LEARN HOW TO USE A MOUSE, GAME DEVELOPERS
I am
so tired of buying games which have broken mouse input.
The mouse is a precise input device capable of 1:1 control.
If the mouse resolution is set to 800 CPI (counts-per-inch) it sends 800 'counts' for every inch that it is moved.
That means it will move 800 pixels on-screen if it is moved an inch.
It doesn't matter how quickly or slowly the mouse is moved, if it is moved by one inch, it sends 800 counts when set to 800 CPI.
In first/third-person games, counts are essentially translated to degrees of rotation, and the amount the view turns per count received is set by the game's sensitivity option.
So you might have a mouse pad which is 10" wide, and adjust the sensitivity so that one swipe across it will turn the view 360°, or someone may prefer a different sensitivity and set that to do a 180° turn for example.
People have -literally decades- of muscle-memory built up for this, because it is how mouse input has always worked.
And yet now, in the past few years, game developers keep fucking this up.
They're adding acceleration to mouse input, like it's an analog stick:
The faster you move the mouse, the faster the view turns, and the slower you move the mouse, the slower it turns.
Or worse, the game suffers from "negative acceleration" where the view turns
slower the faster you move the mouse.
Here's an example of "negative acceleration" in
Dishonored 2 at launch, before they patched the game. Slow movements with the mouse will complete five 360° turns, while fast movements barely turn the view 90°:
So now there's no way to reliably control input in the game, because input speed affects aim in addition to the distance the mouse moved.
Another big problem is when the game adjusts mouse sensitivity based on actions that you are doing.
Prey (2017) is an amazing game, but they fucked up the mouse input.
When you sprint, the mouse sensitivity is cut down by ~1/3. So if you are sprinting away from something, you have to move the mouse more than you normally would.
Maybe that doesn't sound like a big deal, but if I have decades of muscle memory knowing that if I move the mouse X amount my view turns Y amount, and the game suddenly changes that in the middle of playing, my brain hates it.
I get nauseated/motion sick immediately when this happens.
They also have sections where you are in zero-g and it cuts down the mouse sensitivity by maybe 1/2. Unlike the sprinting, this does not make me motion sick because it doesn't happen right in the middle of an action-heavy sequence.
What does happen is that I can't turn around without lifting up the mouse because the distance I have to move it is now doubled - meaning that the mouse would have to go off the edge of my desk to make those turns.
These things may work with an analog stick, but not with a mouse.
Fortunately there is a mod that can fix these things, but it should never have happened in the first place.
And some games manage to be even worse:
Rez Infinite has a problem where, if you move the mouse too quickly, the aim cursor slows down and lags
really badly.
It's like the game has a limit on the number of inputs it can process at once and queues them up, but they didn't realize that mice can send hundreds or thousands of 'counts' with fast movements.
Resident Evil 2 (2019) and
Yakuza 0 have
deadzones for their mouse input. If you don't move the mouse fast enough, the game just ignores your inputs!
RE2 suffers from "negative acceleration" as well, so if you move the mouse
too fast your view will turn slower.
Vanquish is laughably bad. It has three separate sensitivity sliders in the game, and I had to set them to: 1 / 46 / 80 for them to match. On top of that, there are weapons in the game which do not use any of those values, but scale their sensitivity off one of them - so there's no way to have reliable aiming in the game.
EDIT: Another issue common to third-person games is having actions that lock out the camera control while the animation plays out. Maybe that's fine with a gamepad, but it's not something you should do with mouse inputs.
Something else a lot of developers get wrong is that their base mouse sensitivity is too high, so with a sensitivity of "1" the view turns far too much unless you reduce the mouse resolution (CPI/DPI) to a very low setting like 400.
This means the view does not turn smoothly and produces quantized/stair-stepped movements. For example:
Ideally games would either have a very wide scale for sensitivity, or allow very precise sensitivities to be entered manually.
For example: 400 CPI at a sensitivity of "3" should have the exact same turning speed as 12,000 CPI with a sensitivity of "0.1" but the higher resolution will produce smoother inputs.
If the game only lets sensitivity be set as low as "1" that limits the mouse to 1200 CPI resolution - any higher would increase the turning speed.
