[SCdF]

Yeah, I considered leaving that example out ;-)

So FPS games have changed dramatically to work on consoles. They are often third person, and it gives you a better sense of space on a display so far away. They have become 'slower' and the fighting has become mostly horizontal and far less vertical, because controllers just aren't as good as a mouse in terms of aiming. The games tend to have lots of 'shooting' gallery style situations since it's harder to both move and shoot. The whole chest-high wall thing is another by-product, as is auto-aim.

I'm not saying you can't play FPS: you definitely can, but a mouse fits better. I find console FPS / TPS games are easier on PC because the mouse aiming is just so much easier.

I can't think of a way of phrasing this in a way that doesn't sound like "my dad could beat up your dad", so I'll simply say it and hope for the best: I'd wager than an average FPS player on a mouse + keyboard would be 'better' than a good FPS player using a controller, due simply to mouse superiority.

(I haven't played a console FPS in a couple of years though, perhaps things have changed)

[pacmon]

It's clear you haven't played FPS on console in years. Neither had I. I've always been a person who believed a PC was a must for FPS. Then my friend decided he was going to get Battlefield 3 on 360 not PC, so I did the same(with great hesitation about how I would do). It turns out - it's not so bad. I crank the rotation sensitivity way up, turn off auto-aim (frankly, it makes things worse) and I do well enough. I will, however, agree that aiming with mouse/keyboard would still be better & faster (at least for me). Battlefield is also a real FPS it's not third person like Gears of War. Luckily console and pc players don't play on the same servers, so the issue of having a leg-up on PC is moot.

[timee]

It's fairly clear when games are designed for console first or for PC first. For example, Battlefield 3 on the console didn't have some of the fundamentals of a AAA first person shooter title, such as making sure it runs at 60 frames a second. Details like those were reflected in their Metacritic score, where the PC version stood significantly above its console counterparts.

Ironically, Battlefield 3 has sold roughly 2M PC copies, 6M Xbox copies, and 5M PS3 copies. [1,2,3] It was numbers like these that caused most of the game franchises to switch to console if they weren't already focused on them. A lot started out being PC-focused such as Ghost Recon, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell and The Elder Scrolls come to mind, but all of their latest franchise titles are heavily designed as console games first.

I would argue that first person shooters are a dying genre on PCs through just looking from the competitive scene with gaming. While there is still may be a lasting Counter Strike scene, the focus has gone to the latest Halo or Call of Duty being played on a console for competitive FPSs.

It just happens to be that some game genres really don't work well on the console no matter how hard you try. Halo Wars was well done as a console designed RTS, but just doesn't have the same depth as its PC counterparts such as Starcraft or Warcraft due to the restrictions on the interface and controls.

Even if you do manage to design for the platform, a lot of games just don't work.

[1] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/35315/battlefield-3/ [2] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/40231/battlefield-3/ [3] http://www.vgchartz.com/game/40230/battlefield-3/