Shadowrun developer says: Xbox controller is superior to Mouse & Keyboard

For many years, gamers have been debating if the analog sticks on console controllers are able to rival the traditional PC layout with Mouse & Keyboard in terms of precision and speed. With the announcement of Microsoft’s Live Anywhere that puts Xbox Live and Windows Vista gamers into the same match, you’d expect that debate to heat up even more.

The FASA-developed Shadowrun, however, one of the first titles to make use of Live Anywhere, suggests that PC players might have to reconsider their stance once and for all.

“There will always be people that say the keyboard is better. In our game, we’ve found that’s not the case.”, said Bill Gross, Software Test Engineer at FASA. “When we first started testing it, the keyboard tended to have an advantage in long distance combat, and the controller had an advantage in close combat. You could do things quicker on the controller.”

He explicitly mentioned that they had carefully balanced the two teams, so that there would be no big difference in skill, but even then, the Mouse & Keyboard combo constantly lost against the Xbox players. So for the developers, this meant they had to tweak the two versions of Shadowrun in order to balance out eventual controller advantages.

Obviously, those tweaks could give players even more excuses to come up with after a defeat – hopefully, when Shadowrun gets released, no one forgets to actually play the game…

For many years, gamers have been debating if the analog sticks on console controllers are able to rival the traditional PC layout with Mouse & Keyboard in terms of precision and speed. With the announcement of Microsoft’s Live Anywhere that puts Xbox Live and Windows Vista gamers into the same match, you’d expect that debate to heat up even more.

The FASA-developed Shadowrun, however, one of the first titles to make use of Live Anywhere, suggests that PC players might have to reconsider their stance once and for all.

“There will always be people that say the keyboard is better. In our game, we’ve found that’s not the case.”, said Bill Gross, Software Test Engineer at FASA. “When we first started testing it, the keyboard tended to have an advantage in long distance combat, and the controller had an advantage in close combat. You could do things quicker on the controller.”

He explicitly mentioned that they had carefully balanced the two teams, so that there would be no big difference in skill, but even then, the Mouse & Keyboard combo constantly lost against the Xbox players. So for the developers, this meant they had to tweak the two versions of Shadowrun in order to balance out eventual controller advantages.

Obviously, those tweaks could give players even more excuses to come up with after a defeat – hopefully, when Shadowrun gets released, no one forgets to actually play the game…