blizzard has never had much interest in adapting WoW to gamepads.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
It seems that you don't know to much about AOC. Aoc gameplay isn't focused for console gameplay, they just announced that may release a Xbox version of the game but never made it. Anyway, what killed AOC where the bugs , huge bugs & crashes on launch and the following months and also the pvp features that they promised but never never managed to deliver .Most of AOC problems are fixed today, but they still can't deliver a truly pvp focused game, they just transformed it , in time , to a pve focused game. Actually the combat is quite fun & challenging in AOC (with keyboard and mouse), this is where AOC shines. They also have a good story line, landscapes and music, pve is quite nicely done , much better than most mmo's ... but lacks on pvp features which eventually drove me away from this game.
Maybe you should give a try to AOC again, if you like PVE games, I'm sure you will like it .
Tip for you: next time when you want to express your opinion about a game, make sure that you have played it long enough to have a good understanding of it ... no offense
I personally think that gamepad style play is not good for community feeling...
I play MMO's mostly for a social reason and so love to chat with all kinds of people either in groupchat, guildchat or even /say (where i do roleplay) If everyone plays with a gamepad, the best part of MMO gaming is lost for me.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Gamepad > keyboard and I used both on a pc. Plug in the gameplad and kick back and enjoy the game. It is just that simple.
If you had played FFXI, you wouldn't say that.
A lot people played it on the ps2... didn't stop them from chatting or being social.
Anyway... I can easily get my wired xbox 360 to work on any game, with a profiler software called Pinnacle.
Just figuring out a layout at works can take some time.
I use a wireless keyboard and mouse. Cheap, requires no effort on the game designer's part to adapt their game, and you lose no functionality. If you want to play on another screen (e.g. tv) then just get an AV or HDMI cable and plug it in. (it's worth mentioning that when I do this the only problem I have is reading the text on the screen because my tv is the other side of the room). You also get great sound this way
Most PC's have far superior sounds systems to televisions.. as long as you have decent speakers that is.. a good 5.1 set even (cheap!) will sound noticeably better than probably even the very top range of televisions... and you dont have problems with trying to read text either.. which most games still.. unfortunately.. rely on for the most part. personally i prefer to use the tv - have a widescreen 1080i hdtv for watching dvd's (sky+hd etc), sound courtesy of the computers sound system.. for dvd's anyway... tbh, one of the reasons i never bothered with an upscaling dvd player is because these days.. computers can pretty much do that job without the addition of expensive hardware..
yeah i could deffinitly see a gamepad working for games like GW1 and 2 mainly because how few spells you can have mapped at a time. i use to play EQOA and it used ps2 controller and they was limited how how many spells you could have equiped (just as many as gw1&2)
Yes that's fair enough, but a lot of people spend a lot of money setting up a surround sound, HDtv, great lighting etc for their living room, especially if you're like me and you don't use a desktop (I use a laptop), so their TV is better than their PC. I'm not sure why you're bringing watching DVDs into the argument but I still think my alternative suggestion to using a gamepad (where you would have a similar problem with reading text) is helpful, IMHO anyway.
Why ask for gamepad support from the game makers? Their time would be better spent programming something everyone would want to use. You could just make a script for GlovePIE, it would be far more customizable. In fact, I made a script for GW1 for a wiimote that was pretty damn fun to use. I don't see the purpose in asking ANet to cater to a minority.
I ask because I may buy or not buy their product based on the features the developers get in the game. Even if we are a minority (let's say 15%, but I'm sure that are much more considering the huge market of console players which may like Guildwars 2 vesion for PC with gamepad support), we have the right to request a feature. The developers may consider our request or not, based on some analysis that they make. Let's consider that if they don't implement this feature and that they loose 15% players from a total of 10 mil potential customers ... that's about 1.5 mil customers because of a missing feature. Even if half of the 15% players will still play the game with mouse and keyboard they will still loose 0.75 mil players. Considering the game will cost USD 40, a loss of 0.75 mil of customers would mean 30 mil USD.
So, it's now clear for you why should developers care about implementing a feature that a "minority" (although I don't think we gamepad lovers are a minority) requests?
Apart from it's no where near that. I'd doubt even 1% would not buy a game purely because it doesn't support a gamepad for PC especially for an mmo. It costs money for a developer to implement such a feature and they may not even break even on such a feature.
If it's an extremely easy thing to implement in there game with little effort than there's good chance they'll do it. If it's relatively complicated they sure as hell won't do it. They're not even doing gw2 for Mac which has a far far higher percentage than those unwilling to buy the game because of no game pad support due to large complexities.
Seriously 15% for gamepad users that won't buy the the game unless it has that feature? Really?
Developers aren't all morons quite often a feature just isn't economical.
Dude, how much console gamers are there in the world? I tell you ... millions. One of the things they like console games is because they are more relaxing, gamepads offer a good degree of relaxation comparing to keyboard and mouse. So my 15% was including console gamers too, that may have a pc or would buy a pc if GW2 would offer them a console-like gameplay.
Gamepad is horrible for doing multiple motions at once such as moving and slewing a 3rd person view. Not to mention MMORPG's have tons of buttons that need to bee mapped in order to play worth a damn. Not going to fit on some measly 8 button gamepad.
Console gamers should stick to console games!
If you want a console-like RPG, stick to Fable.
MMORPGs just aren't meant for consoles.
I am a console gamer myself, but there's no way in hell I would want a gamepad support for a PC MMORPG, justifying it by the fact that "Oh, I am tired after work, I want to sit on a couch with a beer and play that way", is rather stupid, and lazy.
It doesn;t matter what people say here on the poll, because at the end of the day, they WILL buy the game if it is good, without the silly gamepad support. And the funny thing is, so will YOU!
/pointless thread.
~Awesome Tr!x
I was thinking about how this would work on a console gamepad and while i dont think it would quite work with GW2 (10 slot skill bar would be too many for a standard console controller) but on the other hand i could see this working for GW1. With the standard playstation-type configuration controller you would have enough buttons for using all 8 skills and a couple extra buttons for menu access.
Would also make alot of sense from a business standpoint considering its likely that the GW1 servers will be pretty empty after GW2 is released (much like in every other mmo by that time). And this would allow them to have yet another stream of revenue off there preexisting content by simply porting it to console. The business model is already identical to console games as well. It would ensure the survival of GW1(which deserves to survive), and make it a cash cow for arenanet yet again.
why is it hard for some of you PC noobies to understand that if you were a hardcore gamer as many of you claim, you would be comfortable using a gamepad with any mmo. and they would be QUITE EASY to impliment. hold down a shoulder button , theres another set of moves. hold down another shoulder button, theres another set of moves. man thats hard to comprehend eh??? I have 46 skills mapped in aoc, and i dont even need that many, for any mmo.
step into the future and stop being tools.
Gamepad support isn't a gamebreaker. The OP never said that he wouldn't play because it didn't have gamepad support. They just said they would really like it as an option... I would be pretty happy about it myself.
Also you could look at player loss from another view. The 15% player loss could be from consoloers they could have pulled to the game.
Personally I don't care if they come over or not. But it would be nice as a feature if it wasn't to hard to do, which I doubt it is.
lol...
Settle down nathan...
But yea, I hear ya man...
All my electronic stuff are connected to my stereo, those JAMO 160W will beat most things both in TV and computer ways.
It doesn't matter sound wise which screen you use as long as you jack up good speakers.
I don't play on my TV however ('cept some guitar hero and Soul Calibur on the PS3 at times) because my 24" screen have a lot better resolution. That will change in the future and that might make me reconsider but I think quality is more important than size here, or I would use a projector instead.